Table of Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Discover more Amara titles… Dark ‘n’ Deadly
Deadlock
Search and Destroy
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Tonya Burrows. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.
Entangled Publishing, LLC
10940 S Parker Rd
Suite 327
Parker, CO 80134
[email protected]
Amara is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.
Edited by Heather Howland
Cover design by Mayhem Cover Creations
Cover photography by Dragosh Co/Shutterstock
Derkien/DepositPhotos
ISBN 978-1-68281-605-9
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition May 2020
Dear Reader,
Thank you for supporting a small publisher! Entangled prides itself on bringing you the highest quality romance you’ve come to expect, and we couldn’t do it without your continued support. We love romance, and we hope this book leaves you with a smile on your face and joy in your heart.
xoxo
Liz Pelletier, Publisher
For Alyssa.
There. You have a book dedicated to you now. Happy?
(Love you, little sis!)
“Vengeance is a lazy form of grief.”
-The Interpreter (2005)
Chapter One
Who killed Danny Giancarelli?
That’s all Marcus Deangelo wanted to know—the name of the sniper who murdered his best friend two months ago. Two simple words. A location, if he could get it, but he’d be happy with just a name.
But the woman wasn’t talking. And he was running out of time. And patience.
He tipped her chair back to all four legs and yanked the wet cloth away from her face. She coughed and sputtered and glared at him with murder in her dark eyes. Mercedes Raya was a tough nut to crack, had to give her that. He’d admire her if she wasn’t the enemy and literally in bed with his own personal devil.
The sniper had to be her lover. According to recent intel, her only family—a brother—went missing over a year ago. So, lover. It was the only reason Marcus could figure a mercenary bitch like her would be so protective of the man.
He slammed the jug of water down on a table and turned away from her. For a heartbeat, he thought What the fuck am I doing? He was supposed to be one of the good guys. He’d joined the FBI because he wanted to help people. When he left to join HORNET, a privately owned hostage rescue team, it was with the same goal in mind. To help. To save. He’d been a negotiator, one of the best the FBI had, able to talk down the worst of the bad guys.
Now look at him.
Waterboarding a woman.
He was the bad guy now.
But whatever. Despite his best intentions, he was never going to qualify for sainthood, even before Danny died on that beach in Martinique. After… Well, any shred of decency left in him had been eaten up by rage and booze.
If it was the last thing he did—if it cost him his tarnished soul—he would find Danny’s killer and make the man pay for taking a real-deal, decent man from this earth. For widowing a sweet woman. For orphaning three beautiful, innocent children.
Mercedes finally stopped coughing. “Call that torture? My father called it Monday night.”
He ground his teeth until his jaw ached and turned to face her. Even though he hadn’t put a physical mark on her, she looked like hell. Her long dark hair had knotted into dreadlocks in the weeks they’d held her captive. Her eyes were red and puffy, tears streaming from the corners despite her tough words. Due to her refusal of food, she’d lost weight she couldn’t afford to lose. Mercedes was bony, haggard, and mean, like a stray street dog that had never known kindness.
She wasn’t going to break.
The realization fell on him like a load of wet cement, weighing him down where he stood, making breathing impossible. He shook his head. “Why are you protecting him? He left you to us. He hasn’t come for you. If he was worth protecting, he’d have risked his life to find you.”
Marcus saw a flicker of emotion behind those devil-dark eyes.
Gotcha.
He slid his phone from his back pocket and held it out. “Call him. Tell him HORNET is holding you captive near Jackson, Wyoming. Tell him the team is all out of town until Monday. You’re easy pickings right now. Let’s see how much he cares.”
“He loves me.”
Uh-huh. That was not the declaration of a woman certain about the status of her relationship. She didn’t believe it any more than he did.
Marcus jiggled the phone in front of her face. “Here’s his chance to prove it.”
Gaze fastened on the phone, she lifted the corner of her mouth in a sneer. “If you think you’ll be able to track him from a phone call—”
He grunted and took out his pocketknife, then sliced through the tape holding her right hand to the arm of the chair. “You’re not stupid. You know how to get in touch with him without leaving a trail.” He shoved the phone into her free hand, then stepped back and crossed his arms over his chest. “Go on. Call him.”
She blinked at him. “You’re willing to put your team in danger for answers?”
“I’m not. Your boyfriend won’t come.”
She flinched. A small, almost imperceptible movement, but yeah, he’d hit a nerve. “You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, I do. I saw real love at work in Nigeria. You did, too. Jean-Luc and Claire Oliver. He didn’t rest until he found her and repeatedly put himself at risk to keep her safe. What did your boyfriend do? He took off and left you there in the middle of a biological hot zone. Why is that worth your loyalty?”
She turned the phone over in her hand. Again and again. But she hadn’t thrown it back at him, which he took as a good sign.
“You plan to kill him?” she asked after an endless moment.
A thrill raced along Marcus’s spine. He was getting through to her. “I want answers. I know he was a hired gun. If you can tell me who hired him, I won’t need him.”
&
nbsp; Lies. All lies. He sure as fuck planned to kill the man who pulled the trigger, as well as the person who hired him to do it.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me.”
Holy shit. She was talking. After all the torture—the waterboarding, the sensory overload, the sleep deprivation—all it took in the end was to shake her confidence in her man. He should’ve tried that hours ago.
“Give me his name,” he said softly.
Another shake of her head.
“He. Left. You.”
She remained stubbornly silent, but there was something different about that silence now. She wasn’t as sure of herself.
“Why Danny?” The question had haunted him nightly since that bullet tore through his best friend’s chest. Danny didn’t have enemies. Everyone liked him. Christ, he even got thank-you letters from the guys he’d put in prison during his tenure as an FBI negotiator. He wasn’t someone who inspired the kind of deep hatred it took to hire a hitman.
“It was supposed to be you,” Mercedes whispered.
His entire body froze, his blood icing over in his veins. “What?”
“All I know is that you were the target. You ducked.”
He was the target. He was the target. He was the fucking target.
His enemies had killed Danny.
His fault.
Jesus.
He moved slowly, like the air had become molasses around him. He squatted down in front of her. “Your lover killed the wrong guy. He took away a good man. A husband and a father.”
“He knows. He feels horrible—”
“Fuck that. It’s not enough.”
When she didn’t respond, he yanked the phone out of her hand and found a picture of Danny with his wife and their three children. “That woman? Her name is Leah. She’s alone because your lover made a mistake. She has to raise those beautiful babies on her own. Those kids are so young they won’t even remember their father. They won’t remember how much he loved them. He won’t be there to walk his baby girl down the aisle someday. He won’t be there to teach his twins all the things boys learn from their father. All because your lover made. A. Fucking. Mistake.”
She closed her eyes, but the tears slipped out.
“Let me face him, Mercedes. At the very least, you’re giving him a chance to right his wrong. I’m sure his employer is pissed.”
She opened her eyes but didn’t look at him. She focused on the photo. “His name…” She trailed off, drew a breath, and let it out on a shaky exhale. “Fuck. His name is Sebastian Haly. He has a cabin in the Swiss Alps.”
Chapter Two
Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland
One Week Later
Marcus hadn’t planned to divulge his new intel to the team. He’d wanted to take on Haly alone—spend some quality time with the murdering son of a bitch. But when the team got back from Seth’s wedding and found out what he’d been up to while they were gone, HORNET’s commanders, Gabe Bristow and Travis Quinn, threatened to kick him out if he attempted the takedown on his own. It was either the team participates in the raid on Haly’s cabin with him, or they’d go without him. There would be, in Quinn’s words, “no more fucking Rambos” on the team.
So here he was, crunching through the knee-high snow, decked out in full winter gear, completely, horribly sober for the first time in weeks, and wondering how the hell he’d interrogate, then kill Haly without his teammates knowing.
Up ahead, the cabin was mostly camouflaged by the blanket of snow. Its weathered wood front peered over piles of virgin snow, its two dark windows like eyes, the doorway a gaping mouth. The A-line roof sagged. The cabin looked like an old man bundled up for winter in a scarf and pointed hood.
It also looked abandoned.
No lights inside, no smoke puffing from the chimney. Nobody had cleared a path from the doorway to the woodpile stacked under the eaves along the left side of the cabin. A car sat in the driveway, but it, too, was buried.
The team moved as quickly and silently as they could, given the snow. They kept Marcus in the middle of the line, and he knew they’d positioned him there on purpose. They wanted to keep an eye on him. They didn’t trust him.
Probably for the best. He didn’t trust himself.
Nearby, something crunched through the icy top crust of the snow.
At the front of the line, Lanie Delcambre, field team leader, held up a fist. Everyone crouched, tense and alert. Across the yard, at the tree line, a deer moved into view. The team stayed still for a moment longer to make sure it had been only the deer they’d heard.
Lanie motioned them forward, and as one, they approached the cabin’s door. It hung open, and snow had invaded the house. Fresh animal tracks led inside, and judging by the size of those paws, that was no deer.
Tank, HORNET’s resident bomb-sniffing dog, trembled a little at his handler, Ian Reinhardt’s, side. Yeah, he didn’t like those tracks any more than Marcus did. Something that size could rip through a dog and person or two before their M4s took it down.
They lined up single file on each side of the door, weapons ready for whatever waited inside. Marcus didn’t think they’d find Sebastian Haly. The place felt empty, devoid of human life. If Haly had been here, he was long gone now, but nobody was ready to let down their guard just yet in case whatever made those huge tracks was still making itself at home.
They breached the door, one after another, weapons up. Lanie and her husband, Jesse Warrick, HORNET’s medic, in front. Seth Harlan, sniper, and Harvard, computer geek extraordinaire, next. Jean-Luc Cavalier, linguist, and Marcus followed. Ian and Tank brought up the rear.
The cabin reeked of death, rot, and decay. Marcus knew the scent even before he spotted the body.
“Shit,” Jesse said under his breath.
“Clear the house,” Lanie commanded, even though they all knew they weren’t going to find anyone.
“Clear,” Jean-Luc confirmed.
“Clear,” Ian and Seth said at the same time.
Everyone shuffled back to the living room. The body lay strapped to an overturned chair and was unrecognizable as male or female. Most likely male, going by the clothes that still hung on him. Animals had scavenged most of the soft tissue, and what was left had putrefied into an ugly blue-gray.
“This our guy?” Ian asked.
Jean-Luc picked his way past the body and grabbed something from a dish on the narrow counter that separated the living room and kitchen. A wallet. He flipped it open, studied it with his flashlight, then held it up for the group to see. Inside was an American driver’s license for Samuel Hall, the alias under which Sebastian Haly had bought this property.
“Looks like it.” He slid a glance in Marcus’s direction, and there was no mistaking the worry there. “Sorry, mon ami. Someone else got to him first.”
Marcus lowered his weapon and stared at the corpse. It was over. He’d found Danny’s killer. During the many long sleepless nights he’d spent envisioning this moment, he’d thought he’d feel relieved, exhilarated, triumphant…
Something.
But the ache of his best friend’s loss still throbbed inside him, empty and insistent. Nothing had changed. Knowing Sebastian Haly’s name, knowing he’d pulled the trigger on Danny, and knowing that he was no longer drawing breath himself changed nothing.
He’d never get answers now. Haly had been only a hired gun.
With a shout of rage and frustration, he tightened his finger on the trigger, emptying his clip into the body.
“Jesus Christ,” someone said. He didn’t know who, didn’t care. It sounded like they were miles away.
“Stop him,” another voice ordered. Female. Lanie.
A heavy arm locked around his neck from behind. Hands yanked his weapon free of his grip. He struggled against them, fought blindly, so full of pain
and anger and hatred, he didn’t care that he was hurting friends.
A needle pricked his arm, and a moment later his limbs grew heavy. His vision wavered. The hands holding him back let go, and he staggered, dropped to his knees.
“There now, mon ami,” a familiar voice soothed close to his ear. Jean-Luc. The Cajun had caught him and was lowering him gently to the floor. “Go to sleep now. It’s okay. We gotchu.”
The worried faces of his friends floated over him. He looked away, ashamed, and found his gaze landing on Sebastian Haly’s gaping maw of a face. Haly looked like he was grinning, all white teeth and bone.
The killer’s body was the last thing he saw before the sedative in his system swept him into unconsciousness.
…
Los Angeles, California
Leah Giancarelli used to love her nighttime routine with her kids. Yes, they were wild, her six-year-old twins running her ragged while her nine-year-old daughter laughed at them.
But that was before.
Maya didn’t laugh anymore. She’d withdrawn to her room and hardly ever came out.
Cooper and Colton still put up a fight at bedtime, but the antics were no longer cute or innocent. Cooper had thrown a shoe at her tonight, and it had been all she could do not to break down into a sobbing mess in front of the boys.
She didn’t know how to handle them without Danny.
She shut herself in her room and leaned against the door. She needed a moment. Just a moment to breathe, and then she’d resume the battle. She heard the boys screaming at each other, heard something crash, and exhaled a breath that was half sob, half exhausted laugh.
She couldn’t do this. How some women managed to raise their children as a single parent was a mystery. Three months of single parenthood and her nerves were shot. She couldn’t take Cooper’s angry outbursts anymore, couldn’t deal with Maya’s refusal to acknowledge the world outside her iPad or Colton’s morbid fascination with death.
She needed help or she was going to break.
She had to fix her family before they fell completely apart.
Therapy. After the funeral, a friend had suggested she seek grief counseling for her and the kids, but she’d originally balked at the idea. Now, as she heard another crash from the boys’ room and more shouting, she’d take any help she could get. She lunged for her phone on the nightstand, looking for the text message Marlena had sent her with the name of a renowned family therapist.
Honor Avenged (HORNET) Page 1
