Page 312 of Wild Mustang Security Firm

“Swing us around. If we find more than two strong survivors, we’ll be kind. We’ll shoot them.”

Chapter

Nine

Aliya hated Fariq’s Marshan fortress. Old and remote, it was built on a rocky cliffside overlooking the ocean. A man standing anywhere on the parapet wall could see an attack coming from any direction for miles before the danger was close enough to strike. In medieval times, Fariq told her, such vigilance was a necessary thing.

Apparently, it was just as necessary now.

They’d still been miles from land when a low-flying helicopter swooped in to rescue them from the yellow raft. That Christian and Fariq seemed to know the pilot was obvious. It was just as obvious no one would be going back to where the yacht sank. There wasn’t any reason to go back—Fariq had made sure of that.

They had found seven survivors total, and the first two people they’d pulled from the water were not the same two men who had ended up rowing them to Spain. One had been a chef, an older man who had thanked them profusely in a language Aliya didn’t recognize, much less understand. The other was a woman, one she recognized. She’d walked into her brother’s office once to find the woman on her knees between his legs, her dark hair bobbing enthusiastically in his lap just behind theedge of the desk, which had obscured everything from her sight except what was actually happening. It was the first time Aliya had ever witnessed such a blatant sex act, either in person or on the television. It was also the first and last time she’d ever entered any of Fariq’s rooms without knocking.

Then they’d found a merc silently swimming among the floating debris, trying to find a wood table or desk sturdy enough to hold him out of the water. Fariq welcomed him into the raft with nothing more than a pat on the shoulder, and just as warmly beckoned his past paramour to him and the raft’s open entrance. Offering her a sip of water from the ration pack, he then leaned away from her to pass the ration pack around to everyone else and promptly grabbed her by the ass and legs and dumped her out of the raft.

Aliya came onto her knees, yelling, but neither the merc, chef, nor Christian said so much as a word as Fariq pulled his gun. She’d heard the woman splashing and sputtering back to the surface just before he fired, the loud finality of the sound making her jump. As fast as it had all happened, apart from that one startled squawk of sound, she hadn’t protested. Apart from the gun when it fired, she hadn’t seen the murder, but there was no mistaking the meaning of the silence that followed.

“We are in a survival situation, my dear one,” Fariq told her when she stared at him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. “We will all be required to do things we’d rather not, but it’s the only way we’re going to live through this.”

The next three they found alive, Fariq shot outright, without letting them in the raft. The man they found swimming toward shore not thirty minutes after the yacht had vanished under the waves and once the paddling began, was brought into the boat.

“I don’t need two rations,” Aliya begged when Fariq put the man in the place of the chef and beckoned the older man to crawlup from the back of the raft to the mouth of it. “Please, I can share. Don’t do this!”

Neither merc said a word, and Christian… just sat there, his jaw clenching and unclenching, not saying a word, though it looked as if he wanted to.

“Dry your tears,” Fariq told her. “We can’t afford to waste our moisture.”

The chef had to know what was going to happen, but he went to Fariq, anyway. Resting his hand on the other man’s shoulder, Fariq patted him twice, thanked him for his service, then shot and dumped him into the water.

“You’re horrible!” Aliya screamed at him, bursting into tears. “I’m the most useless person here. Shoot me!”

She tried to shove away from him when he came back to sit beside her, but his arm was like banded steel, and when he drew her to him, no matter how she resisted, she couldn’t pull away. They were on a raft. There was nowhere to go and no help in sight. Only Christian, sitting almost directly across from them, his stony expression impossible to read apart from the tic of muscle leaping along his jaw as he clenched it and only a faint hint of fury winking in and out of his eyes as he glared.

She tried to turn her back to her brother, but it backfired when she lost her will and ended up being drawn down until she laid in the bottom of the bobbing raft with her head in Fariq’s lap, his gentle hand caressing her cheek, her tangled hair stiff with ocean salt, and her shoulders shaking as she cried.

“Hush, love,” he told her. “You’ll give yourself a headache. Close your eyes. Sleep.”

She’d wanted so badly to push away, but ashamedly, she’d curled up and gone to sleep. It was the only avenue of escape she had and was so much better than seeing who he might shoot next.

Then came the rescue chopper.

Now, here she was, no longer a prisoner aboard Fariq’s yacht, but a prisoner in a crumbling Spanish castle along the coastline of Marshan. Her room was at the end of a short hall where Fariq also had his quarters and was guarded at the only staircase leading to and from there. She had a balcony, though, a very small balcony that overlooked the sea. The beautiful ocean, with its endless waves that kept rolling in to bathe the rocky cliff base and its uncannily gorgeous sunsets that painted both water and sky, making it so outlandishly impossible to believe how utterly horrible this place was.

Aristocratic. Elegant.

Brutally awful.

Just like the man who owned it.

She hugged herself against the rough ocean breeze whipping her hair across her eyes, forcing her time and again to push the long wisps over her shoulder and behind her ear.

A flower plopped softly onto her head, slipping down the fall of her waist-length hair before landing on the stones of the balcony floor at her feet. She looked at it, hesitantly bending down to pick it up. She turned the pink and white-streaked water lily blossom over in her hand before, just as startlingly, a tin can on a string dropped almost directly in front of her face, with another lily carefully bound to it with a length of white string.

Reluctantly, she followed the dangling string up to the balcony a good two full stories and a little to the left of hers, where Christian leaned, elbows propped on the stone rail. He brought his finger to his lips, then gave the dangling can on a string a little tug before showing her the other tin can it was attached to. He brought it to his lips, and when she was slow to grasp the concept, to his ear. Her breath caught, her heart giving a tiny leap as she reached for the can. Glancing up at him, she hesitantly brought the can to her ear.

“It’s the only way I could think of to talk to you in a way I’d be sure he couldn’t intercept or overhear,” Christian said into the can.

That she could hear it through a length of string was nothing short of a marvel. Hesitantly, she brought the can to her mouth, swiping the wisps of her hair the wind kept teasing across her face while he moved his can to his ear.

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