Speeding through the dark on winding roads, Roman demanded reports from the teams at the airport, train station, village, and Castillo. There’d been no alerts triggered or suspicious activity spotted. He was confident that PazYGuerra had come alone.
No one in the Monte would be hurt by this monster.
A window had been breached at his home, triggering another alarm. He’d again ordered the guards to remain on the road then silenced his phone, ignoring repeated calls from Henry and Mateo.
He climbed the rocky hillside to his house now with everything he needed: a Glock 19 in his hands, a Ka-Bar Tanto knife in the sheath on his hip, and one of Mateo’s baseball caps in his back pocket.
An image of Cenobia, her dark eyes huge and disbelieving as she’d stared back at him from inside the closet, popped into his brain. He wondered if it was his mama’s same look when she realized her son wasn’t coming to her bedside.
If he’d been lucky, he would have broken his ankle on the ten-foot drop from Mateo’s office window to the ground below. But nothing was left to luck or chance, now. Each movement and decision was based on lethal skill.
This is what he was born to do.
Even in the dark, he knew his security layout well enough to miss various sensors and alarms on his approach. There was a secret hatch in the floor of the laundry room. He’d installed it to allow an escape; he’d never anticipated using it to sneak inside.
Leaning against the side of his home, impervious in his rolled-up shirt to the cold, mountain wind whistling over rocks and boulders, he checked his home’s hidden cameras on his phone. Most of the views had been obscured.
He shouldn’t be surprised that a CIA-trained traitor was also good at this job.
Roman looked up and, for just a second, took in the view of the village of the Monte del Vino Real. It looked peaceful down there. Even after Roman said goodbye, he’d make sure it stayed that way.
He slid aside a rock-shaped panel then crawled under the foundation of his home. After some belly wiggling through the dark, he popped the hatch without a sound, then pulled himself up onto his laundry-room floor.
He’d always like his laundry room, which he’d specifically designed for a man of his clothing tastes. It smelled of the The Laundress fabric shampoos he preferred. Tucked away in cabinets over his front-loading Bosch washer and dryer were fabric-care tools that an award-winning costume designer had taken notes on when Roman had assisted her with some stalking threats.
On the upper-tier drying bar hung one of Cenobia’s pretty dresses, mint green with melon polka dots. On the rack beneath it dried a pair of Adán’s narrow jeans. The kid was going to start outgrowing his clothes like the Hulk.
When Roman hit puberty, he had crazy leg aches that his mama had Bengay-ed up, wrapped in warm towels, and medicated with hot tea laced with whiskey. He wondered if Cenobia knew to do that. And Bartolo and Daniel were fine dressers, but they didn’t seem to know a lot about men’s fashions. Adán, with his impending growth spurt, was going to need a look that made him feel comfortable while...
What the hell.
He was sitting on the floor of his laundry room mooning over a pair of kid’s jeans. Ranger up, he commanded himself. Stay on mission. Do your fucking job.
What did he want? To guarantee that Cenobia and Adán got long, safe lives.
Shaking and cursing himself, he rose to his feet. Focused. Readied his weapon. Felt the weight of it in his hands. It fit so much better than a gold ring.
He crept to the laundry room door. Hearing nothing, he pushed it open.
He could hear nothing out in his hall. Every light was on.
Roman moved silently and slowly, checking the open doorways.
As he crept toward the living room, he came to a realization with each footstep that this breach of his own home felt different. Something was missing. He was calm. Ready.
And empty.
He was missing that growing eagerness he was used to. The building exhilaration. The rush of adrenaline. At this critical point in the mission, when it was kill or be killed, his spidey-senses were usually tingling.
His training had kicked in, he was alert and prepared. But for the very first time, there was no thrill. He felt...outside of himself. Like he was simply letting his training control him. He wasn’t engaged in the danger and excitement of an oncoming battle.
He wasn’t thinking about all that he’d turned his back on when he jumped out that window.
He crouched down where the hallway met the entry into the living room. He pulled Mateo’s worn baseball cap out of his back pocket.
His Spanish-royalty born, Ivy-league educated, PhD-wielding brother had a huge collection of disgusting, grimy, sweat-soaked, threadbare ballcaps he wore in the vineyards. Mateo never knew that sometimes Roman threw them into the wash for him.
Who was gonna do that when Roman was gone?
Holding the baseball cap stretched over his head, he allowed the bill to appear around the hallway wall.
A shot from a Sig Sauer P228 ripped the cap out of his hand. And gave away the man’s position. He was low, about eight feet away, in the center of the room. That sonofabitch was hiding behind the overstuffed armchair where Roman had held Cenobia and she’d told him Adán was hers.
The man who’d raped Cenobia and terrorized Adán had invaded his home as a predator.
He was about to discover he was prey.
The woman who’d been raped and whose son had been terrorized didn’t want this.
I don’t want you to kill for me, his warrior queen had said.
With that flash of memory, Roman did something he’d never done before—not on the playground or in training or at Ranger School, not in a hundred death-hazarding missions, or dozens of combat jumps, or in thirteen years of saving people’s lives.
He hesitated.
Go. You’re losing the advantage. Go. Kill. Do what you’re good at. Do what you want.
Cenobia had said clearly and plainly what she wanted. She wanted Roman. She wanted a future with him. She didn’t want him to throw that away on this kill-or-be-killed mission.
What did Roman want?
A home, a family, and a purpose are waiting for you, his sister had said. All you have to do is choose them.
He’d chosen a path when he’d abandoned his mother and broke her heart. And he’d loyally followed that path until, by some miracle, he’d hit this fork. Would he stay on the long and lonely road and abandon his fierce warrior queen? Abandon his family who’d offered him love and devotion and a community on a silver platter? Abandon the smart, loving boy who, even with all his resources, had real challenges ahead of him?
Would he stay on mission instead of going home?
It’s criminal for such a worthy man to deny himself the people that love him, his brother said.
The soldier is only one small part of who you are, said his love. You have so many more gifts than that.
All his mama had ever asked of him was to use his gifts for good.
What would she have wanted of him in this moment?
What did he want?
He wanted his mother to know he loved her.
He wanted Cenobia.
He wanted to choose a new path.
He wanted to stay alive.
Which, he realized with a feeling that grew volcanic, would be unlikely if he stood here much longer.
There was an advantage to being a master tactician playing another master: You could anticipate each other’s every move.
Except when the move was a rookie one.
With hot, panicked terror flooding his system, Roman turned tail and ran back down the hall, pulling out his phone and pressing a button as he went.
“Henry!” he screamed like a baby shoved out into a bright, new world. Roman slammed the laundry room door behind him just as a shot winged off it. “Get everyone not protecting Mateo’s up here and surround the house. We’re gonna wait this asshole out. If he won’t come out on his own, we’ll bomb the place.”
He locked the laundry room door behind him, his heart beating like a drum roll. Heading into the unknown meant accepting fear. It was awful. It was exhilarating. He waited a couple of seconds, then slammed the secret hatch he’d left open as hard as he could, the metal giving a good, loud bang. PazYGuerra yelled and shot into the door, insulting his masculinity and promising horrors on Cenobia and Adán. Roman squeezed himself behind the washing machine and tried not to scratch its beautiful enamel surface.
Decorated Army Ranger Roman Sheppard—Medal of Honor winner, reluctant warrior prince, savior of young heiresses, and stud of a hot CEO—was cowering next to his high-end laundry detergent.
“We’re pulling up to the house now,” Henry said.
What? How could he already be...
Cenobia.
His warrior queen had been defying men for too long to listen to Roman now.
PazYGuerra kicked in his poor shredded laundry room door.
In a slice of a second, training and instinct took over and Roman shot the man in his right elbow then left knee in rapid succession. PazYGuerra’s weapon went down, then the man went down, too.
Roman shoved himself out from behind the washer, kicked the gun away from the groaning man, then lifted his phone to his ear.
“Roman, Roman!” Cenobia was shrieking into it.
“Shh, shhh, baby girl, I’m here.” Bending his head to his phone, he picked up the gun, disarmed it, and stuck it up on a drying rack, all while keeping his own weapon aimed on the man. “It’s all right. I’m okay.”
“And is he?”
Roman looked down at the tall man, now cleanly shaved, with a prosthetic nose and black hair, who cursed him from the ground.
“Yeah, Cen. He’s fine too.”
“Gracias a Dios.”
“I thought you didn’t pray,” he said.
“I said I don’t pray for me.”
The man was issuing threats to Roman, Cenobia, and Adán if Roman didn’t let him go.
“You’re not going to let him monologue, are you?” she asked as Roman heard guards entering from both sides of the house.
Roman looked around, picked up a dirty sock that had missed the hamper, kicked the man’s shattered knee, then stuffed it in when the man screamed. “My woman said no monologuing,” he told him. “There’s nothing we need to hear from you.”
Henry and the other guards came running down the hall and squeezed into the doorway.
Roman held up the phone and pointed at it. “You had one job,” he told Henry.
“The house is protected, and guards are with her down at the entrance. But the only way she wasn’t coming is if I knocked her out or roped her down with that tie you left. I didn’t think you’d greenlight those options.”
He put the phone back to his ear as the guards secured PazYGuerra then began staunching the blood flow. The man was going to be alive to stand trial.
He stepped over him, still yelling behind a dirty sock, and hustled down the hall to his living room before he said, “I’m still not sure leaving him alive is the best thing.” Guards streamed into his house. “A lot can go wrong between now and prison. Even if he goes to jail, he’s gonna talk. He’s gonna tell people who he is to you and Adán.”
“I don’t care,” Cenobia said fiercely. “He doesn’t define me. He doesn’t define Adán. We’re more than a violent act. So are you.”
God, he loved her. He gripped the phone close to his mouth. “I’m sorry I tried to leave you.”
“Don’t do it again,” she commanded.
“I won’t,” he said, like a private saluting. “I can’t. I figured out the one thing I’m good at.”
“What’s that?”
He looked at all the people buzzing through his house, saw Henry making a beeline down the hall toward him.
“Let’s get this taken care of,” he said. “Then I’m gonna spend the rest of my life telling you.”