Exposed
Authors: Kaylea Cross
Tags: #Romantic Suspense, #Military, #Suspense, #Mystery & Suspense, #Romance
Exposed
Kaylea Cross
Copyright © 2015
by Kaylea Cross
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Cover Art by
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the author.
ISBN: 978-1-928044-11-6
Dedication
To all the HRT fans out there. Thank you so much for loving this series and the cast of characters as much as I do!
Kaylea
Author’s Note
Dear readers,
Hope you enjoy watching Cruzie fall head over heels for the last person he ever would have expected. He took me by surprise a few times in this one, and I love him even more for that.
Vance is up next, and if the sparks are already flying for him in this story, you can just imagine the trouble he’ll get into in his own book.
Happy reading!
Kaylea Cross
Table of Contents
Chapter One
His victim didn’t see him coming. They never did.
Materializing from the shadows where he’d been waiting for the past hour, Bautista stepped out of the foliage behind his target. The man caught a glimpse of him in his peripheral, but too late. Always too late.
His victim started to whip around, one hand going for the weapon at the small of his back. Bautista caught his wrist in a crushing grip and wrenched his arm up behind his back. Bones snapped. The man jerked, drew breath to scream. Bautista locked his free arm around the man’s throat and squeezed, cutting off the thin scream abruptly, the sound swallowed by the night.
“Screaming won’t do you any good,” he said close to the man’s ear, his voice barely above a murmur. “There’s no one around to hear you.”
The guy struggled, his free hand coming up to claw at Bautista’s forearm, locked tight around his throat. Having that element of surprise had given Bautista all the advantage he needed.
He held the blood choke, waited for the man to go limp before dragging him into the rustic cabin. His victim would only be unconscious for a few moments. He wanted him alive for the rest. Wanted the man to feel everything he did to him. This bastard was going to pay for his crimes.
Insects hummed and frogs sang in the darkness, the air tinged with the damp, salty scent of the marsh. He dragged the tall, wiry body inside the shack and shut the door, placing him in the corner of the wood-paneled room before turning on the single light overhead. He’d already drawn the curtains over the two windows while he waited.
The man began to stir. Bautista knew the exact moment he regained awareness. He jerked and hissed in pain, cradling his broken wrist to his chest as he glanced around the room. When the man’s wild-eyed gaze landed on him, Bautista smiled.
A cold, menacing smile that made the man’s sweaty face turn paler.
“W-who are you?” he stuttered, his gaze locked on Bautista.
“Perez sent me.”
The man’s throat worked as he swallowed, the sound overly-pronounced in the taut silence. “I haven’t done anything, man.”
Liar. You know exactly what you did.
He really wanted to play it this way? Every time he went out on a hit, Bautista hoped one of his victims would show some balls. Stare back at him in defiance, give him a fair fight. Just one worthy opponent. That was all he asked.
Unfortunately, this man was like all the others. Weak and stupid. “No?”
He licked his lips, a nervous twitch of movement. “I’ve got bodyguards nearby.”
“Not anymore.” He’d taken both of them out with two shots from a silenced pistol.
A much kinder fate than what he would deliver to this piece of filth. He only tortured the true criminals and never killed the innocent. Some would call it a fucked-up code of honor, but it was the only code he had, and all that drove him.
The man shifted, bending one knee and leaning his weight to the side, his gaze raking toward the door. He thought he could run? There was no escape for this stupid fucking waste of skin.
“Look, I don’t know what the hell you want,” the man said with a show of bravado ruined by the grimace of pain at the end.
Bautista was in a sadistic mood tonight and decided to indulge him a little longer. He had all the time in the world to get what he needed out of the man. This far out into the Everglades there was no one around to hear his screams. And the gators would dispose of the body afterward. Once he torched this shack, come morning, there’d be no evidence left to find.
“Don’t you?”
The man shook his head, the movement jerky, mechanical.
“You’ve been skimming funds from Perez for the past two months. Little bits would have been smarter, but you? Oh, no, you wanted to take a big chunk out of what wasn’t yours and make a run for it.”
He let that register for a moment, watched the man twitch before continuing. “Perez isn’t a bad guy in most respects, but when it comes to business, he doesn’t play. Those wire transfers you made last week?” He tisked. “Fucking stupid, man. Perez knows exactly where his money goes, and when some of it goes missing, he knows exactly how much. Down to the goddamn penny. And, funny thing, your wire transfers added up to the exact amount unspoken for.”
A bead of sweat rolled down the side of the man’s face, dripped onto the white wife-beater he wore. “I was gonna pay him back. I didn’t steal it, it was just a kind of advance to—”
Bautista threw his KA-BAR knife. The man screamed as the blade drove through his shoulder and buried into the wall behind him, pinning him to it.
Shrill shrieks rent the air, the pitch so high they grated on Bautista’s ears. His victim thrashed around like a fish on a hook, a stream of blood already snaking down his useless arm, pooling on the floor around him.
Bautista didn’t move from his position on the other side of the small room. He waited for the initial agony to fade, for the man to cease his useless thrashing, his broken wrist preventing him from grabbing the hilt of the knife to pull it free. Eventually he stopped struggling and sagged there, his breathing rapid and shallow, his face bathed in sweat, those hollow blue eyes locked on him.
“No one robs Perez and gets away with it,” Bautista said in a flat voice.
Perez was the only man who’d earned Bautista’s loyalty. His lieutenant had given him direction when he’d had none. Provided him the means to exact his revenge from the neighborhood thugs who had caved in his grandmother’s skull and left her little better than a vegetable, sentencing them both to a life of hell.
The man before him now was just like those thugs. A spineless waste of space, an opportunistic parasite out to make himself rich off the backs of others, not caring who he stepped on along the way.
Bautista had researched his target carefully before coming on this op. This man had killed dozens of people to get where he was, including an innocent woman and child during a hit on another drug dealer. For that alone he deserved to die a slow, painful death.
“Who the fuck are you,” the man panted between gritted teeth.
The trail of blood had nearly reached the toe of Bautista’s boot now. Rather than answer, he hunkered down and drew a gloved fingertip through the glossy crimson liquid staining the weathered wood floorboards. He drew a thin oval, then stood.
A harsh intake of air came from his victim. The man’s gaze flew from the symbol to Bautista’s face, and the abject terror there filled him with fierce satisfaction. “
El Santo
,” he breathed, his voice full of horror.
Bautista smiled again. A cold, hard smile. “You’ve heard of me.”
His panicked expression was answer enough, but the man shook his head vigorously, his choppy breathing growing more labored. “Look, man, I’ll give you whatever you want,” he gasped out. “Whatever he’s paying you, I’ll double it.”
His disgust for the man quadrupled. “I’m not interested in your money. Most of it belongs to Perez anyhow.”
“No, man, I got my own. I’ll triple your fee. Just let me go.”
“Not gonna happen,” he said in a flat tone.
The man shook his head, the movement jerky, his eyes wide. “Wait. Don’t kill me. Please—”
Bautista withdrew another knife from the inside of his jacket. A slender switchblade he’d had custom made to fit his grip perfectly.
The man fell silent, his stare locked on the flashing silver blade.
Better. Pleas never worked on him. He preferred it when his victims showed some spine, some sort of fire at least before they died.
Not this one though. The man cringed as Bautista approached, his rubber-soled boots almost silent on the wood floor. He was still cradling his broken wrist in his lap.
Bautista lashed out with one foot, stomped on it. The answering scream turned blood curdling when he immediately sliced through one strap of the wife-beater and carved his symbol into the left side of the man’s bare chest.
A halo. Marking him as a victim of
el Santo
.
“No! Fuck you, no! Lemme go,” he cried, writhing against the wall.
He should have saved his breath, because his pleas fell on deaf ears. In a few minutes when Bautista was finished with him, he’d go straight to hell where he belonged.
Before he left he’d take pictures for proof of death, which Perez would circulate to send a message to the others. Then he’d dump the body for the gators and leave, head back to Miami and collect his ridiculous paycheck his lieutenant always gave him for a hit. Money Bautista funneled carefully into an offshore account in the Caymans and managed with the knowledge he’d accumulated while earning his degree in finance years ago.
After that, he’d likely have at least a few days off before another job came in. And another one
would
come in. Because in his world, there were always more victims for him to hunt.
Raising the switchblade high, letting the light glint off the blade and the blood dripping from it, he set about cutting his victim’s blackened soul free in the most painful way possible.
****
“Man, I’m looking forward to having some home cookin’ tonight.”
Special Agent Ethan Cruz glanced sideways at his best friend Vance, seated beside him in the front passenger seat of the rental truck they’d picked up at the airport last night. “You wish. We’re not going there for dinner, we’re just stopping in to say hi and for you and my mom to get a fix of each other before we head to the hotel to meet the rest of the guys. You’ll get your fill of her cooking on Saturday anyway.”
“But that’s two whole days from now,” he complained.
Ethan grinned and reached for the knob on the dash, turning it to a country music station. “Here, focus on this instead. And don’t say I never do anything for you. You know I hate this Hee Haw shit.”
Vance’s expression brightened and he began nodding in time to the male singer’s voice. “It’s ‘cuz you have no taste in real music, my brother. No taste at all.”