King of Hearts (Deuces Wild Book 1)

by Irish Winters

  Vinnie’s kid’s foot slipped, jerking Isaiah’s head nearly off, stretching his neck, and lifting the chair legs up from the concrete. The poor kid flailed and spun. He grunted and pitched, his eyes bugging out until he regained a semi-solid foothold, his slippery shoes braced at the finials at each side of the chair crest. The rude awakening startled Isaiah, his wild-eyed gaze shifting back and forth as he quickly assessed his predicament. He ended with his dark eyes riveted on Tucker.

  Tucker never made a sound, just grunted at Simon. “So you’re here to end me—is that right, Siegel? Is that what this is about? Revenge? And just how did I offend you?”

  Melissa couldn’t believe the insolence packed into his tone. He cocked his head like a prizefighter before a brawl, and suddenly, she felt it. The power. The danger. It roiled off Tucker like heat waves on an asphalt road in July. His spine stiffened and yet his shoulders had relaxed. The tight cords of a powerful predator flexed beneath his sweat-stained shirt. She didn’t know how, but she knew with certainty. Deuce and Isaiah were going to live.

  A quiet snort expelled from Tucker’s flared nostrils as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He’d transformed into a living culmination of his years worth of training and experience, a veritable I’m-going-to-kick-your-ass father.

  Beads of sweat trickled down the valley between her breasts, inciting an uncommonly feminine response to her man at the worst possible time. She fought off the fierce desire to caress the back of his proud, suntanned neck. To bump her hip to his just to be sure he knew she was there for him, and that she’d fight to the end with him.

  Simon Siegel didn’t stand a chance.

  “Ending you won’t get me those girls back, Chase. It took me awhile to track you down, but now, I know how to hurt you.” He took three steps to Vinnie and stuck the tip of his boot to the chair leg. “Let’s play.”

  Even as Siegel curved the sole of his boot to Vinnie’s chair leg, taunting Tucker to take the kill shot, Tucker recognized the signs. The man was a clone of bullies the world over. He needed the drama. The dare. The puffed-up sense of power when cowards held the lives of weaker prey in their grip. When they thought they were invincible.

  Tucker’d seen the same evil glint in his old man’s eyes before one of the many thrashings he’d endured as a kid. Siegel wasn’t going to tip that chair over. He needed Tucker to take that first shot, to make that fatal decision for him. That way the outcome would be Tucker’s fault, not his. Siegel had a death wish and Tucker intended to fulfill it, but first...

  He had to know. “You know my ex-wife.” Tucker made it a statement. It was the only thing that made sense and explained how Siegel knew where to find Vinnie. Nicole finally had what she wanted. A hit man. Deuce’s being there at the same time was just bad dumb luck.

  The Navy was a tight knit family, but family was still family, full of as many friends who’d give you the shirt off their backs as enemies who’d stab you in the back. Tucker might not know all Navy SEALs, but he wouldn’t put it past Nicole to have used that family connection to serve her grasping need for power. God, how long had she known Siegel? How far did her web of lies and deceit stretch? All the way to Cambodia? Was she Siegel’s partner in the sex trade? Was that her real motive for moving to Vietnam? Worse...

  Who worked for who? Was Nicole Siegel’s partner or his boss? That actually made sense. She must’ve had him on speed dial. The clawing reach of his ex shocked even Tucker, a hardened warrior. He’d let Nicole into his life. He’d given her all of himself, his heart, his paycheck, and his kid. There was a time he’d told her everything the way husbands and wives did, and she’d used that intimacy against him.

  Siegel answered with a grunt, as if his knowing Nicole was a foregone conclusion, and suddenly it was. Tucker’s heart skipped a beat. God, he was the dumbest shit in the world. This entire hangman’s game was simply Nicole at work again, moving on. She was clearing her game board, ending the men she could no longer bleed before she moved on to another. She’d said it herself. Love was in the eye of the beholder.

  The truly scary thing was she’d orchestrated this hit from inside a Vietnamese jail cell. Even that made sense. Tucker almost felt sorry for the jail guards. Almost.

  “You won’t like what you’ve got once you’ve got it,” he warned Siegel, knowing the man was too far gone to understand that Nicole was no prize, but reaching out to him just the same. Nicole was that insidious black widow spider. Attractive and slick, she’d suck Siegel dry and then kick his hollowed-out shell of a corpse aside the second she found someone better—like that jail boss.

  But like attracts like—birds of a feather and—all that bullshit. Siegel had obviously worked hard at his crimes. He deserved Nicole. “Don’t matter to me one way or the other. I’ll be long gone and living the life. You’ll be ashes.”

  Tucker swallowed hard at the disgust creeping up his throat, disgust at Nicole for using Deuce to get to him. Disgust at himself for thinking she was ever worth one second of his life.

  “What the hell are you waiting for? You can take him, Tuck,” Isaiah all but spat into his mind. “Kill the son-of-a-bitch. Don’t worry about me. I’m expendable, not your son. Save Deuce!”

  “Shut up, kid. There’s no way you can mentally convince him to blow his own brains out and let us go?”

  Isaiah’s nostrils flared. “I’m psychic, not a magician. Save Deuce!”

  “Just thought I’d ask. Guess I’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way then.”

  “It’s been good working with—”

  “Shut the fuck up, Zaroyin.” Tucker shot his buddy a barely perceptible brow-lift of scorn. He’d already used his meched-up bionic eye to survey the backstop for another sniper, some guy on his belly out there in the leafy jungle beyond Vinnie’s elegant estate. Someone desperate enough to forget to smudge his sweaty brow and the damp patch of skin above his lip. Someone in too big of a hurry to remember that a good sniper always covers the sharp and shiny lens of his scope. Someone stupid enough to follow the likes of Siegel.

  Tucker needed more time to make a more accurate judgment call, time he didn’t have. “Hey, kid. Can you get a sense if there’s another guy laying for us? I need to be sure.”

  Isaiah’s expression went blank, but he came back quickly with, “Just Siegel. He’s pissed you killed his friends, Jackman and some guy named Oreo. Most of all, he’s pissed you killed a kid named Tristan. You left him lying in the jungle.”

  “Oh. Him.” Tucker remembered the scrawny kid in cammies, the one with the wispy excuse for a beard. The kid he’d lied to when he’d said he could save him. “Tristan, huh? Shit. Now I feel bad.”

  “Don’t. Kill this bastard, damn it. Kill the son-of-a-bitch before he ends Deuce!”

  Tucker cocked his neck. “I must be rubbing off on you. You sound like me.”

  “Just tell me when.”

  “Copy that, kid.” Tucker kept his cool. This was your basic no-win situation. Either way, one of these kids would not land on his feet. Necks would get stretched. Someone would die.

  Worse, Tucker had brought Melissa straight into Nicole’s hellish game with him. He could hear her short, sharp intakes of breath behind him. He could hear her heart jackhammering in her chest. Despite the barrel of her rifle aimed at Siegel, he knew Melissa had never killed a man before. He felt her rising panic for the thing that was to come. This was go time, but he was damned if he’d let her suffer the after-effects from taking a life. Not his woman. She needed to stay as pure and as sweet as she was.

  If there was one thing Tucker understood besides ballistics and the sea, it was baseball. A good pitcher controlled the game. He knew his batters. Their stats. Their strengths. Their weaknesses. He knew the base runners, the prima donnas, the guys most prone to hit a sacrifice fly or to swing at everything within the strike zone when they’d lost their cool. He knew which player’s batting average hovered at three hundred. Or four hundred. Whose on-base percentage was worth wo
rrying about. Worth ruining.

  He knew who was on first. Itching for second. Diving for third.

  And a SEAL knew a bastard when he saw one. They all looked like Simon Siegel. Shifty. Sneaky. Over-confident losers. Every single one of them.

  Tucker rolled his shoulder without moving his sights off ground zero. The bases were loaded. He set up his first shot. His second. His third and his fourth. It could work provided everything went according to plan, which would be a miracle.

  Time to batter-up.

  “When,” he sent covertly to Isaiah.

  The kid blinked hard, signaling message received. He stiffened his shoulders and straightened his spine to take a hit that could very possibly break his neck if things went bad. “I’m ready. Do it.”

  “You’re a SEAL,” Tucker said evenly to Siegel, for once in his life not a ripple of anger or vengeance up his sleeve. Not a spike of adrenaline. The boys didn’t have much strength or fortitude left. Things had to happen soon.

  “Was.” Siegel snorted in derision. “Not now. It’s just plain old me standing here gonna kick your ass, Chase. What you see is what you get. I’m the last man you’ll ever lay eyes on.”

  “I see a traitor. A liar. A dead man.”

  “I don’t give a fuck what you see,” Siegel shot a snarl back at him instead of a ballistic round that would’ve carried more weight. The fool.

  Tucker wasn’t there to chat, only to play games. “Batter up,” he said so softly that Siegel cocked his arrogant head just a smidge to the left, like he hadn’t quite heard.

  BLAM! Tucker let him have it. Head shot. Pink mist. Then again. Another round. Just to prove he’d meant what he said. Why settle for a single tap when a double-tap sealed a better deal? Why do a half-assed job?

  Tucker moved with lightning speed. Shifting his weapon on his predetermined targets, he fired two more rapid rounds, one at the rope stretched above Deuce, the other at the rope above Vinnie’s kid’s head. Vinnie made the mistake of ducking at the thunderous report at the same instant that Deuce landed on his feet. The reflex action meant Vinnie’s neck got stretched before the rope disintegrated under the energy of Tucker’s red-hot round.

  Vinnie’s kid fell backward when Tucker nipped his noose. In anticipation, Isaiah had pushed up to his feet and out of his chair as far as his ties would let him reach. It was barely enough, but his neck didn’t get stretched like it had before. That was a good decision since Vinnie’s kid landed on his ass, rolled to his side, crying and blubbering because he was scared to death. Poor little guy.

  Just like Tucker planned: One neck stretched, albeit not enough to kill Vinnie. One kid on his butt, but still alive. And one bastard dead, precisely what Siegel deserved.

  Score: Tucker, four for four. He’d taken four shots without getting any of his designated targets killed, but Siegel wasssss… out!

  Isaiah collapsed back in his seat, a little worse for wear but breathing. “Thanks, Tuck,” he projected. “I really love you, man. I mean it.”

  “My pleasure,” Tucker sent back to the FBI’s newest covert operator.

  This was why Tucker loved who he was and what he did. He knew this game of real men who laid down their lives for their brothers. Of warriors who pushed back against the atrocities of the devil and sometimes won. He’d played it enough. He’d ended skirmishes and firefights. He’d taken down assholes and saved the people who’d mattered, and he’d sent the bastards to hell. And he’d do it again.

  Vinnie’s kid crawled over to his dad while Deuce scrambled to loosen Isaiah’s feet and wrists. Melissa was having some kind of an emotional breakdown at his six, so Tucker grabbed her under his arm where she belonged and let her burrow her face into his shirt.

  “I wasn’t much help, was I?” she asked tearfully, still shaking, but her weapon safely secured, its barrel pointed toward the sky. “Everything happened so fast, and I... I meant to shoot Simon, but I just stood there and watched.”

  Just the way I planned it. He pressed a chaste kiss to her forehead, saving the heat for later when they were finally alone. “You did great, babe.”

  “Dad!” Deuce plowed into him, his head to the other side of his old man’s chest, crying like a baby. And it was okay. Even hard men cried once in a while.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “Mr. Chase.” Vinnie stuck his hand out, his scuffed cheek bloody and repentance shining in his eyes, his other arm fastened around his kid’s shoulder. “I can’t ever repay you for what you did here today.”

  Tucker grasped the unexpected handshake and jerked the guy up close and personal. Nose to nose. Father to father. “If you ever hit my son again, I’ll rip your fucking head off, you understand?”

  Vinnie nodded, his head bobbing fast and hard. “Yes, sir. I was wrong. I know that now. I’m sorry for what I did to Devlin. He didn’t deserve how I treated him.” He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple ratcheting up and down in his throat like it was stuck on the apology. “I’ve made some bad mistakes. I’m going to fix them. All of them.”

  “His name is Deuce, damn it! You do know your wife’s in jail, don’t you?” Tucker released the man’s sweaty hand, still playing hardball, his voice filled with acid. “She killed that kid you had beat the other day. His name was Luke, you bastard. He’s lying on a slab at the city morgue, and it’s your fault. You put him there as much as she did! You should be in jail with Nicole for what you did to him. Shit. He was just a kid.”

  “You’re right,” Vinnie said with a whole lot more humility than Tucker expected, his eyes on the ground, not daring to meet Tucker’s wrath.

  Tucker expected some pushback after his verbal attack, but Vinnie only waved one of the police officers who’d responded to the emergency call over to him. “I promise. I have means. I can’t help Luke anymore, but I will change. I will be a better boss to my people.”

  Tucker growled, not buying one word of this crap. Talk was cheap. “They’re not your people, you moron. They’re moms and pops and, God, most of them are kids. Why’d you do it?” His temper spiked. “How does an adult male torment children just to make a fast buck?”

  Vinnie closed his eyes, his shoulders heaving with a deep breath while the officer waited on him. At last he met Tucker’s glaring gaze. “I didn’t used to be like this,” he said weakly.

  Like that meant anything. Tucker turned away before he punched the guy in the face. Vinnie had connections. He deserved a helluva lot more than what he’d get out of this ugly fiasco. Changing business practices did not atone for endangering children’s lives the way he had. The man was full of shit.

  “Officer,” Vinnie said as Tucker walked away. “I have a confession to make.”

  It would have been nice if it were true. Tucker didn’t hang around to find out.

  Police officers and detectives were everywhere, as well as the local medical examiner. Tucker had been separated from Deuce, Melissa, and Isaiah long enough during the questioning phase. He was weary and the adrenaline rush had worn off, leaving him cranky and tired. He wanted out of there, his son back safely on the boat, and Melissa in his bed, preferably beneath him. “Are we free to go yet?” he asked the nearest officer.

  The officer turned to Tucker. His gaze narrowed. One brow lifted. His ugly face twisted into a sour lemon expression. “You,” he hissed.

  Damned if it wasn’t that prick from jail. The guard who’d threatened Tucker with a slow death the next time he saw him. Tucker raked a hand over his hair. If he didn’t have bad luck, he’d have no luck at all.

  “Yeah. Me.” Tucker stuck out a hand, wishing he hadn’t tossed those keys into the river.

  The guy had the nerve to fumble a metal whistle up from his shirt. He puckered his cheeks and blew it in Tucker’s face. What could Tucker do? He growled at his own stupidity, looked for his son and his wife-to-be, and prepared to be cuffed. Shit. Just shit.

  “Officer,” Vinnie called across the yard. “Excuse me, Officer!”

  Tucker’s worst
nightmare snarled something at Vinnie before sharp words in their language and rapid hand signals commenced, flying back and forth. Tucker held his breath while Melissa joined him, her hand shackling his forearm, the other splayed between his shoulder blades. “Oh, my gosh, what a racket. What’s up?”

  He had to tell her. “It looks like I’m going back to jail.”

  The officer didn’t look too happy, but he also turned away. Vinnie shook his head. “No, Mr. Chase. You’re not going to jail, not after what you did here today. You’re free to stay in my country as long as you want. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of this misunderstanding. Thank you again for all you have done for me and my sons.”

  Speaking of which...

  “I thought you had two kids?” Tucker asked. “Where’s your other boy?”

  Vinnie’s face blossomed into a tired smile. “He’s with my mother today. There’s a ball at the American Embassy later this week. He loves to shop, so Grandmama took him with her.”

  Tucker winked at the boy standing beside Vinnie. “Make your old man proud, kid.”

  The young man nodded shyly.

  “Mr. Chase...” Vinnie paused while the unhappy police officer stood at his side waiting, cooling his jets. Vinnie extended his hand to Tucker again. “I would very much like to repay you for your kindness. Please. Let me prove I can be half as good a father as you are.”

  That hit Tucker hard. He’d never been called a good father. The courts in Virginia certainly hadn’t thought of him in that light. “Just take good care of your kid.”

  He shook Vinnie’s hand again. This time, he meant it.

  It was their last night in Vietnam, and Melissa was beyond tired. Tucker had persuaded Jacob’s uncle to take the junk out into the South China Sea. Tucker was her quintessential guide for all things sailing. She now knew the lovely orange sail billowed tight with wind overhead was called a lugsail. Of Chinese origin, the rigid horizontal ribs spanning the full width of the canvas that made it look like bat wings were called battens. All sails depended on the spar of the ship, the mast. She stood at the bow. The diesel engine was aft. And she knew a bunch of other nautical jargon she’d never known until then that she wanted to learn.