Hunter (Revenge & Legacy Book 1)

by M. C. Cerny

  “Listen to me, my love.” I kissed her nose her cheek, her delicate lips, almost afraid it might be the last time I tasted the salt on her skin.

  “Adam.” Her tears weren’t fabricated. She reeked of fear.

  I pressed my lips to hers a second time to calm her down. She was hysterical breathing in and out so rapidly her chest was like a baby bird having been tossed out of the nest.

  “Shhhh. I’m going to say hello to an old friend, maybe walk on the beach. I’ll bring you back some seashells? Hmm? Darling?” I let my nose trace the outline of her cheek and jaw since my fingers could not. I sniffed her curls memorizing the scent as best I could. I swallowed back a reply as agents pried us apart. She’d figure out the words once she calmed down enough.

  Agent Dicklicker snarled sealing his fate. “Do you have what you need? The prison doctors probably can’t access your fancy cancer drugs.”

  I snapped my head at him and narrowed my eyes. This wasn’t part of the plan. I wasn’t the confessions type of guy.

  Elizabeth whimpered.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I should have anticipated this, her finding out my Achilles heel wasn’t just her, but a fucking disease I couldn’t knock.

  “She doesn’t know, does she?” Agent Dicklicker smirked and I’d eviscerate his weaselly member too. I leave his dick a bloody stump for whichever of the two secrets he was going to divulge to my wife.

  “Know? What don’t I know?” She scrambled fighting against a female agent’s hold.

  No point in answering her question when the soon to be dead asshole was going to inform her. He reveled in this and I’d make sure he paid. The only man permitted to cause her tears was me.

  “That you killed your own brother.”

  Fuck.

  We were going for the two for one special after all.

  “What?” Her voice grew weak and she sunk to the floor unable to hold herself up. I tried to protect her from that. She drank that stupid pomegranate nectar and gave Sadira the codes. The bank password was the encrypted code for the missiles. It wasn’t about just money exchanging hands. It was retribution for a slaughtered village. If I had brokered the deal in the first place, none of this would have happened.

  For the first time in my life, I hung my head down and looked at the sweet girl I’d taken as my own. Her grief was palatable. Fiona would never forgive her if she found out. Elizabeth would never forgive herself. I was already beyond redemption cast into my hell.

  “Elizabeth. I’m sorry.” And for that I was truly sorry. Those weapons were supposed to stop the General dealing arms, but instead they got into the wrong hands of a pissed as hell Saudi wife who took it out on a Marine convoy doing a diplomatic mission. The missiles took out Eddie and Aaron, but only one pulled through off the books, and I couldn’t even tell her that. I couldn’t tell her that they made the choice to save my brother before hers because of rank and his connection to our singular enemy.

  “Adam.” She yelled for me with tears in her eyes and sorrow in her broken heart.

  I winked enjoying the final shudder in the only disturbed way I could. “I’ll be back darling. Be a good girl while I’m away.”

  No point in telling her about the other if it hadn’t come up yet. I let them lead me out of the house. The General arranged my cushy accommodations. This was only a setback. A fleet of shiny black government issued vehicles lined the driveway. Bastards broke through my fence and cracked my lions standing guard. I spit into the red gravel imaging their blood spilling the drive next time. It was going to cost a fortune to fix those damn statutes.

  They tugged me forward and I tugged back getting a last glimpse of my house. My Elizabeth stood at the window pane, her hand parting the lace, forehead pressed against the glass flanked by agents desecrating our home. They’d trash the house looking for shit they’d never be able to find. The apartment in Hoboken wasn’t registered to me. The businesses had been signed over to Elizbeth under proxy. They couldn’t bankrupt me if they tried and they definitely couldn’t touch my wife.

  My darling, you seek to understand my motivations. You think it will be easier for you if I’m broken. I should have clarified that I was broken after I sullied my mother’s womb. I suffered a terrible beginning, that led to a disastrous end. My mother parade me in front of her johns between fleet weeks looking for my bastard of a father. I lacked the basic necessities when I was thrust into a corrupt system abused all over again.

  Despite all this, I’d known a great love from the time a blue-eyed girl stood on a rooftop and defied me. I raked my gaze over her with longing as they shoved me inside the car slamming the door shut on us. This was only temporary. I’d be out on a technicality. I choose this life, and even my love for a precious little bird kept in a gilded cage wouldn’t change my path.

  I slid inside the back of the blacked-out SUV. No regular police vehicle for me. The special agent thought he could stop me, but he was in for one hell of a surprise.

  “Adam.” The voice across from me grunted, and I lifted my head up smirking. He could hide behind the uniform and the decorative medals, but he’d never rattle my cage.

  “Hello dad. Hell of a house call don’t you think?”

  Want more of the Revenge & Legacy series?Preorder Prey now.

  Prey - Chapter One

  Aaron

  “Through violence, you may ‘solve’ one problem, buy you sow the seeds for another.” – Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

  Van doors slammed shut jarring me awake. Disorientation was the new normal between ear splitting headaches and physical therapy that made me cry like a newborn babe. I hadn’t been off the island in months, hadn’t seen another soul except for a few doctors in charge of my care. They spoke to me even less and I would have chosen torture in favor of the isolation marking me a thing instead of a human being. A lump of flesh they molded and manipulated with scalpels and drugs until I was a mere shadow of my recognizable self.

  My fists clenched testing the bonds around my wrists twisting them back and forth. Unmovable as if they knew the danger was in giving me the slightest bit of slack. Slack was akin to opportunity and I would strangle it out of every last one of these bastards when the time came. I was worse than a ticking time bomb or the IED that took out half my platoon. I was their judgement day waiting to pass.

  The damp feel of salt water in the air wasn’t same, less tropical than what I used to with the sun constantly shining on my island prison. Something told me we weren’t in the Caribbean anymore. The last memory I had was of brightness streaming inside my room blinding my vision once the pain meds were weaned from my system. I knew they’d taken me somewhere, but where was the question.

  The smell of bitter coffee turned my empty stomach as Styrofoam cups were passed to the back. Droplets passing over me burned my exposed skin, and I hissed growling at the men inside.

  “Sorry boss.” A voice I couldn’t see chuckled, followed by a slapping sound. I’d punch the motherfucker, but my hands were tied. Literally. Fucking tied. I jerked my arms, but all it did was move the entire bed I lay on.

  “Don’t let it happen again.” A hard hand rubbed the pain away making my skin crawl with a false gentleness I knew not to trust.

  My brain reverberated sounds like white noise. I wasn’t used to this dull numbness. The straps around my arms and legs continued to cut off my circulation. Claustrophobia settled in with the rising panic of so many sketchy details. Had this been months ago, before the mission fubared, I would have MacGyvered my way out this shit in a half Hulk state if it weren’t for the constant pain. None of my squad was here. I was the lone man out and no one was coming for me behind enemy lines.

  A voice shushed me. The placation was irritating. Where was Claudia? Was she safe?

  A knot lodged in my throat with worry. I’d been asking these questions for months with no answers. I forced the air out through my mouth and demanded, “Why am I here?”

  I rol
led my head back and forth on the makeshift hospital bed. This wasn’t the island, but I was drugged up again. My bandages dislodged with each move and my head pounded, crossed between feeling dehydrated and the light stinging my eyes despite the curtained windows. I banged my body around despite the pain hoping the racket I made would force them to give me some answers.

  The driver upfront turned the music up louder.

  “Easy Lieutenant Commander.” The motherfucker sitting casually across from me, or my handler as I thought of him flipped through a magazine of tactical supplies. High caliber rifles and ammo were set down by his feet like a sniper waiting for the call. I was intimately familiar with the equipment, but not why I was in a van laying immobile.

  “Arrrggh!” Clenching my fists, I tried to destabilize the bed again, loosen my straps, anything to get out of here.

  “Good thing the doc pumped you full of horse tranquillizers for this little outing.” He chuckled.

  I would kill this asshole the first chance I got. I’d squeeze the life out him and watch his miserable grey eyes pop from their sockets.

  “Craig, why don’t you put on something to match the mood? We’re at a funeral service after all.” He snickered the fucking bastard. A Sarah McLachlan song hit the speakers, dulcet tones, and sad words echoed in the tiny space like bullets to my brain intent on slowly torturing me.

  “Whose funeral?” I asked between gritted teeth.

  “Why yours of course.” My handler pushed back the curtains so I could see the beach outside. A clear day with bright blue skies, the ocean a familiar backdrop. We were at the beach I loved surfing at when I was on leave. The familiar trailhead and parking lot teased me as morning beach goers casually strolled by with a care in the world. They had no idea a trapped man was inside this van forced to watch his past life move on without him.

  A number of chairs surrounded a podium. A priest. My family. My wife. Claudia sat listening, a baby cradled in her arms. Little arms pumped wildly and my father took the baby holding her close to his broad chest. A chest I remembered flinging myself into for comfort and reassurance as a child some decades earlier. My own chest squeezed tight like a vice grip on my heart. The air inside the van stung my nose full of regret, pain, and loss. The sermon, I couldn’t hear, but the expressions on their faces I could see even from a great distance away. Pain lanced the gaping core where my heart lay stuttering each heart beat seeing the misery wear lines into their faces and age them.

  My brothers and sister were there standing next to my parents. All were subdued wearing sunglasses. It wasn’t a burial, instead ashes were being released into what I imagined was salty air and the ocean wind whipping their faces and fluttering black dresses like birds on a crash course flight back to the sand. From the earth we were created, and to earth we shall return. I didn’t need to lip read to know the words coming from the priest’s mouth, or how my mother sobbed into her handkerchief to stifle her tears.

  My daughter, our daughter hugged her grandfather’s neck, her face buried as the priest droned on. Blonde baby curls tucked against her damp cheeks. Claudia sat with her belly round near bursting with our baby. I knew it was my son, it had to be. I’d failed her, failed them in coming home to protect them from the monsters that were so much closer than the terrorists thousands of miles away.

  “Why are you doing this?” Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes burning my face. The involuntary reaction hit me harder than the IED in the field. I would have been better served with acid dousing my cheeks. Anger punched through the numbness. Anger gave me hope.

  “Some bad people made a bad deal. This is just the first showing of your new life buddy.” He patted my leg dismissing my onslaught of emotions.

  “Who the fuck are you?” I spat. The man’s eyes darted to the front of the van and another leaned back. Had I not been so drugged up I would have shit myself staring into familiar eyes.

  I couldn’t place how I knew the same angles as well as I knew my own. They weren’t perfect but after they butchered my own face and body, I knew they were pretty fucking close. For so long I had felt a gaping wound at the knowledge my loving parents had actually adopted me. It would seem the past really did keep skeletons hidden because this one in front of me was a nightmare in daylight.

  “Hello brother. I thought today would be a great day to reacquaint ourselves.” He nodded in the direction of the beach as he adjusted the fat tie around his neck straightening his fitted suit jacket. He wore black with a crisp white shirt and I longed to punch the smile off his face and knock out his teeth spraying blood all over the perfection.

  “Fuck you.” I gritted. I didn’t know this asshole and the fact that he was controlling my life burned in my gut.

  Ignoring my outburst, he bobbed looking out the window adjusting his sunglasses. “That’s to be expected, brother.” This was a home grown terror I hadn’t fathomed born of the same DNA and the pure shock of being unable to deny it. The Admiral had told me, but this was the closet I’d been to him that I knew.

  I turned my head back toward the window glimpsing at the fiction playing out on the beach. The ceremony was wrapping up, but I was right fucking here. I wasn’t ashes in the wind. I was human flesh and bone.

  “What do you want from me?” I demanded.

  “We’ll get to that.” He sighed motioning for my handler to adjust my hospital bed upright. The pain almost knocked me out. A harsh reminder to bide my time wisely. My doppelgänger offered me a cup non-pulsed glancing at the stain on my sheets.

  “Coffee?” He murmured with a sickening politeness.

  I turned my head away and stared at the funeral procession returning from the beach. Cars were parked on either side of the van. Claudia walked by close enough to reach. If my hands were untied, I could have touched her brushing up against the window.

  “Claudia!” I shouted. No one turned their heads. Not a single person glanced at the van. They acted as though they heard nothing and a hand slowly wrapped around her waist pulling her close as my insides knotted. Long blond hair blew in the wind touching the window of the van. The face of my brother in arms, a man I trained with, lead into battle, and trusted with my life nuzzled her neck leaving me eviscerated.

  “You fucking rat bastard!” I snarled as she turned her face to meet his lips with her own. Pain eviscerated me, and panic clutched the frayed edges of my mind. I pushed down the nausea. The only indication of something happening was my daughter popping her curly topped head up to view around. She looked everywhere but at me before burrowing back in her grandfather’s arms.

  “No! God damn it! Baby!” I called and cried, but nothing changed. “How can they not hear me?” I feared the answer. Maybe this was a sort of purgatory and I was finally paying for all my past sins. I was a fool to think I didn’t know what they were and why I deserved this.

  “Sound proof van.” The man calling himself my brother stated suggesting he was bored while my life, my life before this shit show exploded in my face.

  “Claudia!” I yelled again sobbing her name and jerking back against the bed. Beeping monitors inside the van pulled my attention between what was happening outside and the terror inside with my accelerating heartbeat.

  His hand clutched my shoulder squeezing. “She can’t hear you, or see you, actually. Tinted windows. It’s a special feature I installed just for this little trip.” His eyes sparkled and if I could have stabbed him in the face, I would have without a second thought.

  “You sick son of a bitch!”

  “You’re right and wrong about that.” He waved his head back and forth, a smile tipping the corners of his mouth as he sipped the coffee calmer than a catatonic psychopath.

  “Our darling mother was a bitch, but I’m not sick. At least not certifiably. Unfortunately, our dearest father has that down pat.”

  I cleared my dry throat, feelings of weakness washed over me like the incoming tide. Slow and steady and completely at the whim of the moon. “What’s going on?
”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know why I kindly brought you out here?” He clucked and flicked something off his suit sleeve like he had no time for me, yet he was the one keeping me here against my will.

  “Not particularly.” I doubted my attitude would change given these circumstances.

  “It’s important to process a proper goodbye to the life you once knew. We have a lot of work ahead of us, you and I.”

  This man was insane if he thought for a moment I would work with him at all. He, I presumed was the one who kept me locked up on an island. Tortured. Surgically altered and drugged up for months.

  “You are out of your fucking head, asshole.”

  “Again, thank dear old dad for orchestrating this mess.” He pointed toward the window again directing my attention. I was being given a full military send off as a hero.

  Pomp. Circumstance. Flags at half-mast.

  “It appears the Henderson clan has arrived.”

  I strained against my bonds to see out the window. My two older brothers. My baby sister and a man who held her hand as she cried into a handkerchief pressed against her mouth in anguish.

  “Fucking, Derrick.” My doppelgänger muttered.

  “What the fuck have you done.”

  “Me? Oh no, I just thought you’d like to see your sister’s new husband. Charming man. He works for me actually.” He scoffed waving his hand in the air. “Technically you now, I suppose. Anyway, I hear your sister’s a real wildcat after a glass of pinot noir.” He grinned.

  “You fucking sick bastard.” I yelled slamming myself up and down on the bed as much as I could jarring the locked wheels and forcing them to skip and scrape against the metal flooring.

  “You keep saying that, Aaron but you’ve got it all wrong.” His hand gripped my shoulder attempting to steady, subdue, and soften me.

  But I was too frenzied to calm down.

  “Alright, Hulk. Perhaps you’ll change your mind after you watch them scatter the rest of your ashes.” He chuckled exiting the van. Standing up he buttoned his suit jacket moving toward the beach as the door slammed shut. I tried yelling, but he was quick and no one seemed pulsed by the commotion because they had already slipped inside the limos that were driving away when he poked his head back inside. “Pardon me, I promised my wife seashells from the seashore.”