Fiery debris flew through the night, knocking Zach down, cutting through his clothes and burning his skin. Despite the pain, he tried to crawl away. But his leg wasn’t working. It hurt too damn much to be gone, but he knew he’d injured it badly. He’d hurt something else, too. Maybe his head. The night sky started spinning as the ground rushed up to meet him.
Just before he lost consciousness, he saw several pairs of military boots surround him. The bastards were going to get him alive and they were going to make him pay for what he and his men had done this night. As the darkness claimed him, Zach Jones knew Albatross was the lucky one.
He’d had the good sense to die.
Chapter 1
“You can’t leave him there,” Jamie Sanders said, then shoved her hands into her jeans pockets so no one would see that she was shaking. She wasn’t sure if it was caused by rage or fear.
Probably a little of both.
“Zach Jones is dead,” Winston Danville III stated calmly.
“You don’t know that. According to the men who got away, he wasn’t in the second helicopter when it exploded.”
Winston leaned back in his leather chair and stared at her. Jamie had always thought his combination of pale blue eyes and white blond hair made him look like a Hollywood casting director’s idea of the perfect villain-cool, confident, in control. Winston’s reputation did nothing to dispute that image.
“Three weeks, Jamie,” Winston said softly. “Three weeks in one of their prisons, being tortured several times a day. If Zach Jones wasn’t dead, he is now.”
Her stomach rolled at the thought. She desperately needed him to be alive, but the thought of him having to endure that kind of suffering was more than she could bear. The word torture wasn’t just a casual phrase to her. She was intimately familiar with the inhumanity of deliberately inflicting pain on prisoners. Surely death would be a kinder fate.