Kennedy revisited the urge to throw up. “I told you, that’s not going to happen. Anyway, protective custody isn’t necessarily a bad option. At least there, you’d be safe.”
“Only until the case falls apart,” Xander argued. “Then I’d be dead.”
“Will you stop saying that? Look, I know protective custody isn’t ideal, but—”
“There is a third option,” Sinclair interrupted, effectively snagging both her and Xander’s attention. But that look in his eyes was back, the one that told her she was going to hate the next thing he said with the burning passion of ten thousand white-hot suns, and she had to give it to the guy. He didn’t fucking disappoint.
“You could sign on as a CI, and we could spring you now. You’d have to agree to let us track you, and you’d also have to check in on a regular basis,” Sinclair added, sending the point home with a lift of his index finger. “But we’d have you under surveillance, which would keep you safe, not to mention giving us a lot of evidence to build a solid case against Rusty and whoever he’s working with.”
Sweet baby Jesus, Sinclair was out of his mind. “You want to let Xander go back to this lunatic so you can build a case against him?”
“I do. I think we can all agree that Rusty’s a threat, and this is the best chance we have to catch him before he hurts somebody.”
“By putting Xander at risk,” Kennedy cried. “Absolutely not. You need to find another way.”
Funny, neither Gamble nor Xander seemed ready to jump on the oh-hell-no bandwagon. “So, let me make sure I’ve got this straight,” Xander said slowly. “You want me to wear a wire and snitch on Rusty, and that’s how you’re going to put him away?”
Sinclair nodded. “It’s our best shot at getting the evidence we’ll need to hook him for these fires, and hopefully the attempted bombing at Station Seventeen, too. This unit has got some of the best surveillance equipment available, thanks to Capelli. But, to answer your question, yes. You might need to wear a wire. Grab downloads of whatever you can off Rusty’s laptop. Take photographs and relay a list of materials and plans to the team. All of that would be fair game.”
“And in exchange, I’d be able to go home tonight. Go back to work tomorrow. Go through my life, business as usual,” Xander said, and no, no. No, no, no, he couldn’t possibly be thinking about agreeing to this.
“Xander, are you crazy?” Kennedy hissed. “Rusty held a lighter to your arm and burned you to keep you quiet.” She swung toward Sinclair, whose expression had just flickered with surprise, and nailed him with a glare. “Xander left that little tidbit out. But if you want to know how crazy this guy is, feel free to check out the second-degree burn on my brother’s right forearm. You can take your time with that, though, since he’ll have a scar for the rest of his life.”
Sinclair sat straighter in his chair, dividing his stare between her and Xander. “Believe me, I understand Rusty’s a threat. That’s exactly why I want him off the streets, and I think this is the best way to make that happen.”
“No,” Kennedy said. “Sending him back in is way too dangerous. Rusty’s clearly not stable or predictable. You’ll have to find another way.”
She knotted her arms over the front of her T-shirt, partly to punctuate the refusal, partly to keep her heart from clattering right past her rib cage and onto the linoleum. Protective custody wouldn’t be great for the case, she knew. But intelligence worked hard cases all the time. Sinclair and Isabella and the rest of the team would figure something out. At least Xander would be safe if they put him in protective custody.
And he had to stay safe. He was all the family she had, and it was her job to take care of him.
“There is no other way, Kennedy. We need Xander on the inside.”
Kennedy had expected the protest from Sinclair. But since it had been Gamble, not the sergeant, who had delivered it, and that he’d done so with such certainty, she was thrown off-kilter, enough to make her argument stick in her windpipe. Xander and Sinclair both looked at him, but his dark, dead-serious gaze was locked in on one place.
Hers.
“If I’m going to have any prayer of making the physical evidence line up, I need your brother’s eyes and ears, and Sinclair is right. If Xander ghosts because we pull him into protective custody, Rusty will know something is up. Xander will be more at risk than ever, and the case will fall apart. We won’t even be back at square one—we’ll be so far in the hole that Rusty could burn down half the city, and Xander along with it, without any warning. We’d never see him coming. We need your brother on the inside, Kennedy. It’s the only way to catch Rusty.”
Kennedy’s throat threatened to close off, but she managed to choke out, “No. You saw that burn on his arm. You disarmed that bomb, for God’s sake! You know what Rusty is capable of.”
“I do,” Gamble agreed, his nearly black stare piercing right through her. “And we need to stop him. Xander is the key to that. If we’re going to catch Rusty, we need Xander on the inside. Nothing else will work.”
“I’ll do it,” Xander said, kicking the air from her lungs with those three simple words. She wanted to tell him no—hell, she wanted to scream it as loud as humanly possible—but she was terribly, desperately out numbered.
Gamble had made sure of that.
“I want immunity from prosecution. I’ll do retribution for the car I stole,” Xander added, nodding at Sinclair. “Whatever it takes to pay the owner back for any losses. But if I’m going to put my life on the line, then I want a clean slate. These fires weren’t my idea, no matter what Rusty says. I’m not going down for them.”
“I can talk to the ADA,” Sinclair said. “But considering the circumstances, I don’t think that’ll be a problem. We’ll have to get you set up in the system, and after that, we’ll put our heads together and come up with a plan to get you started. But after all of that shakes out, you should be able to go about your business at home and at work.”
Kennedy’s temples pounded, her heart doing its best to show them how the job was really done. “Xander, please. Think about this. It’s”—dangerous. Crazy. Highly possible you could be killed slowly and horribly by a complete psychopath—“not a good idea.”
Her brother shook his head. “Gamble’s right. It’s the only way to catch Rusty.”
Seriously, she was going to throttle that firefighter. Later. After she’d convinced her brother that this was a spectacular fail of an idea. “It’s not. If you’d just listen to reason—”
“This is reason, Ken.” Xander turned toward her. But rather than giving her a mountain of attitude, or, worse yet, blowing off her fears, he simply said, “I know you’re scared, and I’m not gonna bullshit you. You have good reason to be. But I can’t do this halfway and hope for the best, and you can’t protect me forever.”
Her brother blew out a breath, making her heart corkscrew against her ribs. “I know, but—”
“No,” Xander interrupted, and even though his voice was quiet, the words hit Kennedy with all the force of a Mack truck on a steep downhill grade. “I screwed up, Ken. I got myself into this, fair and square. Now, I need to get myself out.”
He looked at Gamble, then Sinclair, and, oh God, this couldn’t be happening. “If you need me to become an informant in order to catch Rusty, I’ll do it.”
“Great,” Sinclair said, pushing up from his chair. “I’ll go ahead and write up the paperwork and call ADA Kingston so we can get started as soon as possible. We’ve got an arsonist to catch.”
14
Gamble had endured all sorts of hellish conditions in his life. The Crucible at boot camp. The heat and stench and danger of more third-world countries than he could count. Buildings that had burned down over his head as he’d desperately searched for the civilians trapped inside their own literal version of hell.
But none of that held a candle to the anger that had vibrated out of Kennedy the second her brother had agreed to sign on as a CI this morning, and had continued to
fill the space between them as Xander’s paperwork had been processed and Gamble had been officially signed on to the case.
Other than a few glares he’d bet good money she hadn’t been able to help, Kennedy hadn’t spared him so much as an extra glance for the rest of the time they’d spent at the Thirty-Third, and she damn sure hadn’t said goodbye to him when they’d parted ways outside of the intelligence office eight hours ago. Not that, at least on the surface, he didn’t get it. His brain reminded him she’d practically raised her brother, and that she just wanted him safe. Gamble didn’t want the guy in harm’s way, either—Rusty definitely seemed like a diabolical SOB, and they’d barely scratched the surface of the investigation. Gamble had a feeling things would get a fuckload more dangerous before they got better, so yeah, Kennedy hadn’t been wrong when she’d said-slash-yelled that there were a whole lot of chances for things to go tits up with her brother signing on as an informant.
Even if Xander had been right to say yes, and Gamble had meant every syllable of what he’d said.
He needed Xander’s eyes and ears if they were going to make the case. And there was a negative thirty-seven percent chance that Gamble wasn’t going to do every single thing within his power to take down the bastard who had threatened his fire house.
After all, he had a family, too. They just weren’t related by blood.
Letting go of a slow breath, Gamble used the towel around his neck to get his shower-wet hair somewhere in the vicinity of damp. He skinned into a pair of black boxer briefs, then the jeans he’d grabbed from his bedroom, not bothering with a shirt because, well, it was August, he lived alone, and really, what was the frigging point? Not much formality in the fact that he was about to eat leftover Thai food for dinner and read through the case notes he’d picked up from the office of arson investigation on his way home from the gym. Not much personal connection, either, but at least he’d learned to live without that a long time ago.
Even though he hadn’t stopped wanting it since the second Kennedy had put her mouth on his.
Right. The same mouth she probably used to curse your name all afternoon, Gamble reminded himself before shaking off the unexpected thought and even more unexpected shiver it had sent down his spine. Hanging up his towel, he hit the bathroom light switch with the flat of his palm and heel-toed it into his bedroom, his sights set firmly on the case. Somewhere out there, closer than any of them would like, was a nasty arsonist with plans to set fire to a whole lot of city real estate. He really needed to focus on the shit he could control and get over the stupid pang he felt every time he thought of Kennedy goddamn Matthews, once and for all.
He was halfway down the hall when the banging on his front door stopped him dead in his tracks. His pulse went through the ozone layer at the same millisecond his gray matter sorted and discarded all the viable possibilities, from a misguided delivery guy to overzealous Girl Scouts trying to offload that last case of Thin Mints. Gamble had chosen this apartment building for its solid reputation and even more solid security systems. Everyone who didn’t have a keycard had to get buzzed in by a resident. Period. Hard stop.
So who the fuck was going all Muhammad Ali on his front door?
The banging went for round two, and okay, yeah, he’d had enough of this shit. His Glock 19M was in his bedside table drawer—one of the perks of being highly trained and living alone—but he sincerely doubted that anyone who was aiming for bodily harm would knock, even aggressively, so he left it behind. Gamble was all for personal safety, but wasting precious seconds to grab a sidearm he might not need, or worse yet, recklessly drawing a deadly weapon without knowing all the facts of a situation, weren’t on his great, big list of hell yes.
Especially since he could strip the last breath from an intruder with nothing more than his goddamned thumbs if the occasion called for it.
Cranking his shoulders into a firm line around his spine, Gamble kicked his bare feet into motion and headed toward the source of the racket. Taking care to keep his center mass away from the middle of the door, he angled a lightning-fast look through the peep hole until the person on the other side of the wood and steel registered. The burst of relief in his chest only lasted long enough for him to pop the slide bolt and swing open the door, though, because as soon as both actions were in the past tense, a very fiery, very familiar brunette had invaded every last inch of his personal space.
“I’ve spent the last eight hours telling myself I wouldn’t come over here and do this, but screw that. I’m too mad at you to keep quiet,” Kennedy said in a rush, and Gamble’s brain was so inside-out at the sight of her that he replied with the first thought that popped into the stupid thing.
“How did you even find out where I live?”
Without so much as a blink of her blazing green eyes, she said, “I told Isabella you left your phone at the precinct today and that I wanted to come drop it off.”
“You could have just asked me,” Gamble told her. They’d exchanged numbers last night, and at least it would’ve spared his adrenal gland the unnecessary workout.
Another not-happening on the blink. “I could have, but I’m too mad to do anything other than yell at you.” She pressed forward, her palms planted firmly over the low-slung denim hugging her hips. “After everything I told you about my brother and how he and I grew up, how could you do this to him? To me?”
Gamble’s brain engaged in an epic battle with his baser instincts as he tried like fuck to balance the question against the fact that Kennedy now stood so close to him that her breasts had just brushed over his bare chest and her mouth was close enough to claim with a simple shift of his weight.
“Do what?” he asked, pausing just long enough to make sure the door had swung shut behind her the way it was supposed to before returning his focus to the matter at hand.
Or make that, in his hands, because Kennedy hadn’t budged one bit from his front nine. “Are you kidding me? How could you have encouraged Sinclair to turn my brother into an informant like that when you know how dangerous Rusty is?”
“Your brother didn’t have a hell of a lot of choices, Kennedy.” Anger pulsed, quick and hot in Gamble’s veins, but she met it with emotion of her own.
“He had plenty of choices. He could’ve gone into protective custody. Or taken some sort of deal from the ADA. Or, God, anything other than flip on this lunatic, who—news flash—already has zero qualms about killing him.”
Gamble dug way down deep for composure he wasn’t sure he had, especially when it came to the woman currently standing toe to toe with him. “Chances are, Xander would go to prison that way.” A fact Sinclair likely hadn’t come out with only because he hadn’t needed the leverage.
And one that, from the look of things, wouldn’t have swayed Kennedy even if he had. “His being in prison is better than him being dead!”
“Not if Rusty walks,” Gamble ground out. “You think guys like that have no reach in prison? Jesus, Kennedy, where do you think the gang leader is who hired Rusty to make that bomb in the first place?”
Well, that got her attention. For a heartbeat, anyway. “Xander would still be safer that way.”
Gamble shook his head. He might not like the truth, here, but that didn’t make it any less real. “No, he wouldn’t, and you know it.”
“What I know is that Xander is out there, sitting in his shitty apartment in The Hill, probably hungry, definitely in pain, and one hundred percent in danger because you and Sinclair will use whatever means necessary to get what you want.”
Just like that, Kennedy’s chin hiked right back into fuck-you territory, and the control Gamble had been white-knuckling slipped a notch.
“Nobody strong-armed Xander into becoming an informant, and it’s not as if Sinclair and I are looking to use him for personal gain. We’re talking about putting a serial arsonist behind bars.”
“At what cost?” Kennedy asked, her voice pitching higher with rising emotion. “You’re talking about his safety.
”
The waver that had accompanied her words took the razor-wire route directly under Gamble’s skin, and he inhaled on a three-count before answering with, “And that’s something that was made very clear to your brother before he willingly signed on for this.”
“He’s only twenty-three. He has no idea what he willingly signed on for,” she snapped. “You don’t understand. He can’t do this. He can’t.”
The tension that had been simmering in the depths of Gamble’s chest ever since Xander had told them that bomb at the fire house was Rusty’s handiwork surged upward, moving Gamble forward without his brain’s permission. Heart slamming in his throat, his ears—fuck, everywhere—he shifted forward until his face was only inches away from Kennedy’s, close enough that he could hear the catch in her breath.
Yet, still, he didn’t stop. “Do you know what that bomb would’ve done if it had detonated, Kennedy? I’m not just talking about the deaths or the damage,” he added in a pre-emptive strike against the obvious answer. “I mean, do you know what happens? Can you even conceptualize what it does to a human body? Or that these fires could do the same thing if someone gets trapped inside these buildings Rusty is trying to burn down?”
The three weeks of flashbacks and unspeakable nightmares Gamble had endured after he’d disarmed that bomb came crashing back, and he didn’t think. Just spoke.
“People don’t always die right away. Not even when they lose limbs in bombings. Not even when their injuries are bad enough that they should, or”—he pulled in a breath that was quicksand in his lungs—“when they do later, anyway. People die because guys like Rusty decide they care more about what they want than they do about human lives. So, yeah. I’ll do whatever it takes to stop him, and I’ll do it without apology. I get that Xander means a lot to you.”
Again, Gamble broke off, but damn it, he couldn’t stop the rest from pouring out. “I get it, because I’ve been there, too. I’ve lost people who meant…a lot. But we can’t nail Rusty without Xander’s help. Just because I pushed for that doesn’t mean I don’t get it, Kennedy. I really fucking do. No one wants Xander hurt. We’re all on the same side, you know?”
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