Javier (Alpha Heroes #12)

Chapter Twenty-five

Javier

“Lock the sliders and close the curtains behind me,” I whispered, then nudged my head toward the far corner. “Hide behind those draperies over there. You’ll be hard to spot behind all that fabric bunching at the bottom. Copy?”

She nodded, but the fear widening her eyes and the terror radiating from her pores hit me in the gut. My chest squeezed with an overriding need to protect her.

“You’re gonna be all right,” I promised.

“Be careful,” she whispered, fidgeting with her hands.

“Trust me,” I whispered back. “I’ve done this lots of times.”

I wasn’t gonna let her down.

My security app showed that the alarm came from motion detector three, located outside the treehouse at my eleven o’clock. I opened the sliders on the opposite side, took a quick look, stepped out on the deck, and shut the doors behind me.

Click . My brave Angel locked the sliders and shut the curtains.

Crouching in the darkness, I pressed my carbine to my cheek and swept the deck. No targets, and yet the hair at the back of my neck stood on end. An operator like me didn’t have to see danger coming to know it was there, hiding in the shadows. I could feel eyes on me.

Come on, Bekker . I taunted the fucker in my head. Let’s get this shit done.

I eased my way across the deck. I made sure to allow for one creak under my bare feet. I crept down the stairs and pressed my back against the building’s foundation. Keeping my rifle at the ready, I scoured the night. Nothing seemed off. Well, except for me. I was off. And pissed. Fucking pissed.

I maneuvered the next corner, clearing the grid with practiced precision. Working my ears, I tracked even the smallest of sounds. I came around the opposite side of the deck and studied the ground along the wall and shower enclosure. Sure enough. On my side of the curved limestone wall, a single set of tracks led into the woods.

This was classic cat and mouse. Stepping out of the shadows, I followed the tracks and went into the jungle.

***

Missy

Silence hummed all around me and blackness resonated in my head. The minutes lengthened, taunting my nerves. My heart raced, and I fought the lure of oblivion loosening my knees.

Not going to faint, not going to faint, not going to faint.

I stiffened when a metallic jingle broke the silence. It came from the glass sliders, followed by a quiet click that had me curling into the smallest version of me. Someone had picked the sliders’ lock. My heart shot up to my throat.

Swoosh .

The doors opened. The sound of the curtains fluttering in the breeze died when the doors swooshed back. The room went silent for a full sixty seconds. A quiet, cautious step resonated on the floor, followed by several more. A pause and a rustle. Someone was searching through the bed, no doubt still warm from our bodies.

I didn’t dare to breathe.

“Where are you?” the intruder called out from the other side of the bed. His muffled voice carried the added sting of a condescending smirk. “Come out, little Astor princess. I promise. I’m not here to hurt you.”

I peeked between the curtains. Under the starlight, I glimpsed the glint of a gun and a masked assailant dressed all in black. Righty. Because I believed in fairytales and trespassers who carried guns and wore masks were friendlies dropping by for tea.

I clamped down on my teeth and willed myself to stop shaking.

“Artemis Astor.” The gruff voice came again, stern even though it was smothered behind the knitted mask. “We need to get going. You must really enjoy playing hide and seek, Baby Princess. No wonder they call you Mousy Missy.”

I bit down on my lips and ignored the provocation.

“Come on.” A note of frustration filtered through his mumbled words, but he was near now, very close to my corner. “I don’t want to—”

The floor shook beneath me and Javier’s voice cracked in the room. “Drop your weapon. Now .”

The clatter of metal on wood announced that Javier had duly persuaded the intruder to give up his weapon. The command in his voice carried an assurance of violence and death. It wasn’t the kind of order that anyone in their right mind would disobey.

“Hands up,” Javier barked. “I suggest you move slowly.”

I dared another glance and caught a glimpse of the intruder’s shadow. He was now disarmed and raising his arms in the air. Javier stood behind him with his carbine perched on the back of the masked assailant’s head.

I fought to slow down my pulse and worked on my breaths. The plan that Javier had shared with me in detail before he set his own trap had succeeded. He’d stolen out of the treehouse, assessed the potential number of foes we faced, and found that it was likely one merc. He’d then pretended to fall into the trap the merc had set for him. He’d follow the tracks into the jungle and made the intruder believe he was gone and I was alone.

This wasn’t true.

Instead, within minutes, Javier had circled around in stealth and sneaked back into the suite using the front door even before the merc reached the back deck. At that point, he gave me a thumb’s up, climbed to the ceiling rafters, and concealed himself behind one of them. He waited in the shadows like a mountain lion stalking his prey. The merc never knew he was there until Javier ambushed him.

A daring move. A brilliant strategy that had left me alone less than three minutes total. And now that he had the merc in his sights, a perfectly executed plan.

I ventured another look.

“Lay down. On the floor. Spread out,” Javier ordered, his feet braced apart, his weapon aimed, and his finger on the trigger. There was a pause and a grunt as the intruder obeyed. “If you move, I’ll shoot.”

My heart throbbed in my throat. No to fainting. Yes to breathing .

“Are you alone?” Javier demanded.

“Yes,” the thug mumbled from behind his mask.

“You better be telling the truth,” Javier warned, his voice edged with violence.

“Let me up and I’ll explain,” the intruder muttered in his mask-smothered voice.

“If you move, if you try anything, if you breathe wrong, you will die. Clear?”

A muffled squeak. “Crystal.”

“Missy,” Javier called out. “You can come out now.”

It took all I had to stand up, lock my shaky knees, and keep oblivion at bay. I stepped out from behind the curtains, picked up the merc’s discarded weapon on the ground, and threw it into a drawer as Javier had instructed. Then I pointed my gun at the invader sprawling on the floor, pinned in place by Javier’s weapon.

“Shoot if he tries anything,” Javier ordered, before he shouldered his carbine.

I tightened my hold on the gun and kept it on the thug, ignoring my dry throat and my breaths’ rough heaves. I was determined to protect Javier but… Please God, don’t let me faint and don’t make me shoot the merc, even if he’s a terrible person.

Javier pulled several sets of zip ties from his pocket. Moving cautiously but quickly, he fastened the man’s wrists behind his back then tied his ankles together. He checked his work then did a thorough pat down. He rolled the merc over and did the same to the front of his body. He found no other weapons but his eyebrows clashed together, as if realizing something.

“What the fuck?”

Javier hauled the intruder to his feet, dragged him across the room, and hurled him onto the couch. The merc was short but compact and muscled. He managed to sit up on the couch. I followed with my weapon still up. Javier unhooked his carbine from his shoulder and cased the masked assailant blinking at us from behind the mask. A feral glint flashed in Javier’s eyes and warped his lips into a vicious sneer. Was the war machine standing before me the same gentle lover who’d been doing sweet, wondrous things to my body not long ago?

“You’ve got some fucking nerve.” Keeping his weapon aimed, Javier stepped up to the couch and wrenched off the merc’s mask.

I gasped, inhaling all the air in the room.

“Isn’t she—?”

“Yeah.” Rage hardened Javier’s face. “Once I got near her, I recognized her husky voice and her silhouette.”

“She’s the woman from the bar, the one flirting with you,” I blurted out, still astonished.

I took in her masculine attire, her compact body, and her chest, which was now flat as a board. Reeling from the shock, the first thing that blurted out of my mouth was, “Where are your boobs?”

“Really? That’s what Baby Princess wants to know?” The woman’s snort twisted her otherwise beautiful face. “I take it you suffer from boob envy, little darling?”

“You’ll answer every question we ask or face the consequences,” Javier ground out. “Do you understand?”

The impertinent witch turned her sneer to me. “If you have to know, my boobs are strapped down under my clothes. You know, to help hide my identity? You, of course, wouldn’t need to do that.”

I bit down on my lips and refused to let her see any reaction from me.

“Rozina.” Her name sounded like a curse on Javier’s lips. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

She knocked her head in my direction. “Isn’t it obvious?”

I had a lot of questions, but first things first. “What did you do with the guard outside?”

“You mean Pedro?” She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively. “I distracted him with my assets, then I tucked him in for the night inside the treehouse next door. He’ll have a headache tomorrow, but he’ll be fine.”

Javier rumbled. “You better hope that’s true.”

Knowing that Pedro was safe unknotted my guts some. Then I remembered the guys. “What about Pierre and Gerard? Where are they? Did you hurt them?”

“Why would I hurt them?” Rozina returned, as if my worries were silly and she was harmless. “Last time I saw them, they were in Pierre’s room, recovering from our quick and dirty threesome. It was, meh, a consolation fuck. You didn’t miss much.”

“Who are you?” I gritted my teeth. “What do you want?”

“I’m here for you.” She flashed another sneer that sent goosebumps careening through my body. “I almost had you. Until he showed up.” She cut a glare in Javier’s direction.

Javier’s glower could’ve turned the woman to ashes. “Is Rozina Myers your real name?”

“Yes,” the woman purred, her tone rich in attitude. “I’m not here to hurt anyone.”

“Then why the fuck did you break in and threaten my woman?” he demanded.

Her eyebrows shot to her forehead. To be fair, so did mine. Had he just called me his woman?

“To persuade her to come with me, of course,” she said, as if this should be obvious to us. “You can lower your weapon now. I’m not her enemy or yours.”

“Fat chance I’m gonna lower my weapon,” Javier bit out. “The gun you brought in here marks you as her enemy and mine. I’m only gonna ask this once. Are you with Bekker?”

“ Bekker ?” She frowned. “I don’t know any Bekker.”

“You’re a good liar.” Javier scowled, looking formidable without his shirt, displaying the sheer power of his body, and as pissed as I’d ever seen him. “Are you really with the NYPD?”

“You’re a thorough kind of guy,” she tossed out casually. “You checked me out, I’m sure. You verified my employer.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing here?”

“I took a year’s sabbatical to make some extra income.”

Extra income?

“That shit doesn’t fly.” Javier’s smirk acquired a feral quality. “If you’re here, armed and threatening Missy, you’re with the mercs.”

“ Mercs ?” She furrowed her forehead. “What mercs?”

I studied Rozina closely. Maybe I wasn’t qualified in interrogation techniques like Javier was, but she seemed genuinely puzzled at the mention of Bekker and his mercs.

“I don’t believe anything that comes out of your lying mouth,” Javier snapped. “Is Missy the reason you kept pestering me?”

“I’ll be honest with you, honey hunk.” Her impertinent smirk was getting annoying. “You were the main obstacle for me to get her out of here. I couldn’t approach her with you and your guards hovering over her like a crowd of high-end nannies. The horny Frenchmen didn’t help. They monopolized her attention, but you were the real problem. Had I tried to make friends with her, I would’ve immediately popped up in your radar as a threat.”

She wasn’t wrong about that.

“You would’ve flagged me and taken me out in a second flat,” she continued. “On the other hand, every horny female in the resort was salivating over you. It was so much easier to get to you without raising suspicions. Since you were always around Baby Princess here, you left me no choice.”

“You needed to get through me to get to her,” Javier concluded wryly.

“You were supposed to be the pleasant part of the job, a perk if you will.” She expanded her grin. “I was looking forward to fucking you. While Baby Princess was getting all her holes serviced, I was gonna ride your dick like a stallion until I got my fill.”

“And, when you were done, you were gonna get me out of the way,” Javier guessed.

“Temporarily, perhaps.” She lowered her chin and batted her eyelashes. “I’m not a killer. You would’ve done the same had the situation been reversed, including the fucking.”

My fingers tightened around the gun. I didn’t know what struck me harder, that she’d planned to “get him out of the way,” or “ride him like a stallion until she got her freaking fill,” or that she had the temerity to keep flirting with him even now, when we’d thwarted her plans. The woman had some colossal cojones. I didn’t appreciate her using Javier. I didn’t like her flirting with him, either. The pit of my stomach burned with a flare of fury and insane jealousy.

“If you’re up for it, we could still do some of those things.” She ignored my glower and kept her attention on Javier. To her, he was the deadly one and I was just another spineless girl. “My guess is that she’s paying you to be her bodyguard, with benefits.”

The heat went to my face. She made it sound as if Javier was some lowlife gigolo. The words blurted out of my mouth. “You’re a nasty piece of work.”

“And you’re a whiny, wimpy, spoiled brat,” she shot back.

I’d never had the urge to punch someone in the face, but now I did.

Javier’s rumble was a warning. “Rozina…”

“Don’t be a fool.” She challenged him with a glare. “I’m offering you the opportunity to financially level up.”

Javier shook his head and groused, “Why do all psychopathic assholes and bitches think I can be bought?”

“Do you know who she really is?” Rozina asked.

Javier cocked his brows. “Do you?”

“Of course.” She huffed in annoyance. “She’s Missy Astor, the youngest daughter of the billionaire, Richard Astor.”

Indeed, I was, and the demeaning, mocking way in which she said it got me thinking.

“What do you want with Missy?” Javier asked, his voice rough.

The woman hesitated to give up additional information. I processed everything she’d said so far. She’d come for me and taken a leave of absence to make extra income. She’d called me whiny, wimpy, and a spoiled brat. She’d also taunted me with annoying nicknames like Baby Princess and Mousy Missy.

“When it comes to Missy’s life, I’m not taking any risks.” Javier curled his finger on the trigger. “If you’re not gonna be helpful, then I’m done with you.”

He said it so calmly, so nonchalantly, and yet the steel that glinted in his glare was as true as the fear that widened Rozina’s eyes.

“Wait.” I put a hand on Javier’s shoulder.

He shot me a skeptical glance. “She tried to kill you.”

I realized why her words seemed so familiar. “Correction. She tried to abduct me.”

“Kill you, abduct you, same thing to me.” Javier kept his aim on the woman.

“She’s not a merc.” I strung it all together. “She’s not working with Bekker.”

Javier frowned. “If not Bekker, then who the hell does she work for?”

I turned my stare to Rozina, knowing exactly who this woman was and why she’d come. “She’s a detective for NYPD and she’s on leave because she was recruited for a job that would pay her the bonus of a lifetime.”

“Oh, fuck.” Javier cursed some more. “You mean—?”

“Yes.” It made total sense. “She works for my father.”