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  He wasn’t gentle. He wasn’t considerate of her needs, her pace, her rhythm. He plunged to the hilt with a stifled roar, his teeth gritted and his face contorted with raw need, and then he pulled partway out only to plunge in again. He hooked her ankles over his shoulders and seized her ass so he could fuck her harder. She felt his balls slapping against her ass with every stroke and watched the muscles of his arms and torso rippling and straining. He filled her as completely as any toy could; she felt him grow even harder and more engorged inside her. Her juices flowed around him as she met each thrust with her own, wanting him deeper, wanting him so far inside her that it would be impossible to know where one of them stopped and the other began.

  The orgasm that had been building inside her since she was bent over the sink was now unstoppable. As the first waves began to well up inside her, she threw her head back and gave herself over to Ricardo, focusing only the pounding she was taking, on the ferocious claim he was making on her. A cry escaped her lips and Ricardo reached for her hair and yanked it triumphantly in his fist as she came, splashing her juices all over his cock, spreading herself as wide as she could to receive him, wave after wave shaking her to her core.

  Before she was finished coming he pulled out of her and used her hair to drag her body around so her head was over the edge of the bed. Her hands scrabbled frantically for her clit, slapping it, as he plunged his cock into her mouth. She took him all the way, and then she took him even further down her throat as he rammed himself home with a cry of his own. She felt the hot, salty semen flood her throat, gagging her, and still she couldn’t get enough.

  Her hand on her pussy, his cock in her mouth, his hands in her hair—she was suspended in the moment for an eternity, time stopped by the sheer force of their passion. Finally, though, his cock slid slowly from her mouth, the last of his semen dampening her lips, her chin. Her body thrummed with the aftereffects of her orgasm, every nerve ending at the height of its sensitivity. Gently, Ricardo lifted her shoulders and shifted her on the bed so she lay diagonally on the mattress. Then he lay down next to her, twining only his fingers with hers, and they lay together as their breathing slowed and their bodies cooled.

  Chelsea wished they could stay like that forever, in the delicious fugue of sensual satiety. But finally, Ricardo rolled over so he could look at her, tracing his fingertip down her cheek, across her lips, her chin.

  “My love.”

  She wrapped her hand around his. He was about to leave her, as he always left her. “Please—just promise me that you will return alive.”

  Ricardo went very still. He traced a circle on her bare shoulder, his touch so light it was more of a suggestion than a caress. “I will return to you only if you truly want me, mi querida.”

  They both knew that was not the hopeful plea of a besotted man. It was as much a threat, and reminder, of the conditions of their bond.

  She was in deep with him; this might be one of the last times she would be given a chance to walk away. Already she had given up her privacy; she knew Ricardo would not let her return to her old life without providing for her protection. If she left him now, someone would shadow her, ready to protect her from the threats on her life.

  But that promise of safety felt like the bitterest trade. “I want you,” she whispered, knowing that she doomed herself with her choice.

  “I will be back as soon as I can,” Ricardo said. “That is all you need to know.”

  Then he rolled away from her and left their bed.

  #

  He was gone within fifteen minutes, showering and dressing efficiently and brushing a kiss on her cheek, saying nothing as he walked to the door.

  Chelsea had no sooner finished showering a second time and dressing in the clothes she had worn here—she found them cleaned and folded on an upholstered bench in the bedroom—than there was a knock at the door. The first time she’d woken up alone after a night with Ricardo, such a knock would have terrified her. But now, she was pretty sure she knew who was on the other side of the door.

  After confirming by looking through the peephole, she opened the door with a sigh and allowed the visitor entrance. “Good morning, Mr. Smith.”

  He closed the door behind him and bowed slightly. “Good morning, Ms. Ryder. I see you found your clothes. I am sorry that, given the schedule, I was not able to have your pants repaired.”

  “They’re jeans, and those rips are supposed to be there,” she said, not sure if he was teasing her or not. Mr. Smith was the most inscrutable man she had ever met. “But thanks for having them laundered.”

  “I’ve taken the liberty of securing some of your clothes and personal items from your apartment. I thought you might be more comfortable with familiar things.”

  Chelsea looked up from the table, where she’d been gathering her purse. She’d known that they would be leaving the hotel suite—but she hadn’t counted on this.

  “There are so many things wrong with that statement I don’t know where to start,” she protested. “First, how—never mind.” Getting into her apartment in a shabby building with minimal security, especially for a man of Smith’s skills, would be a lark. As for the thought of him seeing her messy closet and trying to navigate the disaster of her medicine cabinet, she tried to put it out of her mind. “Look, I know Ricardo probably told you not to tell me, but where exactly are we going now?”

  “I think you’ll be very pleased to know that Mr. de Santos feels that you may return to work. Of course, I will accompany you.”

  “That wasn’t what I asked,” Chelsea snapped.

  “I wonder if you might feel better after breakfast?” Smith asked, unperturbed. “I would be glad to prepare something. We will be at your new lodgings in less than half an hour.”

  She could have asked again for a specific destination, but Chelsea had learned that such inquiries were pointless. So, too, would be demanding to return to her apartment, but she’d been scared enough by the violence she had witnessed that she had resigned herself to never returning there. Besides, the only possessions she cared about in this world were in her gallery.

  Speaking of which… “I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to go by the gallery and make sure it didn’t get blown up or something?”

  A ghost of a smile flashed briefly across Smith’s lips. He really did have the patience of a saint—or else he was a master at not letting his annoyance show. “Your gallery is fine. It is under skilled surveillance. I am supervising the gentlemen guarding it myself.”

  “Wait, there’s more of you?” Chelsea demanded, not really expecting an answer.

  She didn’t get one.

  “The usual protocols apply,” Smith said, leading the way to the door. “I go first, do not speak, do exactly as I say until I tell you otherwise.”

  Chelsea stomped to the door, her hair drying in a cascade of unruly curls, slipping on the sunglasses she’d bought from a street vendor.

  “A brilliant disguise,” Smith commented with his hand on the door knob and that ghost of a smile. “I almost don’t recognize you myself.”

  “Fuck you, Smith,” Chelsea said, but she couldn’t help grinning.

  Who knew the man had a sense of humor?

  #

  Fifteen minutes later she decided that the joke had been a fluke and Smith was a jerk. An excellent bodyguard, perhaps, but absolutely depraved when it came to the lengths he was willing to go, to ensure they were not seen.

  She hadn’t complained when they took the staff elevator all the way to the basement of the hotel. Nor had she been particularly surprised when a uniformed man greeted Smith respectfully and led them through a vast series of rooms containing commercial laundry facilities and shelves full of supplies. She’d never be able to backtrack through the confusing series of halls and stairways, but she felt safe in Smith’s company.

  But when he opened a small steel door at the dead end of a dingy hallway and the smell of rot and sewer assaulted her, Chelsea refused to enter the
dark, concrete-walled tunnel beyond.

  “Where on earth does that go?” she demanded. A tiny shape shot down the tunnel near the wall, a mere shadow in the widely spaced bare bulbs, and Chelsea shuddered at the thought of rats infesting the space. The tunnel turned about a dozen yards ahead, giving no clue what lay beyond.

  “East, I’d say,” Smith said. “Then south.”

  “What I mean is—” Chelsea stopped herself. He wasn’t going to tell her. And if pressed he’d say what he always said—either that it was for her own protection or that Mr. de Santos had instructed him only to convey her safely, not to give her details. “I didn’t know there were tunnels in underground Los Angeles,” she settled for saying.

  “There aren’t,” Smith responded. “At least, no public ones. These were built for booze running during Prohibition by corrupt city officials. No one uses them now.”

  There was nothing to be done except to follow. Chelsea picked her way carefully along the filthy, damp floor, trying not to wonder what caused the stench. She took grim pleasure in seeing Smith’s distaste as his highly polished leather shoes grew grimier with each step.

  The first turn led to another, and another, sloping gently downward, taking them farther underground. The only sound was their footsteps, until the entire tunnel began to vibrate, and a roar built overhead. Flakes of dirt and plaster fell from the ceiling as they passed under the roar.

  “I take it we’re under the streetcar line,” Chelsea guessed. Smith only grunted noncommittally.

  After they’d gone what seemed like half a mile, they reached a set of stairs. The noise and stench fell away as they climbed two stories. The concrete gave way to brick: a wall that was weathered with age, decorated with the faded and unintelligible graffiti of another generation, with an ancient wooden door and an incongruously high-tech lock. Smith pressed his palm flat against it, and the door clicked open.

  “Where are we now, Culver City?” Chelsea’s lame attempt at a joke did not merit a response. Instead, Smith politely held the door for her as she stepped into what looked like a drafty old garage with dirt floors and shelves full of moldering boxes and rusty tools. In the center of the space were several vehicles; he led the way to a late-model SUV with darkened windows.

  “This building belongs to a friend,” Smith said.

  “A friend who steals cars and takes them apart for parts?”

  That flash of a smile again. “He is merely a hobbyist,” Smith said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I believe you’ll be most comfortable in the backseat.”

  There was no point in protesting. Chelsea knew that he wanted her in the back so no one could see her, but for once, she didn’t mind; it would give her a chance to freely study what she saw out the windows and figure out where they were going.

  When Smith got into the car, he had donned a pair of sunglasses and a Lakers cap. Chelsea thought about commenting on his disguise as he had on hers, but instead, she settled back and fastened her seatbelt.

  Smith hit a button hidden in the visor, and one wall of the garage—actually a mechanical door, Chelsea realized as light flooded the space—opened, and Smith drove into an alley between two hulking warehouses.

  It could be just about any part of town, Chelsea decided, where people valued their privacy more than the condition of the neighborhood.

  Fine with her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  By the time Ricardo was an hour east of Los Angeles, he had received responses to two of the three discreet, expensive inquiries he’d made. Both confirmed the intelligence he’d secured by cashing in a very hard-won, long-standing favor from a source that most of the world believed to be dead. He now had a location and a name—not the target’s real name, of course. The only way the target could have disappeared for so long was by being very, very disciplined about maintaining his false identity.

  Ricardo could appreciate that. Most people made mistakes. It was far harder for ordinary citizens to change identities than they ever realized. Familiar comforts are hard to let go of; habits and mannerisms are easy to slip back into; the temptation to revisit favorite people and places too great. The only people who succeeded, in Ricardo’s experience, were either very, very diligent—or desperate.

  He had no doubt which his target was.

  Several hours later, as the sun was just beginning its afternoon descent and the desert was shimmering with heat, Ricardo pulled into the outskirts of Las Vegas. He stopped at a food truck for a quick meal of tacos al pastor, then headed to the address he’d memorized, in a part of town that was desperate even by Las Vegas standards. Here was where the ruined and the broken went to disappear; where those with cunning and strength took every advantage of those who were weak.

  In the blocks surrounding the dirty yellow cinderblock apartment complex that Ricardo had come to see, there were three gas stations, two restaurants, a brothel masquerading as a massage parlor, four taverns, and any number of leaning shacks and apartments in various stages of disrepair.

  He made a couple slow tours of the neighborhood. Neon signs blinked from the bars. A woman in tight pink short-shorts and thigh-high boots smoked a cigarette in front of the massage parlor. Two rusted low-riders roared past, starting the evening early with a race down the road that led to the strip in one direction and disappeared into the desert on the other.

  Ricardo nodded to himself. There was nothing unexpected here. He widened his circle and took his time choosing the best place to leave the car. By the time someone bothered to decide it was abandoned and have it towed, the rental company to which it belonged would be very glad indeed to have it back—and very curious as to how it had disappeared from a rental lot in Anaheim.

  It was dark when Ricardo finally decided to park in a weedy vacant lot, next to a shuttered wooden stand which advertised both produce and fireworks and appeared to have neither. He took a black backpack from the trunk and threw the keys into the chaparral before removing the thin nitrile gloves he had been wearing all day and pocketing them.

  Then he started walking through the night.

  #

  By dawn, Ricardo was hungry and sore, his muscles cramped from lying unmoving for so long. He had chosen a spot in the alley behind the apartment building, where someone had abandoned a mattress set. The leaning mattress gave fairly good cover, and the side of a garage gave him a place to lean, with a good view of his target’s single apartment window.

  When a light came on in the apartment a little after seven, Ricardo was instantly on alert. For the next twenty minutes he barely blinked, using a small folding scope to follow a shadowy figure as it moved around the interior of the apartment. Then the light went off, and moments later the building’s front door opened and a man half-stumbled down the two steps, then spat into the parking lot.

  His hair hung in a greasy gray ponytail, and he’d grown a scraggly goatee. He also looked about twenty pounds thinner than the photos Ricardo had seen. But, aided by the powerful scope, there was no question it was his target.

  The man ambled down the street, occasionally kicking a rock or spitting again, unaware of Ricardo shadowing him, stealthily moving through the parking lots and dirt yards.

  They didn’t have far to go. When they got to the second of the service stations anchoring the intersection, his target went inside. Ten minutes later, a man emerged, wearing a shirt exactly like the one his target was wearing, except that stitched above the pocket was the name “Raoul.”

  On the target’s shirt was stitched the name “Derek.”

  Satisfied, Ricardo started walking toward the strip, where he would catch a westbound bus and catch a few hours of sleep as it made the trip through the desert back to Los Angeles.

  #

  FBI Agent Stone Everson prided himself on his caseload clear rate. Ever since becoming an FBI agent, he’d received glowing reviews and greater responsibility every year. Advances in technology allowed the Cyber Crime Task Force team to hunt down child abusers in more places than e
ver. And since having two little girls of his own, Stone had never felt more satisfaction than when they were able to lock up another offender and ensure he wouldn’t be harming any other children.

  But there was one case from early in his career that he had never been able to shake. One little girl whose stepfather had a twisted habit of posing her in the locked back room of the run-down, filthy home he shared with her drug-addicted mother, photographing her, and then selling the images over the Internet. This particular offender didn’t ever physically abuse the child, but even her young mind understood that the naked photographs he took were wrong, and she suffered for years as he distributed the thousands of images all around the world.

  The young woman had escaped her real-life nightmare by running away from home at the age of fourteen, though it would be another five years before she found the courage to contact the FBI. Once he caught the case, Stone threw himself into pursuing the monster who had put the pain in the girl’s pretty golden-brown eyes, but the man seemed to have simply vanished, along with the girl’s mother. For the better part of the next decade, Stone followed the girl’s life from a distance, finding comfort in the fact that she found a home and a family of sorts, two men who ran a salon and looked after her as if she were their own child. Eventually, the girl grew up and turned her interest in art into a career. Stone stayed on the alert for any news of her stepfather, checking alerts from around the country, but if the man was still active he had learned to cover his tracks.

  Of course, the terrible images could never be completely removed from the Internet. Stone did what he could, but every time a site was shut down, it seemed a new one popped up to take its place.

  When Chelsea Ryder’s name came up in conjunction with a most-wanted suspect in another division of the FBI entirely, Stone himself brought her in for questioning. But even though he hinted at some of the more serious charges against de Santos, including the murders of several Russian and Chechen gangsters as well as trafficking in drugs and stolen art, she refused to budge: she didn’t deny that she knew the man, but insisted that she had no idea where he was or how to contact him. Given the opportunity to participate in a sting operation, she flatly declined, even though Stone told her that the days when he could keep her safe were over.