“Take off your clothes,” Victor demands.

My heart stops.

“What?”

“Sarai, take off your clothes.” He pulls me up from the chair by my hand. I try to wrench it away from him, but he applies more pressure.

“I’m not taking my clothes off! Why would you ask me to—?” I slap him with my free hand, right across the left side of his face.

He grabs my wrist. “I need you to trust me. I’ve brought you this far now do as I say and take off your f**king clothes.”

His uncharacteristic use of that vulgarity shocks me into compliance. My eyes dart back and forth between them again, my jaw tightening, my breath heavy and short expelling from my nostrils.

“Fine,” I say, jerking my hand from his. “But not in front of him.”

Victor takes me by the wrist and walks with me past Niklas and toward the entrance to his room.

“You have nothing I want to see,” I hear Niklas say just before Victor shuts the door.

I already feel nak*d standing in the wide open of Victor’s spacious ocean-view room and I haven’t even taken my clothes off yet. I want to linger as long as possible, drag it out so that maybe he’ll change his mind or at least tell me what this is all about, but he wastes no more time. And he doesn’t let me waste any more of it, either.

“Take them off. Now.”

I start with my shirt, pulling it over my head and exposing my bare br**sts. I drop the shirt on the floor beside my feet. He watches me, not with lust in his eyes, but with determination. I lean over and slip out of my pants and all that is left are my panties.

He steps right up to me.

I hesitate. The space between us is about two feet but it feels like two inches. I don’t want to take off my panties, not because I’m afraid of him, but because…I’m embarrassed for him to see me that way.

When he steps up closer and doesn’t demand I take the panties off, I breathe a silent sigh of relief.

“Lay down on the bed,” he says and that breath is sucked right back into my lungs again before it can expel completely.

When I don’t act fast enough, he wraps his hands around my upper-arms and gently pushes me down against his expensive designer comforter.

I swallow a lump in my throat.

As I start to raise my arms to my br**sts to cover them, I feel Victor’s warm hands on me. I freeze, my eyes wide and unblinking. He raises my arms above my head and begins to feel every inch of my skin, pressing his fingers along the underside of my arms first and then down toward my ribs before making his way to my br**sts.

His eyes catch mine briefly.

Maybe he wanted to ease my fear of him with that glance, but all it did was make me want him to touch me more.

The guilt of that thought sears through me. But the touch of his hands on my br**sts, kneading only a small portion of them with his fingers, does something entirely different.

I picture his mouth on my nipple…

I force that ridiculous thought away and I watch him, his intent eyes and how deftly, yet at the same time, aggressively, his hands move across every inch of my body. Furtively I inhale the scent of his skin, his natural scent that somehow makes me want him to kiss me. He leans up and away from me, but he isn’t done. He goes for my thighs next, starting with the left and kneading his fingers around the flesh using both hands. And then the other thigh.

When his fingers touch the sensitive skin of my inner thighs, right at my panty line, I gasp.

He stops. He looks up at me, across the nak*d landscape of my body. I can only wonder what he’s thinking, but this time I get the feeling his gaze isn’t to ease my fear of him, but instead to study my reaction to his hands being on me, so close to the most intimate part of me. I wonder why he would study my face at all, why he wouldn’t take my obvious reaction and reject it by moving his hands away as I expected him to do. But instead, he leaves them there, the pad of one of his fingers I feel grazing the flesh at the bend of my leg just on the edge of my panties, conflicted about what he should do. What he might want to do.

He pulls away and abruptly flips me over onto my stomach.

“What are you doing exactly?” I ask, adapting to the quick change of the moment.

He pulls my panties down halfway over my butt cheeks, moves his hands here and there in the same manner and then back up to my hips.

“I’m looking for something.”

“What?” I ask.

Then suddenly he stops, his thumb moving in a circular motion on one particular spot just above my right butt cheek, on the back part of my hipbone. The same general area where I removed his bullet.

“A tracking device,” he says. “You have one.”

I try to twist my head around to see him better, but it hurts my neck.

The flash of a silver blade catches my eye. I panic when I glimpse the knife in his hand and start to twist my body awkwardly. But he holds me down, putting the weight of his hand on the small of my back, the hand with the knife wrestling with my left shoulder.

“What are you going to do?!” I shriek.

“I have to cut it out.”

“Victor, no!”

I thrash around more violently, trying to roll over onto my back so that I can get up. Suddenly he’s lying fully on top of me, and his closeness, the warmth of his breath on the side of my neck, takes my breath away. My entire frame solidifies beneath him and then begins to relax, melting into his body as his voice dances along the shell of my ear.

“I will be gentle,” he whispers and my skin shivers from my ear down the full length of my spine.

He presses himself into me from behind, his hardness obvious behind the thin layer of his pants that separates us.

“I promise,” he says onto my ear. “But it has to come out. Do you understand? Do you trust me?” He presses his h*ps toward me again and I feel me moving against him involuntarily. I shut my eyes when the tingling sensation between my legs moves through my back and into my eyelids.

“Yes,” I whisper. “I trust you.”

“Good,” he says softly and slowly raises himself off of me.

I remain very still, thinking so much more about Victor and what he just did to me than the more imperative threat. A part of me doesn’t even care about what he’s going to do, that he’s about to cut into me with a knife, that it’s going to hurt like hell. And perhaps that’s the only reason he did what he did, knowing somehow that he could control my mood, my emotions, with the hope that he might touch me more than he already has. I feel like a toy and Victor knows every button on me which to push, to touch, in order to make me do whatever he wants, feel whatever he wants me to feel. And I don’t mind. I don’t know how he did it, but I don’t mind at all.

“Bite down on the pillow if you have to,” he says.

I reach up and grab the nearest pillow towards me, crushing it against my chest. I squeeze my eyes shut tight.

The blade goes in and I yell out in pain before burying my face within the pillow, my entire body hardening like a block of cement.

In seconds, the device is out and Victor stands at the foot of the bed looking down into the space between his bloody fingers at something as small as a grain of rice.

With his free hand, he reaches for the towel he used to dry off with after his shower, which had been lying on the floor nearby. He hands it to me. “Put pressure on it to stop the bleeding,” he says and walks across the room into his bathroom.

While I press the towel on the back of my hip, I hear the water running in the sink and then the sound of him rummaging through his medicine cabinet. With one hand holding the towel in place, I get up from the bed to find my shirt, letting the towel drop only long enough to slip it on.

Victor walks out of the bathroom with an orange pill bottle clasped in his fingers and walks right past me and to the door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Victor

“Niklas,” I say coming out of the room, “does this look familiar to you?” I step right up to him and hold out the pill bottle with the tracking device inside.

He takes it into his fingers.

I hear soft footsteps behind me as Sarai emerges from my bedroom, but I keep my attention on Niklas.

He peers into the side of the bottle first but then twists the cap off and shuffles the device into the palm of his hand.

He looks up at me.

“Same type of device they use in the girls in Dubai,” he says. He glances at Sarai. “You found this in her?” Then he drops it back in the bottle and tightens the lid. “I hate to ask where.”

Niklas wipes his hand on his jacket.

“If it is one of theirs,” I say, “this means that Javier Ruiz has a much larger operation than any of us knew. I’ve never known of a drug lord like Ruiz to have access to this kind of technology.”

“They don’t care about technology,” Niklas says. “All they deal in are drugs, weapons and girls.”

“Had,” Sarai says and I turn around to see her. “That Javier had a much larger operation. He’s dead, remember?”

“Yes,” I say, “but that doesn’t mean his operation is. It means that it’ll be passed on to whoever else was in line to control it.”

“Well what does that have to do with us?” Sarai asks.

I feel the urge to tell her to put on some pants while in front of Niklas, but I stop myself.

“There is no us,” Niklas says.

Sarai glares at him and readjusts the bloody towel against her hip.

“Then what does it have to do with me?” she snaps. “Or, with either of you?”

“It has nothing to do with you,” I say. “Not anymore. You were Javier’s and if he had sold you or promised you to another buyer you wouldn’t have been in his possession for as long as you were. He had no intention in letting anyone else have you. Now that he’s dead you have nothing more to fear.” I pause. “As far as what it has to do with us—.” I stop right there, knowing better than to tell her any more than she already knows or I’ll only put her in further danger with the Order.

And judging by the look on Niklas’ face I’ve said too much already, in his opinion.

He slips the pill bottle into his jacket pocket.

“I’ll get rid of it,” he says, then without moving his head I see his eyes avert to Sarai for a split second. His hatred for her seethes beneath the calm and disciplined façade he’s wearing. “So then what’s our next move? Will I be covering for you with Vonnegut, or are you going rogue?”

I know what answer he wants me to give and for now, it’s what I choose to do.

“Tell Vonnegut that I’m ready for my next mission,” I say, making up the specifics as I go along. “And to put this house back on the market. We’ll be leaving in the morning.”

Sarai glances over at me with a look of confusion. Niklas nods and accepts it, because unlike her, he knows that this house has been compromised by the tracking device he’s carrying in his pocket. Javier Ruiz might be dead, but the device is still in working order and someone is and has been monitoring its locations since Sarai escaped the compound. It is how Izel found us so quickly in the motel in Mexico. When I contacted Javier and gave him my location to come for the girl, Izel had arrived half an hour sooner than she should have given our distance from the compound. At the time, I assumed she had already been on the road with her men searching for us, and in fact, she had been. But I did not know until now that it was because she already knew where we were.