“Darius was afraid of heights.”
“Really?”
“His whole life. He got past it—but he said it was always his nemesis.”
“Thanks for telling me that, Dare.”
“Welcome. There’s a lot more I’ve got to fill you in on. There were eight of them altogether. Just happened that way, but Adele always though it was poetic.”
“Were there other women?”
“Just her. She was killed yesterday after coming to tell me you were in trouble.” The thought of her lying on the ground made his throat tighten. She would’ve told him that this wasn’t the time for sentiment, which was reserved for the dead of night when the mission was over, and then you killed it with strong whiskey. Drown the sorrow before it drowned you.
“And this Richard Powell . . . he knows about Section 8?” Avery said, and realization slowly dawned on Dare . . . and on Avery.
“The men you killed—,” he started.
“Are the men sent by Powell?” she finished it as a question, and there was surprise in her voice, since she’d obviously just come to that conclusion with Dare’s information. “Do you think they tortured her, trying to get information about my father, to see what he’d told her about Section 8?”
Dare forced his eyes to stay on the road, kept his breathing slow and steady. “Maybe.”
“Still think I should be in jail?” she asked quietly, and he shook his head no. “I didn’t know I’d be dragging anyone else in. I didn’t know anything about the group. I only knew I was trying to avenge my mom’s murder.”
“I was already dragged into it,” he told her. “You heard Darius—I’ve been marked for death, same as you.”
“All because Darius was part of Section 8?” she asked, and he nodded. “Are you part of it too?”
“No. There was only one S8, and they’d disbanded long before I would’ve been able to work with them.” It had been a moment in time. It had been so perfect . . . and it had all gone so horribly wrong. “On what was supposed to be their last mission—twenty years ago—they lost a man. Almost lost Darius. He left Simon behind and then got a call that S8 was officially disbanded.”
“But they kept working.”
“Yes. Plenty of work for operatives like that,” he agreed. And whether he’d wanted to or not, his formative years had been spent learning from each of them. Adele in particular had come in most useful with her love of demolition—she took it to an almost spiritual level with the way she wired the bombs, predicted the blast outcome.
Darius was the mastermind, second only to S8’s handler—he kept the team together, let them work on their individual strengths and made up for their weaknesses. And he’d never replaced Simon—they’d continued to work one man down.
And now they were all gone.
“Did you know their families?”
“No. We were all kept apart, for good reason.”
“So you couldn’t be used against one another.”
“That was the theory.”
Darius had been more secretive than ever these last years, like he knew letting Dare in on everything would sign his death warrant. As it was, the burden of the legacy of Section 8 was falling firmly on Dare, even though he knew only the sketchiest of details on the missions, where the bank accounts were, who S8’s enemies had been.
But the name Powell . . . that was new.
Avery was telling him, “But we’re part of it . . . because we were born to an S8 member.”
“Trust me—you don’t want to be a part of it. It’s not conducive to staying alive. Anyone who had a connection to S8 is being systematically hunted and killed for their knowledge, no matter how much or how little.”
“Doesn’t the CIA care?”
“S8 fell off their radar a long time ago.”
“But not off this Powell guy’s,” Avery pointed out.
“I’m guessing he was their handler.”
“You don’t know for sure?”
“They were never supposed to find out. I’m guessing Darius did, and that bought him a world of trouble.”
We’re running for our lives,
he wanted to tell her, but she knew. No reason to say the words out loud.
At some point, they were going to have to turn around and run toward the enemy, just like Simon had done. Sometimes that trick didn’t work. But sometimes it did.
“Can we stop Powell?”
“We don’t have much choice.”
“We could hide.”
He’d been doing that, but nothing had changed. The evil was still festering, and if he didn’t try to stop it, he couldn’t live with himself. “We’ll get Powell.”
“Don’t you think he knows we’re coming for him?”
“Sometimes that’s the best way.”
She nodded and felt her resolve steel like a palpable force. “We’re kids of Section 8—we need to live up to the group’s rep, right?”
“No, we don’t,” Dare told her, heard the fierceness in his voice for the first time in more than a year. “We need to exceed it.”
Chapter
Three
M
ental
institution or jail—the choice was an easy one for Jem, except for the parts when they tied you down and tried to shock the shit out of your brain.
Not that it ever did anything for him but get him hard, which really freaked the docs out, and that alone made it worth the pain.
This stint had only been three months so far. Before this his crimes had always been wiped from the system, thanks to the CIA.
But this time, the CIA wasn’t coming to break him out. His handler had warned him that he’d pushed it too far, and given Jem’s history, the only concession made was to put him in the mental ward while he recovered from his GSW.
After that, he was headed to prison, as the government disavowed all knowledge of him.
He’d known they could do so. Hell, it made the risk that much more intriguing. And if he didn’t have family troubles, he’d probably serve the few years so he could walk away a free man.
He had six months left, his handler had told him earlier in the week.
“And then what? You gonna put me back in the field?”
“You know that’s impossible, Jem. Serve your time in jail, find some peace and then—”
Jem had hung the phone up and walked away. Finding peace was not only impossible; it wasn’t on his life list of things to goddamned do.
He was on his own, and anyway, it kept his skills in shape. Amazing what you could learn from crazy people, especially when you had that gene inside you. Letting it run free for a while was as necessary as a wolf running during the full moon. Inevitable and impossible to stop.
“Jeremiah,” one of the student nurses called, and he glanced up from the bench he’d been lying on.
“Jem,” he corrected, held out his hand for the pills, took them without water and opened his mouth wide to show her that he hadn’t hidd
en them under his tongue.
Damn right he took them—they gave him a mild jolt, but he’d always been able to handle substances like this without many side effects. The crazy outpaced it all.
The student nurses were the best because they believed the patients. He loved to watch them get led through the floors, only to find themselves trapped between a locked door and giggling patients.
Now he watched one of them try to get a woman to calm down and take her meds. But Bettie would go down fighting—slapped the nurse and threw a chair while Jem watched and waited for his out.
When the orderly tried to stop her, she swung another chair, which Jem caught and held.
Bettie turned to him. “I’m the Queen of England!”
“Yes, you are,” Jem agreed solemnly. He let the orderly get close to her and then he backed away with the man’s keys in his pocket.
Three locks later, he was out the door and in his younger brother’s car. Key had been cleaning up after him—and trying to save him—since they were little.
“Never asked you to,” Jem would tell him, but Key would keep trying.
One of these days, he might not be there.
But today, he was. “Dude, get the hell out of here.”
Key glanced in the rearview at the orderlies and security guard headed toward the car. “I thought you said you were being discharged.”
“I said I was ready to be discharged. Are you going to argue semantics, brother, or are you going to drive?”
Key muttered some choice curses under his breath, but he ultimately floored it out of the lot.
“Get the net.” Jem laughed, turned the radio all the way up and opened the window. “Fresh fucking air. Got any cigarettes?”
Key just shot him a look and pointed to the glove compartment. “I don’t understand why they keep putting you back into these places. Nothing ever changes.”
Jem drew a few puffs on the cigarette, silently agreeing with Key. But in reality, he forced the CIA’s hand in most of these cases, returned in the hopes that someone could fix him, could explain the burning need to do crazy, dangerous things like they were the air he breathed.
He wanted normal, but as every shrink since the dawn of time had pointed out, normal was relative.
The one thing they did agree on was that he was just enough outside of that box for them to keep agreeing to take him in.
How all this crazy—as his family always called it—skipped Key, he’d never know. But he was grateful for it.
“What did you do this time?”
“Nothing major,” Jem assured him, which he knew was no reassurance at all. “Did I screw up your leave?”
“I’m out.”
Key had been a great Ranger—and he’d been up for a promotion to the Delta Teams once he passed the necessary tests. Jem didn’t know if Key knew that and decided not to even ask. No matter what, he’d done Jem proud.
It had been his brother’s life, and now Jem needed to be there to put the pieces back together, before the family curse took out Key at the knees.
If it was a rescue Key needed, that’s what he’d get. If he needed to drink and fuck his way through New Orleans before he felt better, they could do that too. But Jem would be damned if he’d watch Key self-destruct and sit by and do nothing about it.
“I don’t understand it. You saved a guy’s life,” he said finally. He hadn’t been able to help Key all that much. Jem had tried to pull some strings, but he’d met with a hell of a lot of resistance, enough to make him suspicious that this was far more complicated than Key simply disobeying a direct order.
“The SEAL didn’t bother to show up to testify,” Key said tightly. “Didn’t answer letters. No one could find him to serve the subpoena.”
“Sure he’s alive?”
“When I find him, he’ll wish he wasn’t,” Key muttered.
Jem didn’t bother to try to talk Key out of that—didn’t tell him that he was out of a job as well. Until you lost it all, you had no idea how much you were willing to give. Owning next to nothing had always worked for Jem. Having some money in the bank for emergencies was also important. “Where are we headed?”
Key gave a small twist of a grin. “Home.”
Most of New Orleans was still shot to shit, which left it a perfect hiding spot for vagrants and lawbreakers.
Luckily, he could be both.
Chapter
Four
Two mont
hs later
New Orleans
T
he cabdriver didn’t want to drop her there, asked her three times if she was sure she had the right place.
“Really, I’m fine,” Avery told him firmly, watc
hed him press his lips together in the rearview mirror as he pulled over in front of the address Dare had given her.
She was fine, because after everything she’d been through, she’d be damned if anyone would stop her now, no matter how hard they were prepared to try.
She knew there were nice parts of New Orleans as well as tougher ones, as was the case in any city. But after Katrina, things were different, her mother had said in that wistful tone she always got when talking about this place.
Avery had wanted to come here for as long as she could remember but had been half-afraid, thanks to Mom’s warnings.
New Orleans makes you do crazy things.
“Ma’am, just go directly into the shop—don’t stop to talk,” the driver said now, as she glanced out the window to get her bearings.
There were two men standing a few doors down from where she needed to go, and a larger group a block down, all of whom stilled when the cab pulled up. She paid the fare and exited the car, kept her head up as she walked toward her destination. But it wasn’t going to be that easy.
“I have to be useful. I can’t cower and let you protect me forever,”
she’d argued to Dare earlier.
“It’s not forever.”
“Give me a job. I don’t want to be helpless.”
“I get that.”
“You said we need to get crazy. Let me get crazy.”
Now she was sure she felt Dare’s eyes on her as the closest two men moved toward her swiftly. Maybe she screamed
tourist
or maybe it was simply because she was a woman alone.
Crazy indeed.
She flexed her hands by her sides and kept moving forward, as did they.
She took the first man out easily because he wasn’t expecting her to kick his ass. One swift chop of her hand across his throat and a second hard kick to the groin and he was on the ground, moaning like a girl. She managed a second kick to his ribs for a finale, to ensure he wouldn’t get up when she was dealing with his counterpart.
He took her more seriously. He was big and could easily overpower her if she’d let him.
That’s the key,
her mother had always told her.
Never let them have the advantage.
Her mother had fought to the death. But you couldn’t fight with bullets. And the familiar anger welled up inside Avery as she spotted a gun tucked into his jeans, exposed as he raised his hand, readying to punch her in the face.
She put up her own fists, ducked his attempt, because she was smaller and faster. Two quick jabs of her own, one of which clocked him squarely on the jaw, and she was chest to chest with him. Her hand was on the butt of the gun, cocked and ready. One quick wrist move and she said, “Your choice . . . if you want to lose your little friend.”
He’d stilled instantly. She stared directly at him. “We’re both going to walk away and you’re not going to follow me.”
He held his hands up. She took his gun with her, turned and walked down the four steps under the awning that said simply,
Tattoos
, and never looked back.
She’d been in New Orleans almost three full days—seventy-two hours—and trouble had already found her. And she was actively seeking out more.
“You find Gunner, take over his top floor,” Dare had told her earlier that evening as they’d walked out of the hotel they’d been staying in since their arrival.
“What does Gunner do?” she’d asked.
“Technically, he’s running a tattoo shop.”
“So what makes you think he’ll help us?”
“He saved my life.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” she’d persisted, and all Dare would say was, “I know.”
“Did you call him?”
“No.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier if you introduced us?”
“Yes,” was all he said before he drove away in his old truck, leaving her to grab a cab.
Still, she’d done her research on the way over. What had people done before laptops and WiFi and 4G service?
Maybe walking into Gunner’s shop brandishing a gun was a bad idea, but the tattoo artist didn’t look up from his work. The woman getting a tattoo seemed almost lulled into a state of relaxation—her chest was bared and Gunner leaned over her intently.
Even seated, Avery could tell Gunner was tall—over six foot five probably—with white-blond hair that was cut short. His features were Nordic but when he glanced up at her his eyes were a warm blue, the color of the summer sky. There were tattoos running up and down his bare arms. She had a feeling they traveled under his wife beater and maybe even down his jean-clad legs.
You can’t miss him,
Dare had said.
That was a fact.
She figured the guy was armed and that any fight with him might not be a draw. As a show of goodwill, she took the ammo out of the gun and pocketed both. The walls were lined with framed photos of his tattoo artwork—some were almost grotesque, but she couldn’t deny they were beautiful.
Gunner had a gift. Why he chose to have his shop here, in a location that no doubt kept away business, kept him from getting famous, she didn’t know. But there had to be a reason.
If he knew Darius and Dare, that was definitely the biggest piece to the puzzle.
“Don’t have any openings,” Gunner called out finally. From what little information she’d managed to find, the shop had a quiet, cultlike following. It served an exclusive clientele and was famous for not accepting appointments.
“I don’t want a tattoo.”
“You’re all done, sweetheart,” Gunner drawled to the pretty woman in his chair, and she smiled up at him, a slightly dazed look in her eye. “You got a ride home?”
“My husband’s picking me up, yes,” she said as he helped her stand and showed her the work.
It was obvious it hadn’t all been done today—no, this was a massively beautiful work that encompassed the woman’s breasts, or where they’d once been. It was a swirling pattern of color that covered the same amount of skin a sports bra would, making it look like she was wearing some kind of short, floaty camisole. It no doubt hid the scars from a double mastectomy. The woman’s hair was short and gray, like it was growing in from a recent round of chemotherapy, but on the whole she looked healthy.
“It’s perfect,” the woman breathed and turned to give Gunner a gentle hug.
Avery felt like she’d broken in on such an intimate moment. Until then, she’d never much considered the mysterious privacy of tattoos, never given a thought to what seemed to be a sacredness of process.
The woman was flushed—pride, adrenaline. Gunner seemed to glow as well, like he was some kind of fallen angel.
In reality, he was probably a mercenary. That didn’t make him the devil, but he’d no doubt done things he could never talk about, things that would haunt him.
Maybe tattooing was a way of repenting. Or maybe he just liked the stress release.
And even though she knew she should step away, she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the work. She supposed that was the point. The woman looked . . . empowered. She might not have her breasts, but the way she looked now, the covering was beautiful enough to draw attention away from that fact. “My husband’s going to love it. I love it.”
Gunner simply smiled, and when she was ready, he helped her into her shirt and walked her outside. He came back inside a minute later, locked the door behind him. He looked Avery up and down, his blue eyes boring through her. “I don’t want women with guns in my shop.”
“I have a proposal for you.”
“Christ, do you have to make it sound like marriage? I’ve had enough of them, each one worse than the last.”
“Why keep doing it, then?”
“I’m a romantic,” he deadpanned. “Are you looking to be my next bride?”
“Not especially.”
“Then talk to me. You’re what—a bounty hunter who wants to turn merc? Or the more PC private contractor?”
“We need a home base.”
“Not another merc group looking to save the world.” Gunner paused. “You pay well?”
“Very.”
“Bullshit. If you had money you wouldn’t be here.”
“I’ve heard you’re the best.”
“In many, many ways, sweetheart.” He paused. “You gonna tell me why you’re really here? Because you’re obviously new at this shit.”
“Will you rent me the top floor?”
He sighed, stared up at the ceiling for a long second before pinning her with his gaze again. “I’ll make you a deal. You let me tattoo you, you can have the top floor.”
“Who gets to pick the tattoo?”
“Me. And I get to pick where.” He smiled wickedly and she nodded and made a deal with the new devil in her life.
She stuck her hand out. After he shook it, she said, “I’m here for Dare.”
“Ah, fuck me. And he sent you in here all alone—what the hell is that asshole thinking?” Gunner muttered.
“He said that you owe him because you saved his life.”
“Something I never plan on doing again,” he assured her.