Honor Avenged (HORNET)

by Tonya Burrows

  “No, no, no,” Rick said over and over again. He hung up the phone and started pacing again.

  This wild-eyed man was not the kind man she’d come to know, the man who played video games with her boys and had celebrated birthdays and holidays with her family for the entire four years he and Danny were partners.

  Except that wasn’t entirely true. Now that she thought about it, he hadn’t been around for the last year before Danny’s death. Toward the end, he’d become a scarce sight and Danny hardly ever mentioned him in conversation. He never showed up for Maya’s birthday party the month before Danny died, which she’d thought was odd because he always at the very least brought the kids a present on their birthdays, but she’d been busy, distracted, and had shrugged it off. Had he known then that he was going to have Danny killed? Was that why he hadn’t wanted to show his face?

  She understood wanting to save your child. She’d never been so terrified in her life as she was when he pointed that gun at her babies. She would have thrown herself in front of a bullet for them without a second thought. But to throw your friend and partner in front of a bullet?

  She swallowed back the burn of rage. He ripped her family apart, traumatized her and her kids—not once, but twice counting tonight—all for the vague hope that a crooked man would keep his word. All for nothing, because Rick was in no better position now than before Danny died.

  As if sensing the heat of her gaze, Rick stopped pacing and spun to face her. He studied her expression, and his shoulders slumped. He deflated before her eyes like a sad balloon leaking air, but he still raised the gun. “I have to kill you now, Leah.”

  “Like you had to kill Danny.”

  “I’m sorry. I have no choice.”

  “That’s a load of shit.” The venom in her voice surprised even her. Probably stupid to talk that way to the man pointing a gun at you, but she couldn’t hold it back. “You took my husband from me. You took him from his kids. Now you’re going to make them orphans?”

  “So my kid can live.”

  “No,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, but no. Something happened to the lungs, right? Hayes is never going to let you have them because as soon as Noah is better, he loses his hold on you. Don’t you see that?”

  He opened his mouth, but no sound emerged. Instead he sagged against the wall, slid down until his butt hit the floor, and drew his knees up to his chest. He still held the phone in one hand and the gun in his other. He pressed both to his forehead and let out a ragged sob.

  Leah took the opportunity to inch around the edge of the bed. She still had Danny’s gun in a locked safe under her side of the bed. All she had to do was get close enough to press her finger to the lock.

  Rick didn’t seem to notice, so she turned around to crawl. Her heart threatened to burst out of her chest in terror, but she couldn’t sit around waiting for him to kill her on a crazy whim. If she was dying tonight, it wasn’t going to be without a fight.

  Each movement of her arm sent a lava flow of pain sizzling along her nerve endings from her bullet wound. At least the blood had slowed to a trickle down her arm. She vaguely thought it didn’t hurt as much as it probably should, recognized the lack of pain was a sign of shock, but disregarded that knowledge as unimportant. She’d worry about going into shock later.

  She was just reaching out to press her finger to the pad on the lock when the creak of a floorboard outside in the hallway had Rick bolting to his feet. His gaze darted around the room as if he was disoriented.

  Now was her chance.

  She lunged for the gun safe, shoving her finger against the pad. The lock clicked and the door popped open. She grabbed Danny’s gun as Rick let out an inhuman sound and barreled toward her. She rolled to her back, aimed, and squeezed the trigger—

  Nothing happened.

  Oh God. It wasn’t loaded. Of course Danny wouldn’t have kept it loaded. There were kids in the house.

  The weapon dropped out of her numb fingers. This was it. She’d taken a chance and had only succeeded in angering him. She saw nothing human left in his eyes as he straddled her and wrapped his hands around her throat.

  “Rick,” she gasped and pulled at his hands. “Please—”

  He released her abruptly. With her vision graying at the edges, she wasn’t entirely sure what had caused him to let go. She knew only that he was there one minute and gone the next like he’d been picked up by a tornado and swept off to Oz.

  Wait. That made no sense. That was lack of oxygen muddling her thoughts.

  Someone had knocked him off her. As her brain clicked back online, she became aware of the sounds of a fight—shoes squeaking against her wood floor, the crash of something falling off her dresser, the muffled sound of fists hitting flesh, grunts of pain as those fists landed.

  Marcus.

  It had to be.

  She coughed and swayed to her hands and knees then used the bedpost to pull herself to her feet. “Stop!”

  But they couldn’t hear her. Not with her voice a strangled croak of sound. Marcus was trying to shove Rick over to the window. Rick grabbed Marcus around the middle and drove him back against the dresser. More of her things crashed to the floor.

  “Stop!”

  Rick had dropped the phone but still held the gun, and he fully intended to use it. He turned it toward Marcus.

  No. She’d already lost Danny to this man. She was not losing Marcus, too.

  She found Danny’s gun where she’d dropped it. She heard another crash from the other side of the room and flinched, nearly fumbled the gun.

  No. No. No.

  She was too panicked. Marcus was going to die because she couldn’t focus, couldn’t make her hands stop shaking. She sucked in a breath, her sore throat burning from the rush of fresh air—and a strange sense of peace settled over her. She swore she heard Danny’s voice again patiently explaining how to work the weapon.

  She listened.

  Her hands stopped shaking. She chambered a bullet and only then realized she couldn’t fire at Rick without the risk of hitting Marcus, too. She pointed the gun at the ceiling, covered her left ear with her free hand and pulled the trigger. The bang reverberated through her arm and left her ears ringing.

  Rick flinched at the sound and Marcus took advantage of the moment of distraction. He used the dresser as leverage to kick Rick in the stomach. Rick stumbled backward—right in front of the window. The glass shattered. Rick’s eyes bulged in shock in the nanosecond before his legs collapsed out from under him.

  Leah very deliberately set down her gun on the bed as her hands started to shake again. “What—what—happened?”

  “Seth.” Marcus staggered over to her. He was bleeding from several cuts on his lip and eye, but otherwise seemed to be in one piece. He scooped her into his arms and held her tight. “I thought I was going to lose you.”

  She held him just as tight. “Me, too.”

  They were still clinging to each other when a chorus of booted feet pounded up the stairway.

  Jesse was the first through the door. He assessed them with a quick glance, then dropped to the floor beside Rick. “He’s alive.”

  “Bullshit.” Marcus stiffened and let go of her as Rick’s eyes fluttered open. “Don’t waste your time, Jess. The bastard deserves to die.”

  “Yeah, well. Whether or not he deserves it, it’s my job to keep him alive.”

  “Please, no…” Rick’s voice was a reed of sound. Blood pulsed from the neat hole near the top of his forehead and drizzled down his face in a dark line. “Need to—die. Just keep heart—pumping until hospital. Same blood type—as Noah. Could match. Please…” His eyes rolled back in his head and he started convulsing.

  “Jesus,” Jesse said and tore through his medical kit. “We’re losing him. Someone start CPR.”

  Nobody moved.

  Leah too
k a step forward.

  Marcus grabbed her hand. “Don’t. He killed Danny.”

  She sent him a cool, even glance over her shoulder. “And we’re not like him.”

  With a muttered curse, he let her go. She knelt next to Rick’s body and fisted her hands over his chest, starting compressions. Each downward thrust of her hands had shocking little fireworks of pain bursting behind her eyes.

  Marcus swore and pulled her back. She opened her mouth to protest, but she didn’t have to. He took her place next to Rick and continued compressions.

  She cradled her arm against her body to keep from further irritating the wound on her shoulder and watched the men while they worked. She saw the exact moment Rick died. She couldn’t say exactly what changed, but he was no longer there. She hoped he found peace now. And also hoped with all of her heart that his lungs were a match for his son.

  Something good had to come from all this.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  After Seth took the shot, there was no chance of keeping the local authorities away. The only way to get Rick to the hospital in time for his organs to remain viable was to have an ambulance take him. And Leah needed medical care, too. It meant a lot of hand greasing and political wheedling for Tucker Quentin and the bosses, but they got it done. They always did.

  Marcus watched the paramedics load Rick into the back of one ambulance. He would have preferred to watch the man die like he’d watched Danny die. Full circle. But Leah insisted that was not the way things were going to play out. She insisted they would abide by his wishes and keep his heart beating, his blood circulating for his son.

  She was a better person than him. Better than any of them, really. He knew all of his teammates wanted revenge for Danny as much as he did.

  He turned away just as another paramedic helped Leah into the back of a second ambulance. They had bandaged her wound and put her arm in a sling to immobilize it, but she looked steady on her feet now. Her kids were there with her, all of them safe and sound.

  It could’ve been so much worse.

  He started toward them but stopped short when his phone rang. Jean-Luc’s name showed on the screen, and the memory of Harvard’s last convo with the Cajun came rushing back. Shit. What had he and Ian done?

  “It’s over,” he answered and turned his back to Leah and the kids, his hand all but strangling the phone. “Whatever you two numbskulls are thinking of doing, it’s not worth it. Rick is dying. His lungs might be a match for his kid. It’s over.”

  “Except it’s not,” Jean-Luc replied, cheerful as ever. “We have someone here you might want to talk to. Or, you know, kill. Ian’s voting for kill—big surprise. That’s our favorite psychopath for you. But we agreed it’s your choice to make.”

  “Oh, Jesus. What have you done?”

  “We paid Hayes a visit. Turns out, he really likes male escorts. Which is hypocritical as fuck considering his campaign’s platform.” A muffled umph sounded in the background, a punch hitting soft flesh. “Politicians, am I right?”

  Marcus glanced over his shoulder at Leah again. She’d stopped paying attention to the kids and was staring at him, her concern obvious. She’d say to leave it alone. To let the law handle Hayes. His web was fast unraveling and it was only a matter of time until it fell apart completely.

  The other ambulance gave a whoop of its siren as it pulled away from the curb. Rick O’Keane was just a pawn. Yeah, he’d hired Danny’s killer and was ultimately responsible, but he never would have taken such drastic measures if Hayes hadn’t coerced him into it.

  “Text me your location,” he said to Jean-Luc. “I’m on my way.”

  When he spun around to head to his car, he found Leah standing right behind him. He nearly plowed her over. “Jesus, Lee.” As she staggered, he grabbed her good arm to keep her from falling and pulled her in for a hug. He’d wanted to hold her ever since he first saw O’Keane’s gun pointed at her, and now that she was here, he couldn’t stop himself. He pressed his face into her hair. She still smelled faintly of raspberries. “You should be on your way to the hospital.”

  “I’m fine. They said I just need some stitches.” She tilted her head back to gaze up at him and lifted her free hand to caress his face. “Where are you going?”

  He thought about lying. She wouldn’t approve. She might even hate him for his need to go, but she deserved to know. “Jean-Luc and Ian captured Clarence Hayes.”

  She drew a breath, let it out shakily. “No more killing, Marcus. Please. All this death and destruction…it’s not what Danny stood for. It’s not what he’d want.”

  “Hayes needs to be punished for what he’s done.”

  “But you don’t need to be his judge, jury, and executioner.” To his surprise, she stood up on her toes and pressed a kiss to his mouth. Right there in view of her kids. A statement as much as a plea.

  Something twisted inside him, and he set his hand on her good shoulder, gave her a little push. “The kids…”

  “They know. I told them.” Her eyes clouded, and she gave ground under his hand, backing away. “You’ll never be comfortable with this, with us, will you?”

  His throat tightened. Again, he could lie and tell her what she wanted to hear, but what was the point? “I don’t know. You’re Danny’s family.”

  “So are you,” she whispered and took another step back out of his reach, breaking their contact. “Go on, then. Do whatever it is you think you need to do. Just remember there’s no cosmic scale of justice you can balance with death. You can’t avenge Danny by killing everyone involved in his murder. It won’t change anything.”

  I can try. The thought banged around inside his head as he watched her return to the waiting ambulance.

  Sure, killing Hayes wouldn’t bring Danny back, but it would fill that empty hole left inside his chest, the one he’d spent the last eight months filling with alcohol and surfing and isolation.

  Wouldn’t it?

  Yes. It had to.

  He jumped into his car and followed the directions Jean-Luc had texted him to a house in Brentwood that had to belong to Tucker Quentin. Nobody else he knew could afford real estate in Brentwood. He didn’t even want to know how they’d gotten Hayes here.

  He walked inside and found Hayes bound to a chair in the living room. Someone had spread plastic sheeting over the white carpet underneath him. He looked…well, not like a super-villain. Nor like the sympathetic, benevolent white savior he presented to the world in his Aid First commercials. Not even like the polished politician smiling at primary rallies. No, he was simply an old man, soft and stooped, with thinning white hair and rheumy eyes.

  Ian stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a pool and well-manicured gardens, Tank at full alert by his side. Jean-Luc sat in a cushy leather chair, one leg casually thrown over the arm, cleaning his nails with one of his many knives. They both turned when the plastic crinkled under his flip-flops.

  Hayes lifted his head like it weighed a million pounds and stared at him. He unholstered his weapon but didn’t raise it. He thought he should feel something—an ugly mix of rage and excitement, or vindication, or anything. He was finally face-to-face with the man who had caused Danny’s death, but that hollow ache was still there turning his chest into an echo chamber.

  There’s no cosmic scale of justice you can balance with death.

  At his hesitation, Ian made a frustrated sound. “This was a mistake. We should’ve done it and gotten rid of the body.”

  Hayes shrank in his seat and tried to edge away as Ian walked past him. A scared little rat of a man.

  Jean-Luc pushed out of the chair. “No, this is Marcus’s kill. If he wants it.”

  “God, yes.” The words spilled out of him, nearly a sob. He raised his gun and met Hayes’s eyes, which bulged out of their sockets in terror. The tape over his mouth muffled his pleas for mercy. “
Take off the tape.”

  Ian ripped it off and Hayes gasped.

  “Please. I have family. Kids and grandkids.”

  “Danny had family, too,” Marcus said. A coldness had begun spreading from that hollow place in his chest, and his arm shook with the weight of his gun.

  “I-I don’t know a Danny.”

  “Bullshit. Daniel Giancarelli, FBI. You know exactly who he was. He got too close to you, found out too much about your side business in black-market organs. He was going to destroy you so you had his partner kill him. You might have gotten away with it, but then you tried to have his wife killed, too. You were afraid of what she knew. That was your mistake. She’s under my protection.” He glanced at Jean-Luc and Ian, then corrected himself, “Our protection.”

  “I-I don’t know what any of this about,” Hayes insisted. “I don’t know who you are.”

  “Yeah, you do.” Ian gave the chair a hard kick, making it rock on two legs before settling back to the floor.

  “We’re HORNET,” Jean-Luc added. “And we’ve taken down bigger fish than you.”

  Hayes stared at them all, assessing, calculating. He must have figured out they weren’t falling for his sad old man act because his jaw tightened, his shoulders straightened. The old man facade sluiced away to show the evil underneath. “Fuck. HORNET. I should’ve known you’d be a problem. I should’ve had you all killed.”

  “Lots have tried,” Jean-Luc said.

  “We’re not so easy to kill,” Ian said. “Unlike you. Let’s get this over with.”

  Marcus raised his weapon, laid his finger against the trigger, but he didn’t pull it. He told himself it was because he wanted answers first. “Where are Volkov and Dr. Denisova?”

  “I don’t know,” Hayes said like he’d already answered this question multiple times. “They cut and run.”

  “Is Alexander Cabot dead?”

  “If he is, they didn’t tell me. I’m just the broker. The middleman.”

  “The brains,” Marcus added. “I met Dmitry Volkov. He’s a coked-up idiot.”