She closed her eyes and forced all emotion aside. “What do you want me to do?”
Jack swallowed back the regret that stuck in his craw. He hated this shit. He should just take her right now and get her the hell out of here. He set his jaw hard and forced himself to do what had to be done.
“Arad will take on another job in a few days. I’ll need specifics in order to catch him off guard. Times, rendezvous points, anything you can get. Then I’ll take care of the rest. It’s going to look as if someone trying to get at you took him down.”
A frown furrowed its way across her brow. “But how can I do that now? Raoul has probably already sent word to him that I—”
“You have to go back,” Jack interjected. “It’s the only way.”
She retreated a step as if preparing to flee. “How can I do that? Raoul—”
“Is dead,” he cut in again.
Jack allowed the impact of those two words to sink in before he continued. “As soon as my team recognized what you were up to, we sent someone in and terminated him. We’ve since pretty much wrecked the room so that it’ll look like someone broke in, killed Raoul and nabbed you.”
Her complexion turned ashen. “Because I tried to escape, you had him killed?”
Jack considered whether he should tell her the truth or not, but opted to keep things on the level. “We had no choice. We need your cover intact.”
She blinked, looking far too close to fainting for his liking, but he couldn’t let her see anything less than complete detachment on his part.
“What do we do now?” Her voice sounded small, like a lost child’s.
He brutally squashed the urge to tell her everything…to take her and run as far and fast as he could. “Most likely someone in the hotel, an associate of Arad’s, has already informed him of the incident and he’s probably on his way back here right now or may even be here as we speak. We’ll release you on the street and you’ll say that you escaped.” He gestured to the room at large. “Tell him you were kept here. We’ve planted evidence to indicate a local group of extremists were responsible for the incident.”
“What am I supposed to tell him they did to me?”
She trembled and he had to restrain the need to reach out to her. Every instinct told him this wasn’t right. But, like her, he had no choice.
“You tell him that they tried to beat information about his whereabouts out of you, but that you didn’t know anything. Tell him that you managed to escape when one of the men tried to…to rape you.”
She blinked but didn’t clear the confusion totally from her gaze. “What if he doesn’t believe me?”
This part was almost more than Jack could live with and yet it was the most crucial element…her survival depended upon it. “We have to make him believe it.”
“How?”
Jack stepped to the door and gestured to the man waiting outside. When he entered the room, Ami gasped, obviously recognizing him from the claw marks on his forearms and cheeks as well as the swollen nose. She’d worked the guy over pretty good in her efforts to escape.
When her frightened gaze swung to his, regret pierced Jack like a dagger straight through the heart. “I wish there was another way.”
He turned away from the shock and confusion in her eyes before the first blow landed, unable to watch the brutality necessary to make her cover story real.
The story that would ultimately save her life.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
AMI LAY PRONEin the dusty street, her face turned to one side, her eyes unblinking. She stared, seeing nothing. Her mind as well as her body was numb.
She felt nothing.
People gathered around her. She sensed more than heard or saw them.
She wondered briefly if she was dead.
Something ached through the numbness.
Her son. She would never see her baby again.
