The first guard came at him, pistol raised. He fired, but the shot went wide, pinging off the rock face behind them. Rhys and Álvarez ducked as the bullet whined away into open air.
“¡Imbécil!” the older man roared. “Don’t shoot. You’ll hit me!”
The guard hesitated, then surged forward. Rhys met him halfway, driving a brutal elbow into his throat. It sent him reeling back, his weapon clattering across the stone.
A second lunged from the side. Rhys caught his wrist, twisted sharply, and felt bone give. The scream of pain vanished beneath the thunder overhead as he drove the guard facedown onto the platform with a knee between the shoulder blades.
Movement flashed in his peripheral vision. Two more guards rushed him at once.
Rhys pivoted, shoving the first into the second hard enough to stagger them both. A savage uppercut snapped one man’s head back, dropping him cold. The other recovered in time tocatch a shoulder driven into his ribs. He folded with a choking grunt.
Around them, chaos raged. Guests scrambled for an exit. From the ridge above, gunfire ricocheted off stone and steel as a desperate handful of guards tried, futilely, to repel the assault force.
With four men down and another closing in, Rhys couldn’t afford to track the confusion beyond the platform. His lungs burned, breath coming fast, but he forced it steady. The threat approaching on the platform became the priority.
This man was bigger than the rest. A wall of muscle and scar tissue. Not a bodyguard, but a fighter. He drew a knife, smiling, like he’d won already.
They circled as the helicopters roared overhead, the downdraft whipping up dust and sand, snapping Rhys’s shirt violently against his back. But he couldn’t lose focus facing down Álvarez’s goon, who taunted him by tossing his wicked-looking blade from hand to hand.
The big man struck first, his reach longer than expected.
Rhys twisted. But not fast enough. The blade sliced through fabric and skin along his ribs. Searing heat flared, then vanished beneath adrenaline. He dropped below the next swipe, trapped his wrist, yanked him forward, and drove his forehead into the guard’s nose. Bone cracked, and the man roared in pain. But he didn’t let up.
They grappled, boots sliding, bodies colliding hard enough to knock the breath from them both. His wound and the guard’s broken nose made their hands slick with blood. The knife slipped, giving him an opening.
He shoved the man hard, slamming him against the rail. Rhys pinned him there. A forearm across his throat, arching the guard over the top rail.
“You can’t save them all,” the goon snarled, teeth bared.
Rhys leaned in, voice low and deadly calm. “Watch me.”
With a roar, the guard surged upward, pushing him back. Rhys’s feet slipped on the stone. At that moment, just as he was losing his edge, voices cut through the smoke and chaos.
“FBI! Drop your weapons!”
“OIJ! ¡Suelten las armas!”
Footsteps thundered and guns came up on every side.
The guard froze, but Rhys didn’t. He slammed the man’s hand onto the rail with brutal force and watched as the knife tumbled end over end into the surf below. Then, not bound by arrest protocols or excessive force rules, he drove a fist into the man’s face.
Rhys stepped back, watching as the man swayed, a stunned look on his ugly, sex trafficker’s face, then he dropped hard onto the stone. His only regret was that it wasn’t Álvarez lying unconscious at his feet.
But he hadn’t gotten away. He was cowering in a corner, Keene, Price, and an OIJ agent’s weapons trained on him.
Price cuffed him, none too gently. “Sebastián Álvarez, you’re under arrest for human trafficking, conspiracy, and a host of other crimes you’re about to hear in exquisite detail.”
Álvarez laughed, high-pitched and without humor. “You think this ends here?”
“I absolutely do,” Keene replied. “Your empire crumbled today.”
“His Majesty didn’t believe me when I told him the same thing,” Rhys drawled. “Your money can’t buy your way out of this one, Álvarez.”
He shot him a hate-filled look, then winced, whining, “Not so rough,” when Price thrust him into the waiting hands of two Costa Rican agents.
Price didn’t miss a beat. “Maybe we should give you the same tender treatment you gave your muses.”
The older man went white beneath his tropical tan, shrinking visibly as the agents hauled him away.
