Rogue Renegades (Rogue Trilogy) (2 page)

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“What’s your name?” she asked him when the silence stretched on for too long.

“Ryan,” he replied then glanced at her. “You can’t call me that, of course. The men know me as Alejandro. It would be best if we didn’t talk at all when we reach the compound. You’ll have to do everything I tell you to without arguing or I’ll have to punish you in front of the men.” His lips pressed together and he shot her a warning look. “You wouldn’t like what I’d have to do to you.”

“Ok,”
Abby said agreeably. “No talking back. Gotcha.” Obeying orders from a man that she didn’t know wasn’t something that came naturally to her. It would probably be best to go along with his plan in this particular situation. She wasn’t sure what type of punishment he’d have to mete out, but it would no doubt be painful and humiliating.

Ryan
shook his head at Abigail’s blasé attitude. She was around thirty, only a couple of years younger than him, and she wasn’t a flighty kid. She should be mature enough to realize that she was in deep trouble. “You’re name is Abigail, right?”

“
I prefer Abby,” she replied.

“Do you realize what is going on here, Abby?”

Beneath the dirt, Ryan’s face was ruggedly handsome, which she’d always found appealing. Pretty boys didn’t do much for her. She wondered what color his hair and eyes really were. Focusing on the question, she nodded. “I’m being kidnapped and your men are expecting you to rape me into submission once we reach your base.”

“You don’t seem to be particularly frightened by the idea,” he said
with a touch of bewilderment.

“That’s because I kn
ow you aren’t going to hurt me,” she said confidently.

Taking his eyes off the road for a moment, he found her studying him closely. “How can you possibly know that?”

“Because I can tell that you’re a good man.”

Shaking his head, he refuted her statement. “You don’t know me. You don’t know the things I’ve done.”

She heard self-loathing in his tone and instantly empathized with him. “We all do things we later regret, Ryan,” she told him gravely and he had the feeling she was speaking from experience. “It’s how we choose to live our lives afterwards that really counts.”

“Sometimes we don’t have a choice,” he said almost too low for her to hear. For a while, he was silent and then he turned to her. “I have a job to do and it will be over in a few more days. When it is, I promise I’ll see you to safety.”

“I’ll hold you to that,
Alejandro
,” Abby said with a tiny smile then subsided into silence.

Their trip was long, bumpy and
was shrouded in shadows that were cast by the dense foliage. The sun barely made its way down to their level and they drove in a perpetual gloom until they finally turned off into another dirt road and eventually reached a clearing.

Abby peered at the
well-lit compound through the filthy windshield and automatically catalogued the windows, doors and the number of men in sight. She plotted a possible escape route based on what little she could see. She would compile a more comprehensive list of escape routes once she was inside. There was plenty of jungle to hide in once she did manage to break free.

Most women would have been screaming in terror
by now, but none of them were highly trained special ops agents. Make that
former
special ops agent, she reminded herself. Whoever Ryan really was, they had more in common than he realized. If he wasn’t working for someone, then that meant he’d also gone rogue from whatever agency he’d once belonged to.

Twenty
more men spilled out from within the long, shabbily constructed building. The walls were a hodgepodge of wood, canvas and even car doors. The tin roof looked as though a strong puff of wind would carry it away. Ryan pulled her out of the driver’s side door after him and took her firmly by the arm as he strode towards the structure. The sun had set during their journey, but her night vision was excellent and she didn’t trip over any of the obstacles that were strewn in their path.

One of the
men moved to intercept them. In his early forties, his skin was pitted from childhood acne and his skin was weathered. He wore a grin that didn’t reach his eyes as he looked her up and down. “So, you have finally chosen a woman, Alejandro. She is very beautiful. Such bounty is surely too much for one man.”

Abby kept her face neutral, not giving away that she could understand every word he said as his eyes crawled over her
, lingering on the swell of her breasts. “Perhaps we can all have a taste of her?” He rubbed his hands together and she noted a twisted scar on the back of his left hand. From the way his skin had melted, it had been caused by fire.

“I don’t share, Marcos,”
Ryan said with a sneer as he rudely pushed past him.

“Diego will be here in
four more nights, my friend,” Marcos said to their backs as they entered the building. “We will see what he has to say about who will get to share your woman.”

Abby took stock of the slatternly females that watched her from doorways and the
young children that hid behind them and peeked out from behind their skirts. All were natives of Brazil, but that didn’t mean they were living in the compound willingly. Like her, at least some of them had been kidnapped and forced to service the outlaws.

Reaching a wide doorway on the left,
Ryan turned them into another hallway and they entered a much older, far sturdier building. Instead of dirt, the floors were concrete and so were the walls. The doors they passed were constructed of strong metal that would be impossible for her to break down. Many had barred windows, giving them the appearance of prison cells.

Towards the end of the long hallway, the doors became further apart
as the rooms became more spacious. These doors didn’t have windows, allowing the occupants more privacy. Ryan stopped at the third door from the end on the right side of the hallway. Abby flicked her eyes towards the only exit. A large metal door was guarded by two men. They eyed her lazily and one muttered something that made the other man utter a low laugh. The door was cracked open a few inches to let the night air in and to let the smoke from their cigarettes out.

Ryan
unlocked the door then pushed her inside. He didn’t enter with her, but merely shut and locked the door again. It was pitch black inside and she’d only caught a brief glimpse of the room. Touching the cool concrete wall, she found a switch. A weak bulb came to life, illuminating the room that was to be her prison for the next few days.

Abby
was surprised to find it was much cleaner than she’d expected. The floors had recently been scrubbed, the linen on the rickety queen-sized bed appeared to be clean and the rustic chest of drawers had been dusted. No cockroaches scuttled away from the light to find a dark hidey-hole.

Snooping inside
the chest of drawers, Abby found a few changes of clothes matching the ones Ryan wore. Apart from a bedside table, there was no other furniture to inspect, so she turned to the door at the back of the room that most likely housed the bathroom.

Pushing the door open, she was again surprised at the cleanliness. The tiled walls and floor had turned off-white with age
, but they weren’t grimy. Rust stained the basin and the water was discolored when she turned the tap on. Abby knew not to drink the water in South America, unless it came from an unopened bottle that had been imported from another country. She used the washer to clean her face and hands then returned to the bedroom.

A single window above the bed had been covered
by a dark blanket. Standing beside the bed, she lifted a corner of the blanket and peered outside. It was too dark to see anything and the glass reflected the weak light back at her. Adjusting the blanket so that it blocked the light, her eyes focused on the bars on the other side of the glass. There would be no escape from that direction even if the window hadn’t already been nailed shut.

The bedside table had two deep drawers. Peeking inside the top drawer, her eyebrows rose when she saw several pairs of handcuffs. A short length of
fabric, that had probably been torn from a shirt, looked like it would make an effective gag. She wasn’t sure if the items belonged to Ryan or to the former occupant of the room. Half expecting to see a variety of sex toys, she was relieved when the second drawer was empty.

As she took
a seat on the bed, the springs squealed softly in protest. The mattress was lumpy and uncomfortable, but it was better than sitting on the floor. Propping a pillow behind her back, Abby calculated her chances of escape. She’d have to pick the lock on the door, disable two armed men guarding the exit and make her way back through the jungle with somewhere near forty men in pursuit. They weren’t great odds, but she’d actually faced worse. She hadn’t been alone back then and had had a team to back her up. Those days were long gone and she had no one to watch her back now.

Ryan
had promised to keep her safe and she found herself wanting to believe him. It had been a long time since she’d been able to trust anyone, but something about him made her want to try. Maybe she saw something in him that she saw every time she looked in the mirror; a lonely renegade soul in search of a kindred spirit.

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Ryan
strode away from his bedroom before temptation got the better of him. It had been two years since his wife had been murdered. Subconsciously punishing himself, he hadn’t slept with another woman since the night that he’d lost Miranda. Logically, he knew that he wasn’t directly to blame for her death, but guilt stained his soul anyway. His job as an undercover agent with the Special Ops Branch, or SOB as it was affectionately called by its employees, had gotten her killed.

Walking away from his
far too attractive captive, Ryan recalled the events that had led to Miranda’s death all too well. His team had been hunting Diego Montoya, a Brazilian drug lord, for months. They’d finally been given a tip telling them where he’d be conducting a business transaction. Ryan’s team had arrived near the end of the illicit exchange of drugs and money. Only when they’d moved in to take their quarry down did they discover that it was a trap and that Montoya was waiting for them. Someone had in turn tipped off their target and their raid had been turned against them.

Ryan’s
right hand moved to his left shoulder, absentmindedly rubbing the long healed wound that he’d received that night. He didn’t know who had betrayed them, but they’d cost the entire team far too much pain and anguish. The same night that they’d conducted their raid, several of their families had been attacked. Ryan’s wife wasn’t the only casualty that had resulted from the traitor ratting them out. Three of his co-workers wives and children had also been eradicated to make the squad back off.

Even that hadn’t been enough incentive for the
leader of their agency to call off his hunt. It had taken the kidnapping of his daughter before Trevor Watts had called a halt to their hunt. She’d eventually been returned alive, but her mind had been altered forever by the sexual abuse that she’d suffered. At least Miranda had been spared that fate. She’d simply been run down in the street like a dog and left to die. He’d been in the hospital being operated on while she’d been in a room on another floor being pronounced dead.

Ryan
gritted his teeth and clenched his hands to stop himself from howling out his misery and anger. He wanted to tear the throat out of every single man in this compound, but that would compromise his personal mission. For the first year after his wife’s murder, Ryan had continued to do his job. He’d recruited new members to replace the three men who’d lost their entire families. One of the men had committed suicide and the other two had quit and disappeared. Presumably they’d begun new lives in a far less dangerous field of work.

Towards the anniversary of Miranda’s death
, Ryan had begun to obsess about the man who had killed her. He might not have driven the car himself, but Diego Montoya had ordered the hit. Trevor had forbidden anyone from hunting down the man that had caused so much tragedy amongst their team. Montoya had proven to be too dangerous a target even for them to destroy.

Despite the order to let it drop,
Ryan couldn’t let it go. Walking away from his job had ensured that he would become a hunted man himself, but his obsession wouldn’t let him sleep at night. He had to make Montoya pay, not just for Miranda but for the other men, women and children whose lives had been ruined.

Changing his
hair and eye color, Ryan had travelled to Rio and had infiltrated the bandit gang and had begun hunting his target. It had taken a full year for him to reach the level where he could be trusted to finally meet the boss in person. The man would be here in just four more nights. Ryan would finally get to look Montoya in the eyes again and this time he would send him to hell.

Women shivered and pulled back into the shadows when they saw
Alejandro’s expression. They were all surprised that he’d brought a white woman back from his latest raid. He’d never showed an interest in taking a captive before. He was driven by passions that none of them understood.

Striding down the main hall,
Ryan turned into the only open doorway and stepped into their makeshift meeting area. A hodgepodge of mismatched chairs had been arranged into a loose circle around a collection of battered tables. His chosen chair was actually a car seat. It was the only piece of furniture that had a back that was long enough to accommodate his height.

Marcos looked at Alejandro in fake surprise
as he took a seat and made a show of checking his watch. “That was fast, my friend! Was the woman not to your satisfaction?”

Some of the others laughed, torn between
their fear of Alejandro and of looking bad in front of Marcos. The two outlaw leaders were deadly in their own way, but Alejandro’s cold eyes could make the bowels turn weak with just one glance.

“She can wait,”
Ryan said carelessly. “Don’t we have business to discuss?”

Seeing
he wasn’t going to be able to rile his rival into a fight, Marcos shrugged and let it go. He was jealous of the younger, much more handsome man and he didn’t trust him. Alejandro had come from out of nowhere a year ago and had swiftly worked his way up the ranks. He was a stone cold killer of any man that challenged him, yet he refused to kill women and children. He’d even banned his men from raping their captives, which most considered to be their right. After four rapists had been shot in the head, the rest had decided it wasn’t worth the risk just to taste a fresh woman every now and then.

Alejandro
was a paradox that Marcos didn’t want to puzzle out, he just wanted him dead. He’d tried to tell Diego that Alejandro was bad news, but his boss had just laughed and said that he would decide what to do with the man once they came face to face with each other. Marcos sincerely hoped his boss would decide the younger man wasn’t trustworthy and would order his death. He’d be only too happy to pull the trigger.

T
he six bandito leaders went quiet as several women handed out food and beer. Ryan barely tasted the spicy meal. Most food tasted like ashes to him ever since he’d lost Miranda. He washed it down with the cheap local beer that most of the criminals seemed to enjoy.

As the senior
team leader, Marcos led their conversation. They discussed the villages that were under their thumb and the money they were making from their various scams. Diego had many operations running all across Rio and beyond, and he was always looking for ways to expand his empire.

Ryan
rarely contributed to the discussion, offering his opinion only when he felt it was warranted. While he appeared to be engaged with his fellow leaders, his mind was on long brown hair and dark gray eyes.