12
LOST AND FOUND
I made it to the ocean. The 248 ended in the middle of the city, which got me turned around and required a lot of circling and hunting before I found the shore, but I made it. I was puttering along a road whose name I couldn’t pronounce—something-something-da Fonesca, the ocean on my right, cars crawling slowly bumper to bumper and parallel parked and honking, tourists and locals moving in packs on the sidewalks, and the engine coughed, sputtered, and gave out.
Right in the middle of the road, the engine just up and died. I turned the ignition, the engine sputtered a few more times, wheezed, turned over, and then, surprisingly, caught just long enough for me to hang a left onto Avenida Puglisi and drift into a handicap parking spot before the motor coughed like an asthmatic smoker and died again. I rested my head on the steering wheel, sweat dripping off my nose and sliding down my spine, smeared on my face and my shoulders and…everywhere.
Brazil is fucking hot.
I’d long since drunk the last of my water and the protein bar was also long gone. I had five real, and a pocketknife.
But Harris was coming.
Time to hide.
I spent a few minutes ransacking Pedro’s car, digging under the seats and in the glove box and in all the crevices, but only came up with a single crumpled one-real bill. I popped the trunk and checked in there, but he’d taken anything of value out of it, leaving only some garbage, an empty plastic bag, a tire iron and donut spare, an empty red gas can, and some empty baggies that had once held pot.
I found a scrap of paper and wrote “obrigado” on it, set it on the driver’s seat with the keys under the seat, and then set out on foot.
I trudged out from the relative cool and shade provided by the buildings of the downtown area and down to the beach, removing my flip-flops and stuffing them in my back pockets. The dry sand was hotter than Satan’s asshole, but I trotted through it to the surf, letting the water slosh over my bare feet. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky overhead, only a stiff, steady, hot breeze from off the water.
I just walked. North, I was pretty sure, but it didn’t really matter. The beach was actually fairly deserted, only a few couples and individuals here and there. I tried to seem at ease, as if I was just a lone tourist taking a walk on the beach.
I made it as far north as the beach would go until it ended at a cluster of high-rise condo buildings butting up right to the edge of the sea, hiding what looked like an outcropping of rock covered by a scrim of jungle. I kept walking, following the narrow streets uphill and around the ridge jutting out of the hillside and back down to the beach.
Know what I did then?
I walked.
And walked.
And walked.
Theoretically, I could probably just keep walking up the coast of Brazil until there was no more beach. In reality, I was fucking tired of walking. But what else could I do? I didn’t have money for a hotel, or food. I couldn’t just sit down on the beach and wait for the next ten hours. I didn’t want to stop, didn’t dare stop moving. If I stopped moving, I’d start thinking. If I started thinking, I’d have a nervous goddamn breakdown because I’d killed a man two hours ago. And once I started dwelling on that happy little fact, I might never stop bawling like a baby.
So I walked.
I followed the beach and tried to just enjoy the sunlight and the heat and the ocean and the beauty of Brazil, and tried not to think. I just walked. Eventually, after maybe three miles, the beach ended at another rising mountain of jungle, this one much larger and more permanent, as in not the kind of outcropping you could walk around. So I picked a road and started following it, passing a lovely café right on the water, the kind of place where I’d have loved to be able sit at a table and watch people come and go, eat, drink, argue, kiss. But I didn’t dare stop. So I followed the road, up, up, up. It just kept going up, half-finished high-rises on my left, the jungle on my right stopping just at the road’s edge. Not a nice area, necessarily, not for tourists. But I kept going. Unwisely, perhaps, but I was committed to just walking, walking, walking.
The jungle gave way to a mammoth hotel, and I realized I was topping the rise. Sort of.
Okay, no, not really. There was still a lot of hill left to climb.
A lot of hill.
Jesus.
I started climbing and was sweating balls, out of breath, and exhausted beyond all comprehension, but I’d started up this hill and by god I’d make it to the top. Just because I’m fucking stubborn that way.
Up. Up. Up.
It eventually crested with the sea far below and off in the distance, blue and hazy, nothing but an outcropping of tree-covered rock ahead and a handful of dilapidated, white-washed buildings off to my right. The road turned into ancient, cracked octagonal cobblestones, angling to my right toward the cliff’s edge. A hand-painted sign announced a telephone number, and beneath the number were some Portuguese words, and one word in English that I recognized: “camping”—a campground, then. Run-down, out of the way, and shitty.
Perfect.
A trio of chickens meandered past me, clucking to each other, seeking shade under a lone palm tree, hustling a little faster as I passed them. At the road’s edge was a white-washed cinderblock building topped by a slab of corrugated tin, nothing but some cheap chicken-wire fencing at the very cliff’s edge. A couple of yellow signs announced something or other in Portuguese, which obviously I didn’t read. But I did know enough back-of-the-house restaurant Spanish to recognize that “fritata” and “coco verde” probably meant food of some kind. That, plus the rickety plastic table and chairs and the bright pink umbrella, meant this was very likely a restaurant of some kind.
Way out here, five real might just get me something to drink and somewhere to sit and not have to walk for a few hours.
In I went. It was dark, the ceilings low, and it smelled wonderfully of frying food. It was hot, but cooler than outside, a window AC unit puffing away noisily somewhere, and a wide-bladed fan overhead lazily stirred the air.
So… “restaurant” may have been stretching things a bit.
But it was a public establishment, and it was deserted, so I could probably kill time here without attracting any attention.
There was a table near the door, and I sat down with my back to the wall so I could watch the interior as well as the door and the street beyond. I heard voices in the back chattering in Portuguese, but I was in no hurry. I was just glad to be off my feet and out of the sun. Eventually a tiny, hunched old woman emerged from somewhere, saw me, and started exclaiming excitedly, hustling over to me, placing a twenty-year old laminated menu in front of me. It had maybe six items on it, none of which I recognized, but at least the numbers next to the items told me I could probably make the last of my stolen money stretch enough to get me a meal and something to drink.
I spoke over the old woman’s excited rambling. “American. I speak Inglés.”
“Oh…no, no. No Inglés.” And then she was off again, chattering way too fast for me to catch anything even if I did speak the tiniest amount of Portuguese, which I didn’t. Except “thank you”, which was obrigado.
Um.
“Agua?” That was Spanish again, but it was all I had to go with.
She understood, bustling away and returning with a tall translucent red plastic cup, the kind you used to get at Pizza Hut. It was full of ice water, and I took it and guzzled it down greedily, offering my best version of “obrigado,” which made her grin and chatter something else at me.
I fished the crumpled five-real bill out of my pocket and set it on the table, gestured at the menu with a shrug, and then patted my belly. Which hopefully translated to “Pick something for me, lady, because this is all the money I have and I don’t read Portuguese.”
Apparently she understood, because she took the money, stuffed it into her apron pocket, and vanished. She returned with a fresh glass of ice water and then vanished once more. This time she was gone for about twenty minutes, which were gloriously silent, except for the occasional crackle of ice against the red plastic. When she returned, it was with a plate loaded down with a shitload of food.
It looked like little balls of something deep fried, a large empanada sort of thing, but bigger and flatter and crispier-looking, and then a huge glop of rice and beans topped by what looked like a fried flour substance mixed with bacon and peppers of some sort. It smelled like heaven. But way too much food for a measly five real. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and turned them out to show that I had no more money, and then shrugged broadly.
The woman just waved at me, and a dismissive grandmotherly wave is the same all over the world, it seemed. “Comer! Comer!” she said, gesturing at the plate.
I’d seen the gesture before, but in Italian—“Mangia! Mangia!”, or “Eat! Eat!”.
I thanked her again, picked up the fork and tried one of the deep fried balls. Ho-leeee shit. Best. Thing. Ever. It had some kind of creamy melted cheese and shredded chicken inside it, and it was divine.
The woman pointed at the deep fried balls when I stabbed another one. “Coxinhas.” Co-sheen-yas.
Delicious.
The empanada-thing was next. I forked it open and discovered that it contained more melted, gooey cheese, ground beef, sautéed white onions, and jalapeños. She called it a pastéis. I didn’t care what she called it, as long as I could keep eating it. The rice and beans and flour concoction was just as amazing as everything else, so by the time I finished I was sated, stuffed, and happy.
I wished I had more money to give her, but I didn’t, so I had to settle for effusive thanks, which the woman just waved away. I took my cup of ice water—my third one—and moved out to the table on the patio, sitting in the shade of the umbrella, and stared out at the sea.
Gradually, my belly full and my anxiety lessened, I decided to rest my head on my arms for a moment.
* * *
A scream woke me.
Not mine, but someone else’s. A woman’s. Terrified. Panicked.
I bolted upright, reaching into my back pocket for the knife. The patio was empty, but there was a big black SUV sitting with its engine idling and all four doors open. Definitely the kind of big black SUV a kingpin would send his thugs out in to look for a certain American girl.
I realized as well that my spot at the table with my head down and hidden behind the tilted umbrella meant that they might not have seen me. But they’d followed me here, somehow. I heard shouting, a gunshot, and a scream, the sound of a bullet piercing the tin roof.
What to do?
Duh. Only one thing to do: steal the truck. I hated letting the nice old lady get hurt over me, but hopefully the thugs wouldn’t actually kill her if she didn’t really know anything about me. I was essentially defenseless, anyway, so what could I do to help? Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight and all, right?
Cursing under my breath, I watched the door for a split second, and then bolted, vaulting the low fence separating the patio from the parking lot, slid on dirt, ran around the SUV slamming the doors closed on my way to the driver’s seat. I jumped in, hauled the door shut, and threw it into reverse, gunning it and jerking the wheel around. The powerful vehicle skidded backward and spun in a circle on the gravel, scattering hens and pebbles all over the place. I almost crashed into a nearby hut but I recovered and jerked the gear shift into drive, shoved the gas pedal to the floor.
I heard gunshots, and the back window shattered and the round buried itself in the passenger seat headrest. More rounds hit into the body, the rear quarter panel. Then I was around the corner and out their field of vision.
I hauled ass down the hill at a reckless speed, hit the beach and turned into the city.
How the hell had they found me?
My phone rang. Because of the traffic I was forced to go slow, so I answered it, watching my mirrors for signs of pursuit.
“Harris?”
“Yeah, it’s me. I’m in São Paulo right now, headed down your way.” I heard road noise in the background. “Where are you?”
“Still in Guarujá, although I’ve just run into trouble.” I glanced in the rear-view mirror just then and saw a black SUV identical to the one I was driving cut into oncoming traffic, pass three cars, and pull up behind me.
“Trouble?”
“Yeah. I had this nice little spot out of the way at this tiny little café. And they just…showed up. I don’t know how they found me. I walked there, and didn’t stop to talk to anyone. I didn’t think anyone even fucking saw me.” BLAM! A round slammed into the radio. “Shit. They’re shooting at me.”
“Do you have a gun?”
“No, but I have a knife. Hold on one second.” I tossed the phone onto the passenger seat and jerked the wheel to the right and stood on the brakes.
This earned me a rear-ending which jolted me forward and gave me a nasty case of whiplash, but my pursuers shot past me, which was my goal. I gunned the engine and pulled up next to them, gritted my teeth, and hauled the wheel left, bashing into them. My window shattered and the door crumpled against my leg, but the other SUV didn’t fare as well. I’d forced it into an oncoming cargo truck, which plowed into the black SUV, demolishing its front end. I floored the gas pedal and pulled away, cut left onto a one-way street, and then made a couple more turns at random.
“Layla!” I heard his voice distantly, tinny, and remembered the phone.
“Harris, hey, I’m here. Sorry about that.”
“Are you okay?” He sounded panicked. Well, maybe not panicked exactly, but concerned at the very least.
“Yeah, I’m okay. I sideswiped them into oncoming traffic. I think I lost them.”
“Don’t assume. There are always more.”
“Thanks for the reassurance,” I said, deadpan. “I’m pretty sure I just caused a lot of injury and death.”
“You want me to lie to you?” he asked.
“No,” I admitted. “Keep telling me the truth.”
“The truth is you’re going to be fine. Keep doing whatever it takes to avoid letting them get their hands on you. Don’t worry about the collateral damage; just pretend you’re in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, all right? Get back to the 160, the road you took south out of São Paulo. Head north, and call me when you’re on it. We’ll figure out a place to meet.”
“Got it.”
“All right. See you soon.”
“Promise?” I hated how vulnerable I managed to sound in those two little stupid syllables.
“I promise, Layla.”
Click. I hung up on him, to save him the difficulty of saying goodbye. And because if I didn’t hang up right then, my thin façade of strength would come crumbling down. I’m a tough bitch, but everyone’s got a breaking point, and I was nearing mine.
I managed to find the road north, totally by accident. I was checking my rear-view mirror regularly, watching for any more black SUVs, but so far I’d seen nothing. They’d managed to find me when I’d been absolutely positive I’d gotten away clean. Had they planted a tracker in me, like some kind of Tom Cruise spy movie? I mean, how else could you explain them just showing up like that? Only sheer luck and a big pink umbrella had prevented them from seeing me.
When I was out of the city proper I called Harris back, told him I was on the 160 heading north, and hung up before he could say anything.
With two broken windows, the ride was noisy and windy. My leg ached from where the door had crumpled, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to look down there to assess the damage. My neck was sore and stiff too, from the whiplash. Also, the climb up the hill had exhausted me.
But at least I wasn’t hungry, right?
Always look on the bright side of life.
If you’re humming the Monty Python song, then I love you forever.
Thirty minutes of driving lulled me into complacence; my phone rang, startling me enough that I shrieked and jerked the wheel, nearly sideswiping the car next to me.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” Harris said. “We should be getting close to each other. Have you reached the point where the north and southbound lanes merge, yet?”
Leaving Guarujá, the north- and southbound traffic lanes were often far apart, taking totally different routes through the mountainous terrain, only joining a good thirty miles or so north and west.
“No,” I said, “not yet.”
“Okay, good. When the lanes start merging, I want you to pull over and hide in the woods in the median. Get as far north as you can, so you’re at the very edge of the woods, looking north. I’ll find you. You see anyone else but me coming for you…well, do what have to.”
“Okay. Got it.”
“Any questions?” he asked, his voice firm and brusque and calm.
“Just one.”
“What is it?”
“Does knowing you’ve killed someone ever get easier?”
He didn’t answer right away. “Yes and no. Like anything else, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. But that comes with a price.” Another pause. “We’ll talk more when we’re together.”
“It was ugly, Harris.” Why the hell was I saying any of this? I didn’t want to think about it. I’d been trying not to.
“Death is ugly, Layla. No two ways about it.”
“I’ll see you soon.”
“Yes, you will.” He was the one to hang up, this time.
I tossed the phone on the passenger seat and focused on driving, focused on watching the terrain and watching for pursuit. After another ten minutes, I saw the southbound traffic lane in the distance, off to my left, just a strip of gray in the green of the forest, sunlight glinting occasionally on windshields. When the lanes were a hundred yards or so apart, a thin screen of trees appeared in the ever-decreasing space between lanes. I moved into the left-hand lane and slowed down, earning horn honks and angry shouts as the faster-moving traffic swerved around me.
Another three minutes, and the median narrowed yet further and the trees thinned to a point. There wasn’t a shoulder, so I had to pull off the highway and directly onto the grass, thudding and bouncing as I braked to a halt. I shut the engine off, left the keys in the ignition, palmed my phone in one hand and my knife in the other, glancing in both directions. I was earning a lot of looks, but no one was stopping, yet.
I took off running for the trees.
As I made the tree line, I heard a car door close somewhere behind me.
Shit. Of course.
It was a big black SUV, parked directly behind mine. Five men were moving toward me, and each one was blatantly carrying a machine gun. They strode toward me calmly, unhurried, making directly for my position.
Now what the actual fuck? I’d been watching behind me every step of the way, and I would have sworn on a stack of bibles that I hadn’t been followed. Yet here they were, coming right for me.
“Fuck. Fuck. FUCK!” I shouted it the last time, and one of the men laughed.
It wasn’t a pleasant sound.
I ducked behind a tree, unfolded my knife, and dialed Harris.
He answered before it had rung twice. “Layla?”
“Yeah, it’s me. I’m where you told me to go, in the trees on the median. They’re right behind me, Harris, they’re coming for me. Five of them, and they have big fuck-off machine guns. How did they find me, Harris? What do I do?”
“I’m almost there. Run south, okay? Stay just inside the trees, but run south, closer to the southbound lanes. You’ll know what to do when the time comes.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” I sounded shrill, but I had reason, I’d say.
“Trust me, babe. Run south. Watch for me.”
Click.
Super.
I twisted and glanced around the trunk of the tree. They were approaching the trees, now. Shitshitshit. I took off running south, bouncing off tree trunks and ducking branches.
Crack! Crackcrackcrackcrack! Bark exploded to my left, spraying my face with splinters. I ducked and cut right, then left, not daring to look behind me. The machine gun cracked again, and then another one, off to my left. They weren’t playing around, obviously. No more orders to bring me back alive, clearly.
Kill the bitch, I was sure they’d been told.
I poured on speed, running as fast as I could, as hard as I could, arms in front of my face to knock aside branches. I felt something cut my right arm, followed a split second later by a snapping sound, and then the report of the machine gun. An angry buzz sounded on my left. I wasn’t sure quite why, but the snap scared me more than the buzz.
To my right, off in the distance, an engine roared; I glanced that way and saw a green SUV with a white roof bouncing at full speed across the grass. It’s strange the details you notice in high-adrenaline situations: I couldn’t have told you what kind of car the SUV I’d stolen was, nor the model of the jalopy I’d stolen in São Paulo. But somehow, in a split-second glance from over a hundred yards away, I knew the vehicle Harris was driving was a Land Rover Defender, the older kind you see used for African safaris in documentaries narrated by the late, great Richard Attenborough.
I left the cover of the trees, machine guns still barking behind me and to my left. I ran out in the open now, risking glances every couple seconds at Harris. He didn’t slow down, and as he approached behind me, I saw that his window was open and he was driving with one hand, a small black pistol in the other. I heard the bark of his pistol, saw the muzzle flash—silver dents appeared in the rear driver’s side door, two, three, four, evidence that they were shooting back. Harris jerked the huge SUV to cut behind me and braked to a sudden halt, the rear end of the truck sliding and ripping up chunks of grass and spraying mud. He leaned over and threw open the door, and I leaped into the opening, landing hard on the bench. Harris didn’t wait for me to get the door closed, just gunned the engine, slewing around in an arc, his right hand jerking the manual gear shifter down into second as his feet moved like lightning, popping the clutch and flooring the gas. The door swung open, bounced at the apex of its hinge-range, and then swayed toward me as the truck darted forward, hitting a hillock in the grass and going airborne. I got a handhold on the seatback and leaned out, hooked the door handle with three fingers, and jerked the door closed with a slam.
Somehow, Harris was driving with one hand, firing his pistol out the window with the other, and still finding time to shove the shifter through third and into fourth as we picked up speed, still jouncing violently across the grass heading south.
“I’m going to swing us around,” Harris said, without looking at me. “I want you to get down under the window as we pass them.” He accompanied his words with actions, downshifting to second and slamming on the brakes, hauling the wheel around so the truck juddered around in an arc, swaying and tipping precariously.
All five of the bad guys were lined up abreast, guns lifted to shoulders, pointing at us.
“Layla, get down!” Harris snapped.
Gunfire erupted from all five of them, and I heard several metallic thunks as rounds hit the body of the Range Rover.
“Fuck you,” I growled. “Give me that.”
I snatched the pistol from him, held it in both hands and pointed the barrel at one of the bad guys. I squeezed the trigger, expecting the roar and the kick but still shocked by it. We passed by them so fast I wasn’t sure if I’d hit anything, but it was the thought that counted.
“You know how to shoot?” Harris seemed surprised.
“I used to hook up with a guy who was a manager at a firing range. He showed me how.”
“Well it was a good shot,” he said. “I think you winged one of ’em.” He grabbed the gun back as we bounced along parallel to the northbound traffic.
Holding the wheel and the pistol in the same hand, he shifted up into fourth and we went briefly airborne as we merged onto the blacktop, causing a pile-up when a little blue sedan had to brake and swerve to avoid us. I heard the crash behind us, but didn’t spare it a look.
“Just like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie,” I said, hearing further metal-on-metal impacts.
“You should have ducked. I fucking told you to duck, goddamn it.” Oooooh shit. Harris was pissed.
“Yeah, well…I never do what I’m told. Get used to it, buddy.”
“You want to live? You’d better learn to listen.”
“Are you really going to argue with me about this right now?” I asked, glaring at him. “You haven’t even said hello.”
He stared at me, incredulous. “Hello, Miss Campari. How are you? Having a nice day? Would you care for some tea?”
I flipped him the bird. “Don’t be a dick, Nicholas.”
“I swear to fuck I’ll throw you out of this car,” he snarled. “Do not call me Nicholas. Not even my mother calls me that.”
“I’m having trouble reconciling the idea of you sitting in a tasteful Midwestern bungalow, drinking sun tea with your sweet little mother.”
This earned me a chuckle. “Everyone has a mother, Layla. Even me. But no, they don’t live in a bungalow in the Midwest, they live in a condo in Florida. And my mother is not sweet, nor particularly little.” A pause, and then he grinned at me. “Although, she does drink sun tea, funny enough.”
“What does she call you, then?”
He didn’t respond right away. “Not Nicholas,” he said, eventually. He gestured behind us. “See if they’re back there. Look back several car lengths.”
I twisted on the bench seat, peering into the dense traffic behind us. “Shit. Yeah, they’re back there. Quite a ways back, like maybe half a mile or so, but they’re there.”
“Vitaly’s men don’t give up. They’ll keep coming until we kill them or they catch us.”
“No shit. They don’t dare go back to Vitaly without results to show him,” I said.
Harris glanced at me, his gaze sharp, and his voice soft. “No?”
I shook my head as I returned to my seat and buckled up. “No. They don’t dare. He doesn’t accept failure or excuses. You do what he tells you to do, or you die trying. If you show up and you haven’t carried out his orders to the letter, he’ll kill you. And you’ll never even see it coming.”
“How does he kill them?”
I blinked hard. “Knife to the ribs.” I tapped two fingers over my heart. “He’s got this switchblade, keeps it in his pocket. He’ll just be talking, calm as anything. One second he’s smiling, hands in his pockets, casual, the picture of understanding and congeniality. The next? That blade is between their ribs, and they’re dead. He does it so fast, so easily. Doesn’t even blink. I saw him do it at least six times in the four days I was his prisoner. He must pay those guys really well if they’re willing to risk death any time they’re in the room with him.”
“Recruit from the poor and desperate, pay them well, and they’ll put up with just about anything,” Harris remarked. A few minutes of silence, and then he glanced at me again. “Layla, when you were with Vitaly—”
I shook my head, cut him off. “Not now, Harris. I can’t go there right now.” I focused on breathing slowly and evenly, staring straight ahead, refusing to blink, refusing to unclench my teeth. “Get me somewhere relatively safe first, and maybe I’ll tell you what happened.”
Harris nodded. “I can do that.” He checked his rear-view mirror. “So I just gotta figure out how to lose these guys.”
“Do what you’d do if you were alone. Don’t worry about me.”
“I just rescued you, Layla. I’m not about to put you in harm’s way again.”
“Meaning you’d stop and shoot it out with them, if it were just you, right?”
He bobbled his head side to side. “I’d ambush them.”
“So let’s ambush them.”
“No offense, Layla, but I’m a highly trained combat veteran, and you’re—”
“I stabbed a guy in the eyeball with a pen I’d kept hidden in my cunt for over a week. I shoved it so far into his fucking brain that he died instantly. And that was after I broke his arm like a twig. I did this because he was in the process of raping me. I put on his blood-soaked clothes, his smelly boots—I had to wear his clothes because Vitaly had kept me naked the entire time—and I stole a car, stopped for supplies, drove to fucking Guarujá, walked several miles in the blazing heat, most of that distance either in the sand or uphill, without having any food or water. And then I stole a car right out from underneath the very men who were hunting me.” I was getting a little worked up at this point. “And then—and then!—then I was nearly shot several times just now by those assholes back there. So I think at this point, Nicholas, there isn’t much that’s going to faze me. Figure out how you want to ambush these fuckers, and I’ll help you kill every single goddamn one of those pussies.”
Harris’s jaw worked up and down, as if he was trying to respond but didn’t actually have any words. “Jesus, Layla.”
“If you were hoping for a damsel in distress, you’ve got the wrong bitch. I may be in distress, but I’m sure as shit not a fucking helpless damsel.”
A long, tense moment passed, in which Harris tried to figure out what to say. “You called me Nicholas again.”
“Yes I did, and you can either deal with it or shove me out of the car. I don’t care. I’ll figure this shit out, one way or another, with you or without you.”
“You’re fucking impossible,” he grumbled.
I laughed. “You’re just now figuring that out?”
He shook his head. “No, you’re just reaching an all-time-high impossibility factor.”
“Buddy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
“That’s a scary thought,” Harris said.
“I’m from Detroit. Don’t fuck with me.” I crossed my arms over my chest and kept an eye on the passenger-side mirror, watching as the black SUV closed the distance. “They’re getting closer. If you’ve got a plan, I’d start putting it into play if I were you.”
A body of water rippled pale blue in the distance; traffic was getting thicker and thicker by the moment.
Harris gestured at the water. “Once we’re past this causeway, we’ll be hitting Batistini. I’ll make my move there.”
“What’s in Batistini?” I asked.
“There isn’t shit in Batistini, it’s just the first suburb of São Paulo we’ll get to. It’s hard to ambush someone in the car on the freeway.”
“I guess that’s true. But I’ve never ambushed anyone, so I wouldn’t know.”
We were on the causeway that stretched out over the lake, and a sign over the road announced the exits for Batistini. It struck me as funny that despite the fact that I was in a totally different country and that I didn’t speak, read, or write the language in the slightest, the highway signs were totally understandable anyway. I mean, I didn’t understand the words, but based on the layout of the sign, saída was probably equivalent to “exit”, and diadema was close enough to “diadem” that it probably represented the ring of highways around the city of São Paulo.
Harris took the exit for Batistini, and sure enough, the SUV behind us followed, staying at least four or five car-lengths behind us. Obviously they had no intention of pushing the confrontation on the highway either. Too much risk of things going wrong in our favor, I guess. When we hit the residential area—which was a graffiti-tagged, run-down area—Harris gunned the engine and pulled away from our pursuers, twisted around a tight right turn, gunned it again so the tires spat gravel, pushing me back in my seat, the engine roaring. I heard tires squealing behind us, still several car-lengths back. I revised my estimate of the area as being poor, simply judging based on the number of well-kept cars parked on the street.
Another long straightaway, a left turn, and then we were on a narrow gravel road running parallel to the highway, the scrub-covered hillside leading up to the highway on our left, a cinderblock wall hiding a junk yard on the right, full of rusting semi trailers, ancient buses, and random bits of metal. Harris pulled into a driveway, the highway on our left, a ramshackle warehouse or factory on the right. There was a short, low awning under which Harris parked the Land Rover. The outside of the warehouse on our right had been roofed over to create a porch, and on this makeshift porch was a cluster of middle-aged men, all of them hard-bitten and hard-eyed, weathered faces lined with wrinkles, sweat dotting their foreheads, brown glass bottles of beer in their hands, cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. As Harris and I exited the Land Rover—which was older by a decade than I was, at least—the men on the porch stared at us, unblinking, mute. They were giving us the kind of stares a blond white girl would get if she were strolling down Cass Corridor at midnight. The kind of stares that say, “You are in the wrong neighborhood, and you’d best keep going if you know what’s good for you.”
Harris circled around to the back of the Defender, opened the trunk, and hauled out a huge black duffel bag. He hung the bag on his shoulder, and it gave a heavy, ominous clank as he did so. One of the men on the porch said something in Portuguese, and if I was any judge of tone of voice, it wasn’t polite. Harris reached behind his back and leveled the pistol at the man who’d spoken, stepping closer to the porch in that quick, careful, lithe movement men trained in combat all seem to use, keeping his torso swiveled to the side, presenting as small a target as possible. Harris spoke in fluent Portuguese, his voice low and smooth and even, but still somehow fairly snarling with threat. He gestured with the pistol, and the entire cluster of men stood up, gripping their beer and cigarettes, and vanished into the warehouse.
“Do I want to know what you told them?” I asked.
“No,” was all he said, and grabbed me by the hand and hauled me across the road, where a break in the wall had been hastily boarded over with lengths of two-by-fours and scraps of corrugated iron.
I climbed over the jury-rigged fence and then waited for Harris, who pulled me out of sight and used one hand to press me flat against the intact portion of the cinderblock wall.
He set the heavy bag down at his feet and wiped his brow with his palm, then wiped his palm on his khakis. “Please listen to me very carefully now, Layla, all right? If we’re going to have any chance of getting out of this alive, you have got to do as I say.”
I blinked sweat out of my eye and nodded at him. “Tell me what to do, Nicholas.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “First, stop calling me that.”
“How about Nick?”
He shook his head, irritated. “This isn’t the time for this shit, Layla. Sure, Nick works. Now, are you done mouthing off?”
“I wasn’t mouthing off, actually, but if you want to see what that sounds like, I can—”
“Jesus, Layla. Shut the fuck up and listen, would you?” he snarled. I shut my mouth with an audible click of my teeth, and gestured for him to continue. “Thank you. There’s five of them, and two of us. You’re not trained in the use of assault rifles, I’m assuming—correct me if I’m wrong, as you have a knack for surprising me. Point is, that’s what they’re carrying. What that means for us is this is gonna get gnarly. Bullets will be flying hot and heavy. I’m gonna put you in a position, and you’re going to stay there, come hell or high water, until I tell you otherwise. You got it?”
I nodded. “Got it.”
“I mean it. You stay…there. I don’t care what you see or think you see, you stay fucking put. And keep your head down.” An engine roared somewhere, and tires squealed. Harris cocked his head, listening. “They’re close. We don’t have much time.”
He unzipped the duffel bag, and sure as shit, it was full of guns. “Well fuck me running, Harris, where the hell’d you get your hands on all that?”
“You forget I work for an ex-arms dealer,” he responded, digging a pair of black 9mm semiautomatics out of the bag and handing them to me.
“I didn’t actually know that,” I said. “Roth was an arms dealer? No shit.”
He glanced at me, digging four spare clips out of the bag and handing them to me as well. “Well, now you know.” He gestured at the guns in my hand. “You can reload those, right?”
I showed him I could by ejecting the clip, checking it, and sliding it back in place, tapping it home with the hell of my palm—gently, contrary to popular silver-screen mythology. “Where do you want me?”
He pulled a short, compact assault rifle out of the bag, unfolded the stock, stuffed extra magazines in his back pockets, and slung the weapon by the strap on his shoulder and let it hang, then grabbed another handgun, this one a monster silver thing straight out of Dirty Harry. Zipping the bag, he secured it on his back and then led me at a trot through the knee-high grass toward the row of rusting trailers. There were a good half a dozen metal drums lying scattered in the grass, the kind of thing you’d see hobos warming their hands over in movies. Harris rolled one to lay between two closely parked trailers, grabbed a second and righted it, hauled it over, and then tipped a third to lay against both of the others, creating a makeshift barricade. The wall behind me was fully intact and all of ten feet high, so I didn’t think anyone would be coming up from behind. I tucked the spare pistol into my waistband at my back—which is not as comfortable as TV would have you imagine—and the clips in my pockets.
Lying down prone, I glanced up at Harris. “Well? Don’t just stand there, doofus. Go find your own spot.”
He shook his head at me, a smirk quirking the corner of his mouth. When he was gone I closed my eyes and let myself feel the fear. I was fucking terrified, to put it frankly. None of this was normal, even for me. I’d been through some shit in my life, but lying in wait, preparing to ambush men who were trying to kill me? It was new. And not fun.
I do not recommend it.
But I’ve learned something important in going through all the crazy-ass bullshit life has thrown at me: if something heavy is about to go down, give yourself a moment to feel the emotions. Let them go, let them out, let them boil. And then shut it down—hard—and do what you gotta do.
A few moments of sweating balls in the blazing Brazilian heat, and then I heard tires on gravel and an engine lowering down to idle, doors opening and closing, men talking. Slides being pulled, footsteps crunching. Words were exchanged, voices were raised. A gun went off, making me jump, and then more shouts. Silence.
I couldn’t see Harris anywhere.
I was on my belly, a pistol in my hands, pointing it through the gap in the stacked barrels at the opening in the wall where the bad guys had to come through. I checked the weapon in my hands, made sure the safety was off—it was a Glock, apparently, since it didn’t have a safety. That was a little factoid I’d learned from Oliver, the guy who’d run the firing range: Glocks didn’t have safeties.
I pulled the slide, doing so as quietly as I could, and then set it in the grass at my right hand, took the spare from my waistband, checked it, racked the slide on that one, and arranged my extra clips where I could grab them easily.
My hands shook.
My pulse thundered in my ears.
I was not ready for this. Killing a guy in self-defense was one thing. But lying in wait to kill people in cold blood…that was another prospect.
I couldn’t do it.
Shit.
Shit.
What was I thinking?
A hand appeared in the fence break, holding onto the grip of some kind of compact machine gun. Harris would probably have a proper name for it, but I didn’t give a shit what it was called. A kill-Layla device. That was all that mattered. The body followed, a short, stocky man with sweaty hair and a stained T-shirt.
My finger twitched on the trigger, but I waited; I’d start shooting only after Harris had. I didn’t want to spoil the ambush by shooting too early.
Heh. I didn’t want to shoot too early; I wondered idly if Harris had that problem. Probably not.
Jesus, Layla. Now is not the time to be thinking about Harris’s sexual prowess.
Yes it was. It was always a good time to think about Harris’s sexual prowess. He probably had a lot of prowess.
A second man followed the first, and then a third, and a fourth. And a fifth. They were each armed with a machine gun. They all looked extremely unpleasant.
The first man was about ten steps into the field as the fifth and final man was stepping over the makeshift area of fence. And that was when Harris cut loose. It happened so fast I barely registered it: there was a loud chattering crash, and the fifth man collapsed, falling into and effectively blocking the open section of fence. This happened in an eye-blink.
Another loud detonation—CRACKCRACKCRACK—and the first man in line fell.
The other three scattered in three different directions, and I realized this was my cue. I adjusted my two-handed grip on the pistol, aimed at the torso of the left-most attacker, held my breath…squeezed the trigger.
BANG! The gun jumped in my hands, and my target twisted, stumbled, a red circle spreading on his stomach. Shit. I’d have to shoot him again. I aimed more carefully this time, drawing bead on his face. Deep breath, hold it…BANG!…let it out. He dropped, gurgling. I’d missed his head, the round going through his throat.
My stomach lurched, my eyes watered.
No time for that, bitch, I told myself.
I had no clue where Harris was hiding. I hadn’t seen a muzzle flash, and the sound had bounced off the walls, effectively disguising its location of origin. Clearly the remaining two thugs weren’t sure either, because they had both dropped to the ground in the waist-high grass and were firing their weapons at random, spraying bullets in every direction.
One pinged loudly off the barrel in front of me, startling me so badly I screamed. Which, in hindsight, was a dumb idea. One of the bad guys stood up and moved toward me in a crouch, an evil grin on his face.
CRACKCRACK! He fell, toppling like a bag of bricks, his head exploding in a red mist. Oh fuck, that was nasty. His entire face was gone, just…gone.
Bile filled my mouth, and this time I couldn’t choke it back.
I heard shouting in Portuguese. I spat the nastiness out of my mouth and then looked up to see Harris approaching the last man left alive. Harris gestured with his gun, and the man dropped his weapon, held up his hands.
“Stay there, Layla,” Harris said, not looking in my direction.
I stayed put.
The man spoke, and Harris responded, his voice terse and harsh. The man said something else, and this time Harris responded with a shout, and the man backed up, both hands high in a gesture that clearly meant “no, no, don’t shoot!”
Harris shot.
CRACK! One bullet right between the eyes. Harris lowered his weapon and moved from body to body, nudging them with his boot. One, the man I’d shot, moaned.
CRACK! The moaning stopped.
“You can come out now,” Harris said.
He was rifling through the pockets of each of the dead men, taking clips, currency, and weapons. He stuffed everything he took into his black bag, which he then zipped and slung on his shoulder.
I was making my way through the grass, knees weak, stomach lurching, heart hammering. I tried not to look down at the red-stained grass, but I couldn’t help it.
I stopped next to Harris and stared down at the man I’d shot. I’d hit him in the stomach and the throat, and Harris had finished him with a bullet in the forehead.
There was blood everywhere. The grass was crimson and wet, and the stink was nauseating.
“Okay?” Harris asked, glancing at me.
I shook my head negative. “I’m fine.”
Harris barked a laugh. “Well that was clear as mud. I’ll ask again, Layla. You good?”
I closed my eyes and focused on breathing shallowly and evenly. “Just get me out of here. Please?”
He reached out and took my hand. “You’re fine. You did great. We’re gone, okay?” I felt him squeeze my hand. “Look at me, Layla. Eyes on mine.” I forced my eyes open; his gaze was calm and cool, his eyes green as freshly mown grass. “You did great.”
“I shot him. Twice.”
“He was going to kill you.”
I shook my head. “No, he wasn’t. He was going to bring me back to Vitaly. He’s the one who wants to kill me, now. I think Cut was important to him. So now I’m on his shit list and so is Kyrie. He doesn’t want us dead, he wants us alive so he can torture us and then kill us.”
“Don’t think about that,” Harris said, hiking his bag higher on his shoulder and taking my other hand. “I’m with you, now. I’ll get you out of here. I promise. No one else will ever lay a hand on you, or Kyrie. You have my word.”
I felt weak, shaky, and vulnerable, and I hated it. I hated myself for feeling weak. I hated myself for showing that weakness to Harris. And I hated Harris for seeing it and acting like it was no big deal. It was a big deal. I’m not weak. I’ve never been weak. I don’t show weakness. I don’t need anyone.
But I needed Harris in that moment, and he knew it.
And he was being totally awesome about it, and that pissed me off. I could have handled it if he’d been all cold and businesslike, but he wasn’t. He was looking at me with this…softness…in his eyes that I wasn’t sure any human being had ever seen before. It was odd and disconcerting and disorienting and bizarre, especially because Harris had just killed five men in less than a minute.
It hit me, then, how fast all that had happened. Less than a minute. Five men dead in sixty seconds. Well, if you want to get picky about it, the first four had gone down first, and the last one about a minute later. So the whole business, from the moment the first man stepped through until the last bullet pierced skull bone, had lasted, at most, two minutes.
“Is it always like that?” I asked.
“Is what always like what?”
I gestured around us. “Combat. Does it always happen so fast?”
He nodded. “Yeah. You’re sitting there waiting, and time stretches out like fucking taffy, so slow you can feel each bead of sweat, hear each one of your heartbeats. And then once the first bullet flies…” he shrugged, “everything happens in a split second. Blink and you miss it. Bam, people are dead and you’re pissing yourself and you don’t know whether to cry or laugh or puke or all three.”
“I puked after I shot that guy,” I admitted.
“No shame in that,” Harris said. “I damn near pissed my pants first time I went into combat. If you’re not scared shitless before, during, or after combat, you’re a sociopath.”
“Even after you’ve done it a thousand times?” I asked.
He nodded. “I’m scared every time. I know what to expect and how to deal with it, but I’m still scared. No matter how good you are, how careful you are, something can always go wrong. A stray bullet doesn’t give a shit.” He pulled me into a walk, letting me go briefly to shove the dead man out of the way, and then he helped me over the corrugated iron fence. I refused to look down as I stepped over the corpse.
Harris led me back to the Defender, opened the trunk and set the bag in, keeping only the handguns. I had no memory of doing so, but apparently I’d grabbed my own guns and clips. Harris took them from me, stuffed them in the bag, and then led me to the front passenger seat, opened the door, and helped me in. I was in a daze, running on autopilot, content to let Harris take care of things. Adrenaline was still slamming through me, pulsing in my blood. I didn’t know what to do with myself, whether I wanted to vibrate like I’d OD’d on Five Hour Energy or just fall asleep.
I also felt strangely…turned on.
I mean, it wasn’t hard to turn me on under most circumstances, but this was overwhelming. Waves of need blasted through me, desire throbbing between my legs, making my nipples hard and my breasts ache.
I wasn’t wearing a bra, which meant I had some serious headlights going on.
The dazed feeling, I was realizing, was my circuits being overloaded. I was feeling too many things at once for my psyche to be able to deal with them all.
I wanted, like Harris had said, to puke again from the knowledge that I’d shot a man, and I wanted to cry, and to laugh. I also wanted to touch myself. To pinch my nipples and stuff my hands down my pants and finger my clit.
I wanted to strip naked and shove three fingers inside myself.
And then, the biggest need of all, I glanced over at Harris as he turned on the ignition and backed out of the alleyway. And Jesus shit fuck—I wanted him.
It made no sense, but there it was.
He’d come after me, he’d taken charge, and he’d killed for me.
Risked death for me.
From the point of view of an alpha, Type A, totally independent sort of woman, a man who could take charge was kind of sexy to me. This translated to me being attracted most strongly to men in power, to men who wore uniforms. Of course, those men were usually assholes, but I typically didn’t care because I was just using them for their dicks.
But I’d never in my life felt such a strong need. Not like this. I NEEDED.
I ached.
I was hyper-aware of every move I made, how my thighs rubbed together—yes, my thighs rubbed together; no gap there, just flesh and muscle. I was hyper-aware too of Harris, of every move he made, of his hands on the steering wheel and the gear shifter, of how big his hands were, how strong and callused. How they’d feel on my skin, scratchy and hard and powerful. I was aware of his face, the strong jaw and the high cheekbones, the jade of his eyes, the stubble on his cheek, the dark fuzz of his hair cropped close on the sides, and long enough to sweep backward on top. He wasn’t gorgeous, not in the sense that Roth was just insanely, inhumanly beautiful. Too beautiful for my taste. Harris was rugged, hard, and weathered. He was handsome, but again, in that rough and rugged sense. A steamy novel might describe his features as “craggy”. Cheesy and cliché, but true. He looked so rough and hard that he might have been chipped out of granite, carved out from somewhere deep in the crust of the earth. He was lean, sharp as a razor, not overly muscled but quick and lithe.
If Harris had an animal spirit, he’d be a puma.
I almost laughed out loud at myself at the comparison. But it struck me as true. He was a predator. Cunning, able to move in utter silence, radiating threat and lethality, oozing poised grace and coiled ferocity.
I wanted him.
I didn’t want to want him, but I wanted him.
God, did I want him.
It was just the adrenaline, right?
Adrenaline made you feel horny. I’d read that somewhere, or maybe I’d seen it in a movie.
Keep it together.
Don’t jump him.
My hands were twitchy and itchy. I wanted to paw his shirt off and run my hands over his abs, feel his ass cool and hard and taut in my hands, I wanted to clutch his cock and feel him throb between my fingers. I wanted to taste him and touch him and lick him and suck him and fuck him.
I stole a glance, and caught him just as he was looking away, returning his attention to the road. He’d been staring at my tits.
I looked down, and totally understood. I mean, they were pretty fucking prominent, especially with arousal making my nipples so hard they hurt, so hard they could cut diamonds.
I crossed my arms over my chest, but that didn’t help. My own arms rubbing over my sensitive nipples had me squirming, aching. My core pulsed, and I crossed one leg over another, but that made it a thousand times worse.
I couldn’t breathe for how badly I needed sex…
For how badly I needed Harris.
I looked left again, and this time my gaze caught his. He cut his eyes to the road briefly, just long enough to navigate a turn, and then he was looking at me again. I held his gaze, lifted my chin. Defiant. Daring.
It was an act; I couldn’t fucking breathe, couldn’t take another second of insatiable need. Pure, unadulterated thirst for Nicholas Harris.
His eyes flitted over my face, slid slowly and deliberately down to my tits, and then back up. I stared into his eyes when they returned to mine. Glanced down, and saw his bulge. Ho-ly shit, he had a bulge. Massive, huge bulge.
I swallowed hard and laced my fingers together on my lap to keep from ripping open his pants and deep-throating him as he drove.
“Don’t look at me like that, Layla,” he growled.
His eyes returned to the road and he gripped the steering wheel with both hands and shifted in the driver’s seat.
“Then don’t you look at me like that either.” I turned away and tried to focus on the scenery outside the window.
“I’m not looking at you like anything,” he said.
“And neither am I.” My words were given a lie by the way I tried to steal a look at him, and caught him doing the same.
Silence.
“It’s just the adrenaline,” I said.
“Right.” His hands were twisting the faded leather of the steering wheel as if trying to choke it into submission.
“It’ll pass on its own. It doesn’t mean anything.” I tried chewing on my lip, biting down hard enough to cause pain.
Nope. That didn’t help either.
I crossed and uncrossed my legs so many times it probably looked like I was doing the pee-pee dance. Only, it was the pretend-you-don’t-need-sex dance.
And Harris was doing one of his own. I stole a glance and caught him trying to surreptitiously adjust himself, plucking at the zipper of his khakis to relieve the pressure of his erection.
Shit. Shitshitshit. Do not think about his erection, I told myself.
Do not think about his massive, throbbing erection. Don’t think about stroking him, petting his thick, veiny cock. Don’t think about licking the pre-come from his tip, or wrapping my lips around the bulbous head.
Fuck.
Not good. So very intensely not good.
Now that was all I could think about.
We drove in complete silence for several minutes. Neither of us daring to look at each other, neither of us daring to cross the invisible line drawn between us.
He seemed to know exactly where we were going, and it wasn’t back to the epicenter of São Paulo. If I had my directions right, we were heading east. I didn’t care, though. Or rather, I didn’t have the mental capacity to care.
All I could think about was NEED.
The sexual tension in the car was at DEFCON 10. High alert. We’d gone past storm watch directly into tornado warning. I couldn’t sit still, and neither could he. We stole glances, each pretending nothing was wrong.
And then a spark flew.
He took his hand off the wheel and set it on the bench at his side, and I did the exact same thing at the same time. Which meant my hand went under his. My head snapped around and my gaze fixed on our hands, his on mine, and then I looked up at him, at his eyes, and saw that his gaze was daring, challenging.
You move your hand first, his eyes said.
I didn’t. I never back down from a challenge. That’s rule number one with Layla: never dare me or challenge me, because I have zero common sense. I will not back down.
I rotated my wrist, turning my hand palm-up under his. He narrowed his eyes, looking from me to our hands to the road and back. And then his fingers splayed apart, snaked between mine.
What the hell was this, junior high?
Clearly, because my heart was thudding against my ribcage like a fucking tribal drum at the innocent, ridiculous, childish contact of his hand on mine, his fingers in mine.
We were holding fucking hands.
HOLDING HANDS.
I’d never held hands. I’d skipped the silly cute innocent stage of my sexuality, going straight from thinking boys were stupid to making out in janitor’s closets within the space of a single grade—fifth grade, if you want specifics. I’d sucked my first cock in sixth grade, and was pretty well experienced in the basic missionary position by the end of seventh. By ninth grade, I was on the prowl.
Holding hands wasn’t exactly on the itinerary, needless to say.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Mogi das Cruzes,” he said. “It’s an offshoot of São Paulo. Thresh has a safe-house prepped for us.” He let go of my hand and pulled a cell phone from his pocket, dialed a number, and put the phone to his ear. “Thresh. We’re ten minutes out. No, just secure the perimeter and then head for Rio as we discussed. Affirmative.” He hung up, and shoved the phone back in his pocket, doing that uniquely male thing where he lifted his entire body off the seat to wedge the phone into the pocket.
And then he reached out, took my hand in his once more, and threaded our fingers together. His eyes cut to mine to gauge my reaction; I’d felt strangely disappointed when he’d let go of my hand, and giddy when he took it back. None of this had crossed my face, though, hopefully.
Or maybe it did, because the corner of his mouth quirked up in a small, pleased smile.
Somehow, over the next ten minutes, my position on the bench seat shifted. I’m not sure how, or why, but I kept sliding further and further left, closer and closer to Harris. And then he let go of my hand, but only to rest his palm on my knee. This made it hard to breathe, and impossible to swallow.
When his fingers found the tender skin of my thigh just beneath the hem of the skin-tight shorts, I had to focus on forcing each breath in, and each breath out.
I lost track of my left hand, and found it on his thigh.
What the hell was going on?
We were in a residential area, quiet, sunny, hilly, São Paulo proper in the distance, the buildings more well-kept, the cars a little newer. Kind of like Clawson or Livonia in Metro Detroit, not super wealthy but not run-down either, where people were getting by and weren’t exactly poor, but weren’t really close to even upper-middle class.
Harris drove with his left hand, not taking his right off my leg. His eyes were in constant motion now, though. I could feel his attention, and it was laser-focused on our surroundings, checking the mirrors and the rooftops and each doorway we passed. He slowed, made a left turn, and then stopped outside a small house with white siding and terra cotta roof tiles, a gray fence separating the driveway and front door from the street and sidewalk. A momentary pause, and then a truly massive human being emerged from the house, ducking under the lintel and straightening to a full height that had to be close to seven feet tall. The man was nearly as broad as he was tall, which was a terrifying distortion of physical proportion. Despite his gargantuan size, the man moved with the same predatory grace that Harris possessed. Quick motions unlocked the gate and slid it aside, letting Harris pull the Range Rover into the driveway.
My door was pulled open and I climbed out, straightened, and turned to face the giant. And he was, truly, a giant.
“Jesus Christ on a cracker,” I said, “you’re the biggest person I’ve ever seen.”
“I get that a lot,” he said. His voice was…I’m not sure I have a word for how deep it was. Metaphor also seems to fail, but I’ll do my best: it sounded sort of like mountains crashing together, the sound emerging from the depths of the Marianas Trench.
“Layla, this is Thresh,” Harris said, pulling his bag of guns out of the back of the Defender. “Thresh is Rambo’s worst nightmare.”
“Well. That’s a fun thought.” I held out my hand. “Nice to meet you, Thresh.”
Thresh took my hand in his and shook it once. His grip was surprisingly gentle, as if he had to consciously focus on the act of not crushing my hand like a pretzel stick. “Glad to see you in one piece,” he rumbled.
He turned away then and took the bag from Harris, brought it inside the house, once again ducking his head and turning slightly sideways to fit through the doorway. Let me reframe this for you. The doorway was average height and width, but Thresh was of a size that he had to not only duck to fit vertically, but had to twist sideways to get his shoulders through the door. The bag, meanwhile, which Harris had carried with visible effort, Thresh dealt with by threading two fingers through the straps. He was carrying it like it was a grocery bag full of bread. I watched his acres of tan muscle and shaggy blond hair vanish into the interior of the house, and then I turned to Harris.
“Where the hell did you find Goliath, there?” I asked.
“I was in the Rangers with him.”
“Is his name really Thresh?”
Harris shrugged. “Would you ask him his real name? I know very little about him besides his qualifications, which are pretty self-evident. I mean, sheer size aside, he’s a stone-cold killer. He’s deceptively fast and silent, which should be impossible for a man of his size. I’ve seen him use at least four different kinds of martial arts. He’s a dead shot with a rifle, proficient with explosives, fluent in four languages, good with computers, and is, obviously, the strongest person I’ve ever met.”
“And he’s unquestionably on our side?”
“I trust Thresh with my life.”
“You trust him with your life, but you don’t know his real name?”
“His name is Thresh. That’s all I need to know. His personal life is his business, not mine.”
Thresh returned at that moment, a khaki rucksack on his back. “Perimeter’s clear. Sensors are in place. I’ll have us a ride out of South America by the time you reach Rio.” He handed Harris a set of keys. “This place is good for seventy hours, no more. See you in Rio.”
Harris unlocked the gate, let Thresh through, and locked it behind him. I glanced at Harris as he pocketed the keys, and when I turned back less than two seconds later, Thresh was gone, as if he’d never been there in the first place.
“Where the hell’d he go?”
Harris just shrugged. “Who knows? Man’s a ghost.”
“How can a seven-foot-tall giant just fucking vanish into thin air?”
This earned me a grin. “See why he’s the only one I brought with me to come get you? Now get your ass in the house. We need to keep a low profile.”
I preceded Harris into the house, heard him close the door behind us and turn several locks. The interior was dark and cool, and I noticed the shadow of bars across the windows and the front door. There was a couch under the front bay window, thick tan curtains pulled across the glass. The couch was out of the seventies, lime green fake leather. Everything, in fact, was seventies, I realized as I moved through the tiny house, from the window treatments to the appliances to the wallpaper.
There was a minuscule galley kitchen, a single bathroom not much larger than an RV bathroom, and one bedroom.
I heard Harris prowling around much as I was, peering out of windows, testing locks and windows. When he was satisfied, he pulled his phone out of his pocket, swiped it to unlock the touch screen, tapped an icon, then tapped and swiped at the screen a few times.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He moved to stand beside me, showing me the screen. “Just making sure I’m connected to all the cameras and sensors Thresh installed. See?”
He cycled through several screens, one of the front of the house as seen from the roof across the street, one of each side looking out, and two from the back, one looking out and one looking at the house from some tall structure behind the house. There were also blank screens with “armed” and “clear” written in green letters, which I assumed were motion sensors.
The next thing Harris did was pull weapons out of the bag and hide them in various places around the house: in a box in a cupboard, duct-taped to the wall behind the fridge and behind the toilet, between the mattress and box spring in the bedroom, between the cushions of the couch, a huge assault rifle stood on its stock in the broom closet. He set another handgun on the nightstand beside the bed with two spare clips beside it.
I watched him the whole time. Meeting Thresh had momentarily distracted me from my hyper-sexual awareness of Harris, but now that we were alone again, it came rushing back at me like a runaway freight train. I was aware of the way his sweat-darkened BDU shirt was sticking to his spine; of the way each movement he made seemed to have a specific purpose, no wasted motions, no wasted energy. I was aware of the bulge in the front of his pants, lessened at the moment. I was aware of his corded forearms and chiseled biceps.
I was aware of his gaze as it slid away from his phone and to my eyes.
I was aware of the way he slid the phone back in his pocket and prowled over to me, bulge in his pants getting larger as he approached. I was aware of his eyes on my chest as I breathed, intensity and anticipation and arousal making me short of breath, which meant my breasts swelled with each breath.
“Where’d you get these clothes?” he asked.
“I stole a car from the valet in Vitaly’s hotel. He gave them to me.”
“They don’t fit you.”
I shook my head. “No, not really.”
A moment of silence then, as if that was all he could think to say.
I watched his chest expand with a deep breath, which he held for a moment and then released slowly. His hands curled into fists at his sides, and his eyes fixed on mine, conflicted, heated green.
And then, with a growl of irritated acquiescence, he moved so he was pressed up against me, erection hard against my belly, face tipped down, mouth centimeters from mine.
“Tell me no,” he murmured.
I should have.
I couldn’t.
“Layla.” It was a demand, a repetition of his injunction to say no.
“Nick?”
At my use of his name, he seemed to swell and his fingers gathered the skin-tight cotton of my T-shirt into his fists. “Last chance, Layla. Tell me to stop.”
Fuck that. I wanted this. I wasn’t thinking beyond the moment, because that’s how I worked. I wasn’t thinking about anything except need, except want, except the ache between my thighs, except the way my nipples pulsed and my core was going damp and hot. I couldn’t have told him no even if I’d been able to summon words. Which, incidentally, I wasn’t.
He growled again, and this time it was a groan of need. Harris’s jaw clenched and I felt his fists tense in my shirt at the center of my spine. He pulled, and I heard cotton rip. His arms went rigid, and the frayed crew-neck collar parted.
Holy fucking shit; he was literally ripping the clothes off me?
The maroon fabric hit the floor, and I was bare from the waist up. My nipples tightened, and I lifted my chin, stepped back, hands at my sides.
Harris’s gaze roved over me, and I was rewarded by a groan scraping past his clenched teeth as he took in my body. “Jesus, Layla.”
“What?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew exactly what he meant.
“You,” he said. “You’re the sexiest thing I’ve ever fucking seen.”
Somehow, coming from him, that meant more than any compliment I’d ever gotten, and that scared the fuck out of me. I shoved that little box of emotion way, way down, closed the lid, locked it off, and buried it. Nope nope nope. Not going there. Not with him, not with anyone.
“Tit for tat,” I said, running my hands over my breasts. “My shirt…for yours.” I crossed the space between us and gripped the edges of his shirt.
I ripped it off him with a rough jerk, and Harris took the garment from me, let it fall to the floor, and now we were both naked from the waist up. I ran my hands over his chest, rubbed my palms on his nipples and through the dark, curly hair on his chest.
“You’ve got a hairy chest, Nick.”
“Sure do.” The question was there in his gaze, unspoken.
I ran my palms in circles on his chest, placed a kiss to the indent on his shoulder where it wasn’t quite shoulder, wasn’t quite chest. Another, over his breastbone. “I like it. Real men have hairy chests.”
He scraped his hands up my belly and cupped my breasts in his big, rough hands. “Glad you think so.” There was a smile in his words, but I was too busy tracing the grooves of his abdomen, the concavity of his sides, the smooth plateau of his broad back to actually see it.
A breath, another kiss to his chest, right above his nipple, and then he was kneeling in front of me, yanking open the button of the shorts and jerking them down past my hips. I stepped out of them, and looked down at Harris, meeting his gaze. He had a double-handful of my ass, and his lips were pressed to my left hipbone. Just beneath my navel. Then over to my right hipbone and to my thigh, high up, just underneath the thin strap of my tiny red thong, then over, a breath away from where the silk cupped my pussy.
He glanced up as he hooked his fingers into the side of the thong, preparing to rip it off.
I grabbed his hand. “Don’t. It’s the only pair I’ve got.”
“I brought you clean clothes from the Eliza. They’re in my bag,” he said, and then ripped the thong apart anyway.
Jesus. You read about a sexy brute of a man ripping a girl’s underwear off, but the reality is a little different. It kind of hurts a little, where the strap on the opposite side digs into your hip with the pressure of the pull, until it gives. And then there’s the fact that it kind of creates a bit of camel toe. But then the string parts and you’re bare, naked, completely bare. And that was what he did, just ripped it off, tore my underwear right off. It snatched my breath away.
Yeah, it is exactly that sexy.
And then his mouth was over my core, his tongue spearing into me, and I had to grab his shoulders for balance. “Holy shit, Nick.”
I went from turned on to orgasm in the space of a heartbeat. One swipe of his tongue against my clit and I was ready to come apart, aching, throbbing, a spear of raw intensity cutting through me.
“Come now, Layla,” he said.
He reached up and twisted my nipple sharply, and then slid three fingers of his other hand into my pussy. No buildup, no adding them one at a time, just a quick rough thrust and I was shredding into a million pieces. He sucked my clit between his teeth and flattened it against the roof of his mouth, twisted my nipple, withdrew his fingers and fucked them back up into me.
“Fuck, Jesus, Nick. Fuck.” I tried to push him away. “I need a shower, I stink.”
“Don’t fucking care,” he murmured. “Now…I told you to come, Layla,” he growled.
“I am—oh…holy fuck—I’m coming, Nick.” I felt everything clench, felt my muscles contract, felt the heat blasting through me, a wordless moan escaping my lips. I squeezed hard with my PC muscles, clamping down as hard as I could on his fingers, trapping them inside me. He groaned at the pressure on his fingers, glancing up at me with an appreciative glint in his eyes.
Abruptly, he was standing up in front of me and he was kissing me, pussy on his breath and his tongue demanding mine, commanding and insistent. His fingers dug into my hair, trying to undo the rubber band keeping it in place.
“It’s an actual rubber band,” I murmured, breathless from his kiss. “Gonna be a bitch to get out.”
He reached into a pocket and I heard a snick of a pocketknife as he pulled my head toward him. “Hold still,” he ordered.
I sank to my knees instead, and got to work on his pants. I felt him playing with the bun on the top of my head, looking for the best spot. I unbuttoned the fly, and tugged his pants down, and they fell to the floor at his feet with a thud. He was utterly focused, though, I had to give him credit for that. Even as I pulled his black briefs down and bared his cock, he was focused on my hair, cutting away the rubber band piece by piece until he could shake my hair free.
Only when my hair was loose around my shoulders did he fold the knife and glance down at me. “Still got my shoes on,” he said.
“True.” I leaned closer to him, teasing him, mouth close enough to his cock that he could feel my breath as I unlaced his boots one at a time and helped him tug his feet out of them.
He toed his socks off, kicked the pile of clothes away, tossed the pocketknife onto the pile.
And then he waited.
I took a moment to admire his penis; it was a lovely organ, long and thick with a very slight inward curve to it as it stood flat against his belly. That curve, I couldn’t wait to have it inside me, pushing against me just right, hitting that spot as he thrust into me….
I wrapped both hands around it and stroked him, and then leaned over him, wrapped my lips around the head.
I got one good suck in, and then he was lifting me to my feet. “Later, Layla.”
He twisted me in place and guided me to the bathroom, turned on the shower stream, adjusted the temperature so it was somewhere between cool and warm. Normally, I like scalding hot showers, but for once I was simply too damn hot and sweaty to be able to tolerate a hot shower.
Here’s a thing: shower sex isn’t actually sexy. It’s hard to have good shower sex without anyone getting hurt, and someone is always left out of the water stream so they get cold, and there aren’t really any good positions that don’t involve feats of acrobatics or powerlifting—especially when you consider that I’m not exactly dainty.
Harris seemed to recognize all of this. He pushed me so my back was against the wall, the water beating against my front. He had a bar of soap in his hand, and proceeded to scrub me with it, all over. He started with my face, telling me in a gruff whisper to close my eyes, then washed my face and rinsed it carefully. He moved to my neck and shoulders, tugging me forward to wash my back while kissing me between my breasts. Then he roamed over my breasts with the soap bar, and god, that was sexy, intimate, tender…too much to handle. I closed my eyes and let him wash me. Thighs, core, ass, all over, kissing me clean everywhere. I was breathless by the time he was done, and tried to take the soap from him, but he just knocked my hands away and pulled me under the water to wash my hair. He had bottles of complimentary hotel shampoo and conditioner, and used them both on my thick, curly black hair, working them in one after another, massaging my scalp.
I was finally clean, head to toe.
I reversed positions with Nick, and did the same for him, washing him from head to toe, but I made sure to avoid his erogenous zones at first. Meaning, I washed his hair first, and then ran the soap over his lean, hard, toned body, only touching his cock at the end. By this time his erection had subsided to a drooping semi, but I made short work of this sad fact. I lathered soap onto my hands and then worked it onto his cock and balls, massaging gently, just washing him at first, and then as I rinsed him clean began stroking him to full erection.
God, the man had a lovely cock. Seriously. I’ve seen and handled a lot of cock, and his was—objectively speaking—the best I’d ever gotten my hands on. I mean, it wasn’t about sheer size. I’d seen bigger. But there is actually such a thing as too big, in my opinion at least. It’s more about overall shape, for me. Size factors in, clearly, and Nick had size in spades. He wasn’t hung like a horse in any literal sense, which was perfect for me. I could tell as I explored his dick with my hands that he’d fill me enough that I’d feel pleasurably stretched. Big, thick, long, but just perfectly shaped, mostly straight but with a very slight curve, and that curve…I shivered with anticipation—when he was inside me he’d hit me just right, and I was looking forward to it.
Like, a LOT.
I may have gotten a little carried away, stroking him in the shower. The water had gone cold, but I didn’t care. It felt good, the cool water on my skin. I had both fists around his cock and was stroking him, not trying to get him off, just…playing with his length, pausing now and then to cup and massage his heavy balls, rolling them in my palms. No mouth, this time, I just touched. Learned. Explored.
And he let me. He watched, head leaned back against the tile, hands on my shoulders, thumbs circling on my skin in idle affection. And that idle touch, it was enough to make me almost panic, because it was unconscious, the kind of touch that means so much, more than any sexual touching. It was like the way he had of brushing his thumb across my lips. Tender. Affectionate. Meaningful.
When I had him breathing hard and had his hips fluttering with the smooth, slow strokes of my fingers around him, Nick lifted me to my feet, shut off the water, and indicated with a push that he wanted me out of the shower. He made quick work of drying us both, and then hauled me into the bedroom. Hot humid air immediately coated my skin. Nick’s eyes roamed down my body, and his lip curled up in a hungry smile.
“Now we’re both clean. No more excuses.”
“Excuses?” I asked.
He didn’t bother answering. He just pushed me up against the bed. Before he bent me forward, however, he pressed himself up against me, erection nestling between the heavy globes of my ass, pulled me backward so my head rested on his shoulder, and kissed me, traced my lips with his thumb. He bent at the knees, his hand cupping my throat, holding me against him, and his cock nudged against my entrance.
“Oh god. Nick…”
“You want it, don’t you?”
I nodded. “Jesus, yes.”
“Say it, Layla.”
“I want your cock inside me, Nick. I want you to fuck me.”
He kissed me once more, and then his cock filled me with one hard thrust, and a scream ripped out of me.
Oh holy fuck.
This was going to be incredible.