LITMIR.BIZ

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dead into a trap, dropping evidence that he was not the sexual predator, the destroying creature, whose identity he’d assumed.

      Too many years on the LAPD had taught him that rape had very little to do with sex, with sensuality, with lovemaking. And yet, that tiny bit of information had failed him as he’d given in to his body’s normal, human sexual desires, bonding with Sanay, tending to her tender little form the way she’d explored his hard physique. Already, the lips of the laceration on her cheek puffed up, darkening. Her jaw was also deepening its hue, red and raw from where he’d punched her.

      “I needed you to do that,” Sanay repeated softly. “He’ll kill you if you don’t.”

      Lyons cupped the tip of her chin, looking into her eyes. “Why would you do this?”

      “Because you’re kind. You’re a good man,” Sanay answered. She lowered her head, scrunching her shoulders up around her neck. “A man like that doesn’t deserve to be treated like...”

      Lyons bit his lower lip. At once, he was ashamed of his violent reflexes, but at the same time, they’d intervened and protected him despite himself. The girl had leveled a gun at him.

      “You took a damn chance,” Lyons growled. He helped her up, a hand under each armpit, then sat her beside him on the mattress. “What if I’d shot you? What if I beat you to death?”

      “Then this would be over,” Sanay answered.

      In the ever-growing light, Lyons could see that Sanay’s skin wore her years with nearly as much character as he’d earned in his years of battle. Cigarette burns, healed cuts and freckles were now visible as the concealer makeup she’d worn had been scrubbed away by their vigorous lovemaking. Her whole life was a wrought tale carved into her flesh, hidden by that caramel coating.

      And Lyons hated himself for having gone full karate on her. He knew that his palm-heel stroke would leave hairline fractures along Sanay’s mandible, and she was still in pain right now. It would stay with her as a constant, sharp ache for months, acting up every time she bit down hard. He just knew that she’d be taking an extra painkiller or two to numb herself further against the lifetime of punishment she’d received.

      Lyons gently dabbed the blood from her cheek, careful not to apply pressure to the swollen edges of her laceration. Sanay’s welling tears didn’t fill her eyes quite enough to trickle down her face, but Lyons could see into her dark, soulful eyes, spotting a small spark. A tint of hope gleamed in them. He could see that he was the first in a long time who had treated her like a human.

      “Don’t,” Lyons told her, his deep voice having a slight crack in it. He’d been here before, with brave women, those who knew how to fight and survive.

      “Don’t what?” Sanay asked.

      “Don’t risk yourself for me,” Lyons ordered.

      “Jinan said to expect to be raped, to be hurt, to be destroyed,” Sanay whispered. “But he said that if I made it, he would give me all the opium I needed. Enough to ride away into eternity.”

      She looked down at herself, sinking her upper teeth into her soft, cushiony lower lip. “This...this isn’t enough. You’ll—”

      A knock at the door cut her off. Sanay froze, her sadness-brimming eyes finally bursting like a dam as she shot a glance at the door. Lyons moved with the speed of a cobra, scooping up his Colt Python and readying it for action.

      Still standing at the jamb, using it as a shield, he tore open the door. “What the hell do you want?”

      Lyons was eye to eye with a man who looked too wide to even step through the hotel doorway. He could see brawny muscles rippling in the newcomer’s neck, shoulders, upper arms and chest. However the farther down he looked on the ever-broadening form, those muscles ebbed, slipping under a layer of fat that, at a distance, would have most fools thinking him to be a ball of blubber. Fortunately, Lyons had run into many of this type of man, as well. He called them “hard fat,” men who would never display a set of washboard abs, but had endless reserves of strength and endurance, capable of tossing around throngs of bodybuilders as if they were rag dolls. The Lump, as Lyons named the man, glowered in reaction to Lyons’s hostility.

      “Picking up the bitches. Or what’s left of them.”

      The man had no accent, though his features were solidly Polynesian. He also didn’t show the slightest bit of intimidation at the sight of the Colt in Lyons’s fist. He turned to Sanay and barked. “Here! Now!”

      Sanay sprung to her tiny feet and darted from the bed to the doorway. She hadn’t bothered to pick up the folds of flimsy cloth that Lyons had torn off her the night before.

      “Was expecting you a little more ripped up,” the Lump said.

      Lyons glowered at him. “Jinan said not to kill the staff.”

      The round ball of disguised muscle tugged Sanay into the hallway, looking at her closer, his gaze falling on the darkening bruises of her face.

      “Well...” Lyons added, letting a little sheepishness creep into his voice. “I remembered that eventually.”

      The Lump swiveled his head atop that tree trunk of a neck, ropes of tendon and sinew stretching from it and into his shoulders like the gnarled roots of a hideous tree. “She ain’t staff. She’s party favors.”

      The Lump pulled on Sanay’s wrist. “Come on. I’ll get you some fresh...”

      Lyons growled, cutting off the slab of humanity in the hallway. “Screw that. I want her back. The bitch sits up and begs when I cough. Don’t want to have to train something else like that.”

      Lump glanced from Lyons to the frightened girl. Sanay looked like a rabbit caught between a wolf and a mountain lion. The slab glanced back to Lyons, standing there naked—the only thing he wore was a scowl of annoyance—accessorized with a menacing Colt.

      “I’ll have her cleaned up, just like last night,” Lump told him.

      Lyons nodded, standing by helplessly as Lump tugged Sanay after him. She looked at him, confused.

      Lyons slammed the door shut, resting his head against the doorjamb. He looked at the reflection of his face in the chrome of the door chain’s slot.

      He hated what he saw.

CHAPTER THREE

      Barbara Price stood in the center of the Stony Man Farm Computer Room, looking between the touch-screen tablet device in her hand and the gigantic global map stretched out on the wall. Around her were the computer workstations of the four technological geniuses of the cyber crew: Aaron Kurtzman, Carmen Delahunt, Huntington Wethers and Akira Tokaido.

      As mission controller, Price was staying on top of all open correspondence channels and keeping track of her field operations. Currently the cyber team was trying to locate Robert Baxter and Beatrice Chandler, scanning the world for their RFID chips. Given the ferocity of the attack, most people would have considered both scientists dead, but there had been a passive signal as leaving the perimeter of the base.

      A global search would be much more difficult. One intruder had been located on the base, a disguised commando, Chinese in ethnicity, with forged identification papers, unit patches and dog tags that, if Stony Man looked really hard, could be traced back to Shanghai and the Ministry of State Security. This would have proved to be convincing evidence, if only for the fact that the intruder had been killed with the same U.S.-issue weapons and ammunition as the attacking commandos had likely carried. Indeed, that the man’s Beretta and rifle were found—and had been traced to stolen American arms lost in the Gulf War—only made Price more suspicious about the red herring dropped in the desert.

      That was why Akira Tokaido was currently checking every ounce of digital traffic coming out of the People’s Republic of China, looking for incidents of a similar attack in-country. She didn’t know if there would

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