by Layla Reyne
Toward that goal, they couldn’t be seen before reaching the destination. The teams moved in a grid pattern behind them. Wheeler, at the tactical helm, called out the cross streets every few blocks, and the teams checked in, confirming their locations. There were additional teams in the field, positioned near the half dozen possible locations Chris and Wheeler had scouted, but none of them had reported any activity. As they continued down Third, across King, and past the ballpark and arena, Chris began to understand why, started to suspect where they were headed.
He swiveled in his seat. “Is this another fucking setup?”
Judging by the pale faces beside and behind him, he guessed not. Holt shook his head. “We weren’t expecting this either.”
Confirmed by Hawes’s “Fucking hell” over the comm as the town car carrying their sister turned onto the road leading to the pier where MCS’s headquarters were located. “We’re following,” Hawes said.
“Beta and Command only,” Chris radioed the teams. “Traffic is too light for all of us. Wheeler, shift the Hunter’s Point tactical team to the pier here.”
“On it,” Wheeler said, then relayed the order down the line.
Chris tuned him out, trusting Scotty to do his job, and turned his attention to Hawes. “Do not go all the way to the gate, Madigan. Stealth approach. It’s our best chance for salvaging this op.”
“Fuck your op,” Hawes practically growled. “I’m not letting my sister go in there alone. What part of trap don’t you understand?”
He understood all of it, including the trap he had planned. He wasn’t about to let this op go to shit either. “We devised a tactical plan for the pier down in Hunter’s Point. We’re shifting that team up here. By boat, they’ll be here in ten minutes, max.”
“Hena can stall at the gate,” Holt said. “But that’ll probably only buy us five minutes.”
“Do it,” Chris told him. “The other teams will get here in time for backup.”
Holt relayed the request to Helena, who cleared her throat, signaling message received. Hawes smacked the dashboard of the Benz, clearly frustrated, a loud thump sounding over the comm. They’d boxed him in, hadn’t given him an opportunity to object. He ordered Avery to pull into the parking lot a building over from MCS, and Kane swung the cruiser in beside them.
Hawes bolted out of the Benz and immediately took up his pacing. Sympathy sliced through Chris’s chest—he’d be going crazy too if that were Celia—and his heart, as much as it hurt for Izzy, as much as it still stung from Hawes’s betrayal, traitorously itched to comfort the other man.
He reverted to agent mode and shut his insides down, ignoring the irrepressible attraction and the lingering doubts that maybe he too was walking into a trap. Work the tactical; that was the best way to avoid it all. And the best way to get justice for Izzy. “Do you have staff on-site?” he asked Hawes.
“Minimal. We’re between shifts at this time of night.”
“Because someone knows exactly how you operate.”
“Another fucking mole.”
“Do we think the explosives are really there?” Kane asked.
Holt flashed the countdown clock on this tablet. “Four minutes left and we find out, one way or the other.”
Chapter Nineteen
Four minutes and Helena’s expert stalling gave their small team time to converge on foot. Kane waited in the cruiser, prepared to run point as tactical arrived, while Chris, Hawes, Holt, and Avery approached via the adjacent property. Hawes picked the lock on their neighbor’s gate, its fence behind the parking lot and closer to the building, unlike MCS’s fully gated yard, and Holt hacked their alarm system, on the police chief’s orders of course. It was a risk to have Holt here too, all the Madigan siblings on-site, but he’d refused to sit on the sidelines this time, and they needed him for exactly these situations. No one knew the security around here better. They snuck inside and crept along the shadowed walkway between the building and the barrier separating the two properties.
As they neared the back, where stairs led down to the docks and water, Chris drew their group to a halt and spoke in a whisper. “We’ll be too exposed down on the dock.”
“I’ll go over first,” Hawes said, pointing up at the barrier wall that descended in a set of terraced levels.
Chris gestured at the wall itself. “If there’s a hostile on the other side, you gonna shoot ’em?”
Hawes’s jaw hardened, his blue eyes shining bright with defiance. “I don’t need a gun to take someone down.”
“I know that,” Chris replied, straining to keep his voice low and calm. “But we need every second we can get, and a quick, relatively silent takedown is necessary.”
“I’ll go over first.” Avery held up her pistol, which was fitted with a silencer. “Lighter and quieter.”
“No,” Hawes said, voice brooking no argument. “We don’t know who’s on the other side of that wall. We can’t shoot first and ask questions later. That’s not how we work anymore.”
Admiration surged in Chris’s chest until he remembered why Hawes had those rules, and all that unbidden warmth froze in his veins. Hawes stared back at him, some of the hardness in his eyes softening with regret, making the same connection Chris had, but he still wasn’t giving an inch.
Helena’s voice cut through the stalemate. “You took my phone,” she said to the driver. “If I had it, I could call our IT guy and find out what’s up with this gate.”
“Nice try,” the driver replied. “What’s the number? And no funny business. Just relay the problem.”
She rattled off a string of digits, which when dialed, rang directly to Holt’s comm. He answered, not letting on who he was, pretending instead to be a groggy IT guy just woken from sleep. She explained the issue, and he returned a, “Yes, Miss Madigan, give me just a minute.” He clicked off the comm and turned to Chris. “Boost Hawes over on the count of three.”
Now Chris was the one boxed in without a choice, Holt tapping away on his tablet as Hawes stepped closer. Close enough for his breath to tickle Chris’s cheek, for the smell of expensive aftershave to tease his nose, for Hawes’s heat to warm the chill that had overcome him a moment ago.
“One.”
Hawes put a hand on Chris’s shoulder, heat magnified tenfold, intensified by the vulnerable tremble in his grip that Hawes couldn’t hide from him. Fuck but Chris hated that hesitation, hated this ebb and flow of trust and distrust between them. Hated that Hawes was right to doubt him. They had to trust each other, at least for the next hour, if any of them were going to get through this alive. And the bearing walls were there to do that. Yes, the foundation was shaky, both of them lying about pillars critical to the other, but they’d worked well together when they’d thought their interests were aligned.
“Two.”
Chris sank into a crouch, hands cupped for Hawes’s foot, and Hawes’s grip on his shoulder tightened. Glancing up, Chris’s eyes clashed with Hawes’s, and a flood of memories washed over him like the waves lapping at the dock below. Chris in a similar position the night he sucked Hawes off against the ladder. Their positions reversed when Hawes had returned the favor in front of the couch. Their eyes locked in his reading nook, in the alley, as they’d been unable to resist each other this week, coming together again and again. Hawes trusting him. Chris had fallen for that heady gift, those blue eyes and the man they belonged to, his descent starting the second he’d walked into Danko the first time and spotted him across the room.
The man who’d killed his partner.
Fuck.
But was Hawes the same man? Nightmares of that night plagued him, yet he got up every day and changed everything about himself, his life, and his organization so nothing like that night would happen again. To atone. For Izzy. To bring her justice.
Their interests were still aligned.
“Three.”
Hawes put his foot in the cradle of Chris’s hands and released his shoulder. Trusting him. Chris powered
up and heaved the man who’d made a tangled mess of his insides, of his priorities over the wall.
A quiet thump, Hawes hitting the ground, was followed by a half-spoken, “Wha—” before the stranger’s question was cut off. Two quick slaps of skin on skin, hand-to-hand combat, then another thump.
“Clear,” Hawes said, and Chris didn’t want to consider his relief at that single word in the king’s familiar, confident tone. “Send Avery over, then come around the wall. We’ll unlock the gate.”
They gathered again outside the loading docks on the south side of the MCS facility. Hawes was shoving an unconscious merc clad in all black into a storage unit.
Chris had barely gotten out a, “Good work,” when Helena’s startled, “What the hell is going on here?” echoed over the comm.
“Exactly what was promised.”
Chris’s stomach sank, Holt hung his head, and Hawes cursed.
“Fuck,” Avery gasped. “They got to Zoe too.”
Another, deeper voice entered the fray, speaking to Helena. “A chance at the future.”
Holt’s head shot up. “Is that—”
“Carl Reeves,” Hawes said.
Chris measured his reaction, not letting on that Reeves had recently shot to the top of his suspects list. It was a risk, surprising Hawes and the teams in the field, but Chris hadn’t disclosed it in advance, not wanting to risk Hawes or anyone else eliminating his best chance at confirming the puppeteer behind Izzy’s death. “Was he on Rose’s list?” Chris asked.
Hawes shook his head. “We haven’t done business with him in years. We wouldn’t consider him a competitor in either business.”
“Why’d you stop doing business with him?”
“Wasn’t comfortable with how he was using our products and services.”
That euphemism was almost as ironic as assassins running a cold storage business. “Seems he didn’t take kindly to that.”
“But he went his way, and we went ours,” Holt said.
“Or,” Chris ventured, “he’s been circling like a shark this entire time.”
Helena asked, “And if I don’t accept?” drawing their attention back to the showdown happening in the front yard.
“I push this trigger, and the past is erased,” Reeves replied. “The future moves on without you.”
Chris’s stomach went tumbling the rest of the way to his feet. “The explosives are here.” He clicked over to Kane’s open channel. “Chief, you hearing this?”
“Just gave the order to keep the teams back at the perimeter.” He cleared his throat. “Get them out of there, Perri.”
Chris clicked off without replying, hoping the excuse of Helena speaking again would be reason enough for his nonanswer. “You think Hawes will let that happen?” she said.
“We’re not worried about the prince,” Zoe said, notably not referring to him as king. “His days are numbered.”
Hawes’s gaze snapped to Chris, and the kernel of doubt in the back of Chris’s head ballooned—burst—sending a chill snaking down his spine and out to his limbs. They were all being manipulated, moved around the board to satisfy Reeves.
“And Holt?” Helena asked.
“Will, in the end, do whatever it takes for those he loves.”
Across from them, the man in question hung his head and laid a hand over his right pec, fingers digging into the flannel that covered a lotus tattoo in honor of his daughter. For a second, Chris thought they’d lost him, but Holt lifted his dark, determined eyes, then lifted them even farther, up toward the command perch on the top floor of the facility. “I’m going up,” he said. “Depending on how they’ve wired the explosives, I might be able to do something about them from there.”
Hawes nodded. “Avery, go with him.”
They took off as Helena continued to stall, demanding proof of the explosives. Her gulp a moment later was audible. “You wired the north wing.” Where all the manufacturing took place. “That’s a fucking tinder box.”
Reeves must have shown her a live feed on a tablet. Good. Better even if the trigger was on it, because then Holt had a chance. And in case he needed more time, Chris and Hawes needed to move. Chris gestured toward the standoff at the front of the building.
“Let’s go,” Hawes agreed, falling in behind him. “Hena, we’re coming to you. Keep them talking.”
She didn’t miss a beat. “That’s a stockpile’s worth of explosives.”
“All of them,” Reeves said. “Mine now.”
“If you blow it, you won’t have any left.”
“I’ve got recruits,” Zoe said, and by the shuffling of gravel behind them, she had a good many there on-site with them. “Soldiers who’ve done the dirty work, making and exploding them for years. They’ll make more for us. We’re not afraid to sell and use them.”
“And the display will be powerful,” Reeves added. “You should be a part of it.”
“Why would I join you?”
“Why wouldn’t you? There’s nothing holding you to your current life. You could still live your life and do your job if you need to. We wouldn’t care.”
We. Was he referring to Zoe or someone else?
“She said you were the star, an asset the organization couldn’t lose.”
She.
“Amelia?” Hawes mouthed, brow raised.
Chris was likewise skeptical and mentally ticked through the options. From questioning Amelia, Chris didn’t think she was the sort to heap praise on Helena. Zoe, while in the inner circle, didn’t ever strike Chris as having that kind of worship for Amelia either. But Avery…
Pale-faced, Hawes had already reached the same conclusion and turned his gaze skyward, looking up toward his brother’s office. It was dark, no sign of movement, but Holt would know not to turn the lights on, to operate under the radar as long as possible.
Wouldn’t he?
If he ever made it up there.
Holt down wasn’t necessarily contrary to Chris’s objective, but fuck, he did not want the younger twin, who really would do anything for those he loved, his daughter especially, to go out that way. It was too cruel a fate for Lily and those who loved him, including Hawes.
“We’re set.” Holt’s voice came over the comm, and both Chris and Hawes gasped out a held breath. “I’m tapped into their signal.”
“Take these fuckers down,” Avery added, proving her loyalty once more.
Hawes grinned, that wicked, beautiful thing that made Chris’s blood run piping-hot and knotted his insides. He shouldn’t want it, shouldn’t want him, but he was irresistible. And that picture of home that had been shifting in Chris’s head? It included this Hawes, the man he was now. The emptiness Chris felt after the auction, after almost losing him, knowing if he had lost him the puzzle would be incomplete, was proof enough.
I’m yours. And he was Hawes’s.
And their common objectives—the explosives and the seller, and the person who may have set Izzy up to die, who may have set up Hawes to pull the trigger—were in their grasp.
Chris crept toward the corner of the building and fought off a full body shiver when Hawes put a steady hand to his lower back, no more trembling, trusting now, braced to enter the war with him.
“You forgot one thing,” Helena said. “I’m loyal.”
“To your family,” Zoe said.
“Exactly. To my brothers.”
“All teams, hold at the perimeter,” Kane ordered over the comm. “Be prepared to go when the lights come up.”
“You’ll die for that loyalty,” Reeves said, and pressed the button on the trigger.
Brightness exploded, but not from the bombs—from every light in and around the facility suddenly blazing to life.
The battle was on, and Chris and Hawes entered it, together.
For a few valuable seconds, everyone in the yard stood frozen, blinded by the lights and waiting for the blast that never came. It was the opening Chris and Hawes needed to bolt from behind the building and re
ach Helena, who expertly handled the Ka-Bar Hawes tossed her direction. It hit her palm with a smack, and it was like pressing Play on a recording. Everything around them snapped back into action.
At Zoe’s signal, three soldiers rushed them. Chris introduced one to his boot, kicking clear his weapon. Momentum carrying him, he planted his kicking leg and swung the other around, delivering a round house kick to the soldier’s head. The soldier crumpled in an unconscious heap.
“No promotion for that one,” Hawes said, as he yanked back another soldier’s elbows with his garrote, the angle unnatural, the crack of bones sickening. “No promotion for this one either.” With a smooth flick of the wrist, Hawes withdrew the wire and the soldier’s broken arms fell limp. Hawes kicked him in the kidneys and sent him flying face first into the pavement.
They turned in unison to Helena. Her back was to them, her knife dripping blood onto the downed soldier at her feet. He was breathing still but decorated in blooming red slash marks. “That all you got, traitor,” Helena hollered at Zoe.
Hawes spoke to the other soldiers. “They’ve fooled you. Lay your weapons down and no retribution will come to you.”
“Like Lucas, Jodie, and Ray?” Zoe countered.
“They made their decisions,” Hawes replied. “Now I’m giving these soldiers the same choice.”
Several fell back, but an equal number remained at Zoe’s side. She didn’t, however, send them in the next wave of attack. Mercs were more expendable than valuable soldiers. No shots were fired. They’d clearly been given the order to capture, not kill. Chris went hand to hand with one, and out of the corner of his eye, watched as Hawes and Helena worked in perfect tandem. Catch, slice, release. None fatal, but those hired guns weren’t getting back up anytime soon. Neither was the merc Chris finally choked out with his denim jacket.
Helena looked on approvingly. “Double denim for the win.”
