Warrior Mine Read Online Free PDF

When faced with the decision of forever-defective goods or a little information dump, any man would cave.
    Carmen swiped the detonator from the floor, flipped the rubber band around her left wrist, and glanced back at him. He couldn’t discern the expression in her round, lash-rimmed eyes. Regret? Appreciation? She’d planned this little fiasco beautifully, knowing she’d have to threaten more than just his life to get his compliance. He had no doubt that she’d find a way out from under her brother’s thumb. With or without his help. She’d chosen the perfect spot in the room to make him completely worthless and unable to strike an attack.
    They bowed their heads toward one another. A bit of a truce. She spun on her heels to go and he let her.
    “Before you leave…” The tone of Carlos’s choked voice razed Vail’s nerve endings and pulled Carmen to a stop.
    “What?” She regarded him over her shoulder, her eyes narrowing to slits.
    The son of a bitch’s mouth spread wide and curled at the edge, despite the swollen part he could see. “Show me you mean to run the family business. Kill him.” The thumb he’d pried the nail from earlier hitched in his direction, as if there were any question to which him he referred.
    Son of a fucking cock-sucking whore ! Screw torture. This guy needed killing.
    Carmen’s gaze darted from Vail to her brother and back. The thin line of her mouth morphed into a snarl. She yanked the compact gun from the holster. The barrel rammed the side of Carlos’s head. Her jaw flexed. “So help me, brother, you’ll die before he does.”
    “I’m surprised you’d give his life for Sophia’s,” the scum provoked.
    “He’s innocent,” she retorted.
    “Please, he’s killed more people than I have.”
    “Your causes are very different,” Carmen ground out.
    “Make your choice, sister. Who deserves to live? Him or sweet Sophia?”
    A scream, feral and pained, ripped from her throat. She bore down on the grip. Her arms shook. The shriek pitched high then rumbled into a growl. “One day, brother, your sins will come for their retribution.”
    She lifted the barrel, aimed at Vail’s middle, and fired once.

5
    C armen dropped to the ground , happy to leave the blackness of the ducts. She just couldn’t escape the blackness of her mind. She sprinted toward the vacant building where she’d left the rented sedan. Though the standing water in the pitted alleys she fled through crystallized in the chill, the flames of hell licked her cheeks. Sweat suctioned the front of the black shirt to her stomach. In the dark of night and the gleam from the street light it looked like blood. She smacked the moisture from her eyes with the hand she’d used to pull a trigger. She imagined Vail Tucker clutching his abdomen, fighting to stem the flow of blood as futilely as she tried to dam her tears.
    “Damn you, Carlos. And damn me too.”
    Up two flights of stairs she found the white car she’d left four hours earlier. Retrieving a key from a lower cargo pocket, she unlocked the indistinct wheels, opened the door, and tossed herself into the back seat. She hurled the detonator in the small confines and released her disgust in a yell so loud her throat burned and her ears rang. With a limited wind-up the dummy mechanism did little more than tink off the dashboard and then plummet to the floorboard.
    “Fuck!”
    Her brother hurt people. She didn’t. She hadn’t intended to harm anyone, only learn where Carlos’s men held her daughter.
    In her search for Sophia through the family’s Mexican holdings, she’d heard murmurs about her brother’s capture in the States and little more than a whisper about the organization that had taken him. Not FBI. Not CIA. Similar, but much more shadowed with a much broader reach.
    Carmen pulled civilian clothes from the duffel on the seat next to her. She peeled the wet and all too conspicuous clothing from her body, slamming it into the bag with vicious slaps