The lieutenant Abram had glimpsed over the months at the Mustafa fortress had never spoken much, never socialized. He’d always managed to keep himself distant, as many of the terrorists had once done.
Until more of their compatriots had arrived after Ayid and Aman’s deaths. Many of them now moved in groups, socialized with each other, and had begun slowly drawing the people of the Mustafa province into their grip.
Hell, Abram realized, he was one of the men they hadn’t been able to identify at all. He and Tariq hadn’t even been able to collect his fingerprints as they had for most of the suspected terrorists.
The other man’s gaze was locked squarely on his as Abram pulled his jeans from the floor and eased them up his legs, feeling the small Beretta handgun he had kept shoved in the pocket at night.
His fingers itched to push into the pocket and jerk it free. But the military-issue P90s Jafar and his lieutenant carried were still aimed squarely at Paige rather than at Abram.
Abram let his gaze slide to his father, Azir. The old man was staring at Paige with such a gleam of crazed hunger that suddenly, Abram understood exactly how Azir could have realized his son’s attraction to her.
Azir had developed a fixation on Paige that Abram had missed.
How the hell had he managed to miss it?
As he eased from the bed a small, lonely sigh slipped from her. She shifted beneath the thin sheet as though searching for his warmth.
Trying to keep the movement slow, unthreatening, he pulled the comforter bunched at her knees up to her shoulder.
Azir moved faster than Abram could have expected.
Before he could counter the move, Azir, for all his girth and normal slowness, managed to strike with cobra swiftness and jerk the comforter from his grip.
Abram stared back at him through the dim light of the room, hatred and murderous rage rising inside him.
“Before I die…” He kept his voice barely audible, but even he heard the resounding promise in it. “I will kill you with my bare hands. Hear me, old man, because I swear to you before God, you will pay for what you have done in this life long before you meet Allah.”
Azir’s eyes narrowed, but Abram saw the flicker of fear in the depths for the briefest second.
“Let’s move,” Jafar ordered him. “We’re leaving the house, and you will be going with us. Ensure, Abram, that no one stops us. We have proved to you that we can get past Khalid’s defenses, and that we can access your woman. Don’t make the mistake of believing you can escape again without consequences.”
“That is why you shot Khalid rather than me.” He smiled mirthlessly. “How you have changed, Jafar.”
Jafar’s eyes narrowed. “No Abram, I have changed not at all, I promise you this.” Mocking, condescending. Was his cousin actually attempting to convince him that he had never dreamed of the freedoms they had both enjoyed while attending college in the States, or that both of them hadn’t, at one time, enjoyed their membership in the Sinclair Club?
“May I dress?” he asked sarcastically.
“By all means.” Jafar shrugged. “Dress well, cousin. Your return to the fortress will be noticed, and we would prefer it appears voluntary.”
Abram dressed without hurrying, though he didn’t move with deliberate slowness either. But he needed the time, he needed a moment to think.
There was a message in Jafar’s words, he could feel it. He’d once known this cousin as well as he had known Tariq. At least, he had thought he had.
They had attended American college together, they had shared lovers, gotten drunk as young men, and grew into their maturity as friends.
They had both joined the Sinclair Club at the same time, joining Tariq in the conspiracy to lie and deceive to cover the funds used for their membership fees.
Was Jafar still a member?
“Stop dawdling.” The order came from the lieutenant rather than Jafar.
Abram almost froze for a second, his gaze sliding to the other man. Abram buttoned his shirt mechanically, knowledge rippling through his mind. He began to piece together the answers that had eluded him over the years as he attempted to identify the commander of the terrorists moving into the Mustafa province.
When Jafar had disappeared several years before, supposedly moving into the mountains to aid one of his father’s elderly friends, Abram hadn’t suspected anything. He had never considered, not even for a moment, that his cousin had been in Iraq working to attack the king to whom he’d once vowed his loyalty.
Abram had believed Jafar was the commander they had been searching for, but that answer hadn’t felt right. Ayid and Aman had hated Jafar almost as much as they had hated Khalid and Abram.
This was why it hadn’t felt right. Because Jafar wasn’t the commander he had searched for. It was this man. The one that stared at him with steady, dead eyes. No emotion. No sense of anything but the evil that filled him.