This wasn’t happening.
Couldn’t happen.
There was no way he could risk her life like this.
Hands clamped on his shoulders before he even realized that he was about to jump into the water and try to swim to shore in time to stop the abduction from happening.
“You’ll never make it in time,” King reminded him.
He knew that.
He wasn’t stupid.
But he also wasn’t letting Alex Irwin put his hands on Abigail a second time.
“This is what she wanted to do,” Chaos reminded him.
“She’s putting herself in danger,” he muttered, trying to break free of his friends’ hold. They didn’t understand. How could they? Neither of them had ever been in love and it wasn’t their heart that was about to be snatched away with no guarantees it would be returned. Or at least returned in one piece.
“She’s doing it because she trusts you,” Chaos said. “Because she believes in you.”
Those words should probably comfort him, but instead, they cut through him like a knife.
When his mother had believed in him, trusted him to save her, he hadn’t. Instead he had ended her life.
It didn’t matter how many times someone told him it was just an accident, that he was just a little boy, that his mother wouldn’t have blamed him, he didn’t think any of those things had sunk in. He had failed his mother and the idea that he would fail Abigail too nearly paralyzed him.
“What if I fail her?” he murmured, more to himself than Chaos and King.
The hand on his shoulder squeezed reassuringly. “You won’t,” Chaos said.
“You can’t know that,” Spider said, suddenly weary, he’d been carrying the burden of his mother’s death for so long and some days it felt like too much. Today was one of those days. He needed Abigail, needed to hold her, to feel her heart beating against him, her warm breath on his skin, he needed her love and her support, but Abigail wasn’t here and he felt perilously close to losing it.
“I can know it,” Chaos said firmly, fiercely. “You won’t allow yourself to fail.”
Those words startled him out of his growing melancholy and bout of self-pity. They were true. He couldn’t allow himself to fail. Failure meant Abigail suffered and there was no way he would be responsible for that.
With a nod at Chaos to say he wouldn’t jump out of the boat and attempt the swim to shore, he looked over at King. “What’s going on?”
“The guy drugged her,” King replied. “He’s picking her up and carrying her off the beach.”
“Then it’s time for us to move,” Spider said, making no move to check his own scope to see what was happening. There was no way he could cope with watching Abigail’s abduction so he wasn’t going to torture himself.
Since Abigail was wearing a tracker they didn’t need to follow the kidnapper to see where he was going. While they assumed that Alex was having Abigail taken back to Mexico, there was no way to be certain. They had a helicopter standing by ready to transport them, and they had every other SEAL team standing by should they find they needed backup once they got to wherever Alex had set up his trap.
Everything was in place, they were as prepared as it was possible to be, and yet none of that eased his anxiety.
He wanted this case closed, he wanted Alex Irwin dead, he wanted Abigail safe, he wanted the chance at happiness he had been too scared to fight for last time.
As they drove the boat back to shore where they would meet up with Night, Fox, and Shark, Spider kept his attention focused on following the tracker. Part of him was comforted by the knowledge that for the moment at least, Abigail was unconscious, as long as she was asleep she couldn’t be hurt. While he would love it if she remained drugged until the op was over, he knew that wasn’t what Alex had planned. Hurting Abigail was just another way to hurt him and Night, and by extension the rest of the team, and it seemed like hurting them was at the top of Alex’s to-do list.
“Looks like they’re headed for the airport,” Fox said as they joined the others, climbing into the car and heading for their own airstrip.
“That’s what we thought,” Shark added. “He’s heading back to Perez’s compound. He wants this to go down on his home turf, and if he’s working with Perez then that means Alex has an army at his beck and call.”
“What’s in it for Perez?” King asked thoughtfully. “Luis Perez is a vicious man, he thrives on money and power, he kills anyone who gets in his way, he’ll deal in anything so long as it makes him money, and has zero regard for human life.”
“Maybe that’s it,” Chaos said. “Money. Abigail is drop dead gorgeous.” That comment earned him a growl from both Spider and Night, and Chaos laughed and held up his hands. “Hey, I’m just stating facts here.”
“He’s right,” Fox said. “And we discussed that as a possibility before we even knew about Alex. Maybe that’s why Alex kept her alive even though his plan to use her as bait didn’t work. Alex gets Perez’s help to get his revenge, and then Perez gets Abigail, he’d get a small fortune selling her, or he can keep her for himself, I’m sure he’d be the envy of his cohorts owning such a beautiful woman.”
The idea of Abigail belonging to a man like Perez made him nauseous. She wasn’t an object to be used and abused and he took hold of his fury and harnessed it. It didn’t matter how many of Perez’s men Alex had access to, it didn’t matter that the trap he was laying was on his home turf, they were SEALs, the best of the best, and they weren’t just fighting to save anyone, this was a woman who they all cared about.
Hold on, Abby, he said, praying that she could feel his words even though they weren’t together and he knew she was drugged unconscious. Although he knew it wasn’t possible he could swear his hand could feel the phantom caress of her hand closing around it. Spider felt her trust in him, her belief that she was safe because he would come for her, and he knew he would not let her down. He had tried to save his mother and he had failed, he couldn’t let that happen again.
He would save Abigail or he would die trying, but one way or the other she was going home alive.
4:32 P.M.
Everything was proceeding just how he’d planned.
Alex couldn’t be happier.
Well, that wasn’t quite true; he could be happier if the woman in front of him would finally wake up and open her eyes.
At least he was pretty sure she was still out cold from the drugs his men had given her to transport her back to Mexico, but there was always the chance that she was faking, just pretending to be unconscious to keep the inevitable from happening for as long as possible.
Abigail McNamara was a strong woman.
Strong enough that she intrigued him and not many women did. His ex certainly hadn’t, all she’d done was nag, and whine, and complain, and somehow manage to mess everything up. Carly could find a way to turn the simplest of tasks into an ordeal, she was stupid, and ugly, and to be honest not good in bed. But Abigail on the other hand was a stunner.
He’d had her here on the compound for over a year, and he still hadn’t managed to break the woman. That had been his goal, by the time her useless brother and boyfriend had finally managed to track her down he’d been hoping she would be nothing but a shell of the former feisty woman they had previously known.