Page 339 of Wild Mustang Security Firm

After only a slight hesitation, the pilot handed it over, and Christian quickly entered the number. Blinking twice, the pilot studied it, his eyebrows quirking in puzzlement.

“You want me to call Noah?”

The source of the man’s familiarity suddenly made sense.

“You’re a Mustang. Junior?” he guessed.

“At your service… unfortunately.”

“Don’t worry,” Reid told him. “So long as you don’t do anything stupid while I’m still on the plane, I won’t hold anything you do afterward against you.”

Junior set him down exactly where Reid told him to. There wasn’t a single weapon left anywhere on the plane when he disembarked. He had them all, tucked in his belt, in his boot, and everything he couldn’t use, tossed into the grass before he slammed the door, smacked it twice, and with a wave of the handgun he’d borrowed, ordered them to take off again.

He saluted the glowering soldiers as they scowled at him through the window as the plane took off again. Fields made for bumpy takeoffs, but Reid didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about their comfort. Unless they wanted to land on the highway a few miles south of here, this was the only place within miles they could set the jet down. By the time they turned around, he’d be long gone. He didn’t care if they circled overhead to try to follow where he went. His only hope was Fariq would be so occupied doing other things, he neither heard the engines nor noticed the aircraft.

Unless, of course, those “other things” involved Aliya.

He couldn’t afford to think about it, but it was already pervading his thoughts as he took off running across the field in the direction of the villa. He prayed he still had time. He prayed she was there at all.

If she wasn’t, he didn’t have a clue where Fariq might have taken her. It wouldn’t matter, anyway. Once the Mustangs gothere, their promise to help be damned, he already knew they’d take him captive again for sure.

He wasn’t going to get another chance.

Fariq sat low in the cigarette boat, his American baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, watching the impressive aerial display above him. Hmm… he had underestimated the beautiful, golden-haired pilot of the Wild Mustang Security Firm. Had he known about her prowess in the skies earlier, he might have recruited the curvy blonde. His cock had hardened the first time he had been introduced to her. It would have been interesting to have a woman with her lethal skill set underneath him as he plowed what he was sure was a nice, tight, American pussy.

Allah be damned, the girl had cost him a bundle this afternoon.

He had watched as her Sikorsky helicopter had fired on his own smaller one, sending it and his body double into the Mediterranean in a ball of fire. She probably knew how expensive the machinery was, but he wondered if she had a clue the cost of having a lackey surgically altered to look like him. It had been expensive but well worth it if it bought him even a few weeks to regroup and rebuild.

Fariq thought with the immediate threat of the helicopter negated, the American pilot would turn tail and head back for safety. When she turned her guns on his yacht, his beautiful floating fortress, it was as though he could hear his Swiss accounts being robbed. The crew, instead of staying to protect his property, scrambled into lifeboats. He would see that they, and their loved ones, were all put to death.

The pilot fired mid-ship, and he could do nothing but watch as the yacht and the last of his organization was destroyed. Circling the wreckage, Avery made sure both the yacht and the chopper were sinking to the bottom of the sea.

No doubt about it, Christian Reid had cost him dearly—his helicopter, his yacht, and his sister’s innocence. Fariq meant to see him pay and had the only bait he needed to lure Reid out of the safety of the shadows. Both Reid and Aliya would rue the day they had betrayed him.

Aliya fought for her life with everything she had. The problem was she didn’t have anything left to fight with—no weapons, no strength. She could barely keep her eyes open, much less her unfocused gaze on the hands that held her down. There were two she could see—Fariq’s men both, holding down her arms, cutting the clothes off her back, while a third watched, appalled while she was held facedown on a wooden table in a dining room she didn’t recognize.

“Jesus,” the third man said, his eyes roving over her in naked pity.

“Just fix it,” her brother said, his cold tone washing over her from somewhere she couldn’t see. All she had to do was lift and turn her head, and she could change that, but she didn’t have the strength even for that.

“Let me go.” Her teeth kept chattering. She burned, hot pain igniting in her back when the man moved in close enough to touch her, cold scalding her everywhere else. “Let me go!”

“She’s gone septic. This woman needs a hospital.”

“Can you treat her?” Fariq asked.

“With what I have?”

She screamed when he prodded her back, scalding her with fire with every touch. Over the violent chattering of her teeth, she heard and recognized the metallic click of a handgun being cocked. The man froze mid-torture.

“I said,” Fariq repeated, “can you treat her, Doctor? Or was bringing you here a waste of my time?”

“I can disinfect the wounds, set her up on an IV drip, and give her antibiotics.” Even over her pain, Aliya heard the steely undertone in the doctor’s voice when he bravely—stupidly—stared her brother down and said, “But if she doesn’t get proper treatment at a hospital, I don’t give her even a fifty percent chance of surviving what you’ve done.”

Weakly twisting her arm, she tried to pull from the grip of the man holding her hands pinned to the table. “Let me… let me go…”

Her eyes began to drift shut. Hearing the gun uncock startled her awake again.

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