Hard Evidence (23 page)

She didn't answer. And then he understood why.

She was throwing up.

He tucked his gun back in its holster, stood there while the toilet flushed, waited for her to open the door. But she didn't. "Are you sick?"

Brilliant question, Darcangelo.

And then it struck him. Maybe she was pregnant. But it was too soon for her to be showing symptoms, wasn't it?

He did some quick math, tried to figure out how soon she would know, and realized he didn't know a damned useful thing about pregnancy or her cycle—where her eggs had been or when. The only thing he knew for certain is that he'd more than done his part to start a baby boom.

"Christ!" He waited for her to answer, wanting to rip the door off its hinges. "If you don't talk to me, I'm going to pick the lock!"

The door opened with a soft
click
.

Tessa stood there, her face white as a sheet, her eyes haunted.

He felt her forehead for fever. She was ice cold. "What's wrong, honey?"

She looked up at him, her voice almost a whisper. "There were pictures—in my e-mail."

"Son of a
bitchP'
Julian turned and strode in a hot rage down the hallway to the dining room, certain he knew exactly what kind of pictures could have upset her so much. He grabbed her mouse, woke the drowsy machine—and felt his gorge rise.

There on the screen was a digitally altered image of Tessa suffering unspeakable horror.

Five messages. Twenty images. A repertoire of cruelty.

Burien had Wyatt's photograph of Tessa in the tub and was making the most of it, dredging up some of Zoryo's finest work and doctoring Tessa's face onto the bodies of other victims. The bastard was trying to frighten her, showing her just what he hoped to do to her.

"TESSA WILL SUFFER," read the subject line.

Over my dead body, Burien.

Fighting to control his fury, Julian tossed his jacket aside, unhooked his harness, and walked back to the bedroom. He needed to call Dyson, get someone started tracing these e-mails— probably a hopeless task. But first he needed to make sure Tessa was all right.

He draped his harness over the footboard of his bed and strode over to the bathroom. She was brushing her teeth, her motions wooden. He stroked her hair until she was done, then wrapped an arm around her shoulders, led her to the bed, and drew her down onto the quilt beside him, pulling her into his arms. "Come here."

Tessa heard the steady thrum of Julian's heartbeat, felt the strength of his arms around her, and gradually the sharpest edge of her terror receded. 'Those pictures—that was all real, wasn't it?"

"Yes." Julian's voice was deep, soft. "That was Zoryo's handiwork."

The man Julian had arrested. The man who'd held a gun to Julian's head. The man who'd committed suicide in prison.

"I'm glad you caught him. I'm glad he's dead." She said it, and she meant it, the rules be damned. And then she had to get it out. "That's what his boss plans to do to me."

"He's never going to have the chance." Julian kissed her hair. "He won't get near you."

She pressed herself deeper into his chest, tried to force the images from her mind, the brutality beyond anything she could have imagined. "God, I've been so stupid!"

"No, you haven't."

"I had no idea, Julian. I didn't know anyone could do anything so terrible to a woman!" She shuddered, a wave of revulsion, of sheer terror, passing through her.

He held her closer. 'Try not to think about it. Just let it go."

"Those poor women!" She squeezed her eyes shut. "I can't get the images out of my head! How do I make them go away?"

And then it hit her.

She sat up, stared at him. "My God, Julian, you're exposed to this every day! How do you—?"

He pressed a ringer against her lips. "It's my job, Tessa."

Something about the way he said it—the quiet strength, the resignation, the hint of buried despair—closed around her heart like a fist. "It hurts you."

He sat up, rested his weight on one hand. "Somebody has to do it, and I'm better suited to it than most men."

She ran a hand up his arm. "You're as human as any man, Julian. You have the same right to feel as everyone else."

"Don't try to figure me out, Tessa." He pushed off the bed, pulling away from her, a dark scowl on his face, an edge to his voice. "It's a waste of your time."

She hopped off the bed, cut him off at the door, her hand pressed against his chest to stop him. "Don't try to push me away! It's my time to waste."

'Tessa!" One word, her name—a low growl of warning.

A muscle clenched in his jaw, his heart pounding against her palm.

She held her ground. "There's nothing inside you that scares me, Julian."

She saw in his eyes the moment his control snapped. In a heartbeat, she found herself pinned beneath him on the floor, her arms stretched over her head, her wrists cuffed by one big hand. He glared down at her, an almost feral look on his face, his thighs forcing hers apart. "You really want to know what's inside me?"

Then his mouth closed over hers in a brutal, punishing kiss.

Chapter 23

Tessa didn't object. Not when he forced his tongue roughly into her mouth. Not when he used his free hand to rip open her blouse, scattering buttons across the floor. Not when he ground his pelvis against hers, thrusting in crude imitation of sex.

He meant to frighten her, she knew. He wanted to show her how violent he could be, how badly he could hurt her. And yet it was himself he was hurting.

Tears slipped from the corner of her eyes down her temples as she yielded her body to his rage, her heart aching for him. Somehow he'd gotten her pants off and was now yanking his zipper down over the bulge of his erection. Then he buried himself inside her, pounded his fury and desperation into her without finesse or gentleness.

It was over quickly.

He groaned, shuddered, then sank against her, his face buried in the crook of her neck, his breath coming fast and heavy. For a moment he lay against her. "Jesus God!"

It was a cry of remorse. He released her wrists, started to pull away, but she held him fast, kissing his hair, her tears falling freely now.

"I'm okay, Julian," she said, wanting to reassure him. "It's all right."

"I'm so sorry! Christ!" He raised his head, looked down at her, the anguish in his blue eyes like a knife through her chest. He wiped the tears from her cheek, then lifted himself from her, zipped his jeans, and dropped back against the footboard, his eyes squeezed shut.

His voice when he finally spoke was that of a stranger. "My father was a pimp."

Tessa sat up slowly, tried to take in what he'd just told her, waited for him to say more, covering herself with what was left of her blouse.

"He took me from my mother when she divorced him and hightailed it across the border. I was two." He gave a cruel laugh. "It's not that he wanted me with him—far from it. He just wanted to hurt her. I didn't know that at the time, of course.

"I'm not sure how my father got into the flesh trade. I guess being on the lam he didn't have a lot of career options. We moved from barrio to barrio—him, me, and his ever-changing stable of
putas
. He dumped me in their laps, left them to raise me while he drank himself slowly to death and gambled the pesos they earned for him.

"Some felt sorry for me—poor little American boy with a real
cabron
for a father. Others hated me because they hated him. What an idiot I must have seemed to them—bringing them flowers, drawing pictures for them, offering them seashells and other stupid gifts."

Tessa gulped back a sob. Whatever she had expected him to tell her, it hadn't been anything like this. It was no wonder he held himself back. He'd grown up unloved and utterly alone. Who had cared for him when he was sick? Who had comforted him at night when he'd had bad dreams? Who had made sure he got a bath and clean clothes?

At least she'd had her mother.

"Sometimes I went to school. Sometimes I didn't. As I got older, I spent more time on the streets. I learned to speak Mexican Spanish like a native, and I learned to fight dirty. My old man and I got into more than a few scrapes, usually over him roughing up one of his girls. He kicked the shit out of me more than once, but by the time I was fifteen, I was more than able to return the favor."

Julian had never told a soul the details of his childhood, not Margaux, not even Dyson. He had no idea why he was telling Tessa now, except that he owed her the truth. Hell, after what he'd just done to her, he owed her his balls on a platter.

God! Christ! Son of a bitch!

"I grew up thinking it was normal to have a dozen women hanging around the house half dressed, to wake up and find my father hung over with two women in his bed. But listen to me—I'm talking about it as if growing up with a house full of whores was a
bad
thing. It wasn't, not always. I got laid
a lot
. I learned what a good blow job was when I was fourteen. By the time I was sixteen, I'd had more lessons in female anatomy than the average gynecologist."

"Oh, Julian!"

He could tell from her voice that she was in tears, but he couldn't look at her face. He couldn't bear to see the truth of what he'd just done to her written there.

"The first woman I had a crush on was one of my father's girls. Only after I'd found her in his bed did it dawn on me that she wasn't free to live her life the way she wanted. It was then I finally understood the reality of what my father did for a living. He owned women, controlled them, exploited them sexually for his own profit. I hated him from that moment forward."

Julian told her how he'd begun to spend more time on the streets, looking for a piece of the action to call his own, venting his rage on the world, eventually getting into a fight with a man over a girl he'd met in a cantina. He'd slammed his fist into the man's face, accidentally killing him and landing a thirty-year prison sentence. He'd resigned himself to living and dying behind bars, when he'd gotten an offer from the FBI he couldn't refuse.

"They pulled me out, shipped me stateside, and gave me a new life. I got my GED, mastered aikido, learned how to shoot. And I learned the truth about my mother. They showed me the crime files, the newspaper articles, nurturing my hatred for my father and all men like him. By the time they sent me back to Mexico two years later, I was a weapon, loaded and ready to go off. I might have gone after my old man, tried to bring him down, but he'd taken the easy way out and drunk himself to death. I spat on his grave."

He heard Tessa sniff, then clear her throat. "What about your mother? You found her, didn't you? Working for the FBI—"

"Yeah. I found her. She died in car accident six years after I was taken. Nice Irish girl. The FBI had a thick file on the case. She never quit looking for me." Julian felt strangely naked and spent, lost in memories he wished to God weren't his. "My father always told me she was a whore. Turns out the only thing she did wrong in her entire life was fall in love with him."

Deeply weary, Julian closed his eyes, and they sat for a moment in silence.

He heard her shift, felt her breath shiver across his cheek. "I'm so sorry, Julian!"

Then her lips brushed over his, as soft as the touch of a butterfly's wings, her hands resting on his shoulders for balance as she straddled him. But he didn't deserve this—her gentleness, her tears, her forgiveness.

'Tessa, don't!" He turned his head away.

"Why not? Because you don't want me to touch you? I know that's not true." She slid a hand down his chest, pressed her palm against his thudding heart.

He opened his eyes, grabbed her shoulders, gave her a little shake, pressure building in his chest. "Didn't you hear a goddamned thing I just said? I'm a convicted killer! I've fucked more whores than you have pairs of shoes! I've spent my life keeping company with the worst of the worst—rapists, traffickers, stone-cold killers!"

She touched a soft hand to his cheek, tears streaming down her sweet face. "Maybe so, but that's not who you are. You held me when I was afraid, stayed with me. You took bullets for me. You make me feel things no man has ever made me feel. You're not a monster!"

The pressure in his chest almost beyond bearing, Julian could scarcely speak. "You can say that—after what I just did to you?"

She gave him a shaky smile. "And what do you think you did? Do you think you raped me? You big idiot! You didn't take anything from me I wasn't willing to give. I love you, Julian."

Her words shocked him, drove the breath from his lungs. For a moment he could do nothing but stare at her. Then he gritted his teeth, forced out the words. "I am
not
worth this!"

"God, for a special agent you sure are a fraidy cat." Then she leaned into his chest, wrapped her arms around him, and kissed him.

With a groan, Julian felt the torrent inside him rise up black and venomous—and break like a wave against her gentle strength.

He opened his mouth to her, gave in to her touch, accepted her passion. Her lips never left his as her hand slid up his thigh, fought with his zipper, stroked him to readiness. Then she lowered herself onto him, taking him with her heat, filling the bleak emptiness inside him, penetrating his darkness.

Musk and salt. Mingled cries. Shattering pleasure.

A baptism of tears, of fire, of light.

Redemption.

She collapsed against him, her head resting on his shoulder, her breath coming in shudders. Julian held her, kissed her hair, felt his own heartbeat slow. And for the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt clean.

They ate a quiet dinner of sushi, sharing a single plate. Then they took a shower and crawled back into bed, where Julian made long, slow love to Tessa, showing her all the finesse and gentleness he'd denied her in his rage, giving back everything he had taken.

Now Tessa lay sleepless in the dark, her head on Julian's chest, his heartbeat strong, his breathing deep and even as he slept. She'd never known him to sleep so deeply and realized he must be exhausted. He'd revealed things he'd never told another human being, baring his soul to her out of a mistaken sense of guilt. And what he'd told her had broken her heart.

She imagined a tiny boy torn from his mother's arms, doomed to grow up without love amid squalor, depravity, and violence. She imagined the terror and grief of a young mother, doomed never to see the child she loved again, not even knowing if her son were still alive. The unbearable sadness of it all welled up inside her.

"I love him," she whispered to the darkness, not realizing she'd spoken until she heard her own voice. "I'll watch over him."

Something in the darkness seemed to ease.

Then, at last, she, too, fell asleep.

Tessa sipped her latte and sorted through documents on her computer, reading the criminal histories of the nearly 100 known Red Mafia leaders suspected to be operating in the United States. She'd already eliminated those who dealt only in drugs or weapons, but that still left more than 60 men, all of whom had some alleged involvement in prostitution or pornography.

"What a bunch of losers," she muttered to herself.

She heard a "humph" and glanced up to find Julian standing at the other end of the table, arms crossed over his bare chest, a frown on his face—his surliness surely proof that she was on the right track. He'd been hovering nearby from the moment he'd heard her on the phone with Moscow this morning.

Still, she couldn't feel irritated with him. It was just his way of protecting her—one of the many ways he'd showed her today that he cared for her. He'd gotten up early and had already forwarded the threatening e-mails to his own computer and purged them from hers by the time she'd opened her eyes. Then he'd woken her up with a kiss and a homemade latte. While she'd made breakfast, he'd rigged her e-mail account so that it would reject all e-mail from unknown addresses, ensuring she wouldn't get any more unwelcome surprises over the Internet.

Even so, it wasn't easy to sit down at her computer and look at the screen. She'd found herself wondering if Kara's mother knew any weird New Age cleansing ceremonies for laptops.

She glanced up at Julian. "You know, instead of glowering at me, you could just tell me who the bad guy is."

His scowl deepened. "Not a chance. If you write an article about him, you'll only send him into hiding, and I'll have to start from square one."

"What if we published every known fact about him—his picture, his mother's maiden name, his favorite color, his hometown? Wouldn't that make it impossible for him to hide?"

He gave a snort. "You think underground crime lords eat at Burger King and stroll down Main Street? These guys keep to the shadows, Tessa. Most of their men don't even know what they look like. You can't flush them out with bad publicity."

She wasn't convinced. "Do you know what he looks like?"

He hesitated. "Yes."

Then a sound she'd never heard before interrupted them— a high-pitched metallic whine.

The alarm!

In an instant, Julian was on his feet and reaching for his gun. "Get downstairs! Arm yourself, and hide!"

Heart thumping, Tessa made a dash for the stairs. She'd made it halfway down, when she heard Julian cut loose with a stream of profanity.

The alarm went silent.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" He sounded furious.

A woman answered. "Thanks for the welcome. Dyson sent me. He said you'd had some e-mail trouble."

Tessa walked back up the stairs in time to see a tall, gorgeous redhead walk through the front door—and kiss Julian full on the mouth.

So this was Margaux. Dressed in tight jeans, cowboy boots, and a red leather jacket, she was almost as tall as Julian, her body slender and athletic. With high cheekbones, a slim nose, and full lips, she looked like a runway model—except for the gun she carried in a hip holster.

Tessa couldn't stand her.

It wasn't just that Margaux had kissed Julian or that she'd once been his lover or that she'd hurt him or that she was sexy and beautiful. It was all of those things together—and something more.

Green isn't your color, girl.

Tessa tried to force aside her irrational jealousy. After all, it was obvious that Margaux and Julian wanted nothing to do with one another. They were barely able to be civil to one another. Then again, what woman wouldn't be jealous? Margaux was an Amazon. She radiated sophistication and sexuality. Men probably flocked to her like ants to apple butter.