by Abigail Roux
“It’s the start of the trail. We think that’s why the cartel is after him,” Nick told them. “Not because of Antonio de la Vega’s assassination. Or, not completely because of it.”
“His name on those accounts makes him complicit, Ty,” Owen said. “If we can’t prove Burns acted alone, you’ll go down for multiple counts of murder, and Zane will go down for the money.”
“If the cartel don’t kill him first,” Digger added.
“So Burns made it look like I not only stole millions of their dollars, but also killed their boss?” Zane asked, almost shrill.
“Hundreds of millions,” Liam corrected.
“Cabrón hijo de la gran puta!”
“Zane,” Ty grunted as the rest of Sidewinder gaped at Zane, wide-eyed.
Zane eyes blazed. “You remember when I said I’d hold him down so you could hit him?” he asked Nick. Nick nodded warily. “Let’s dig him up.”
“That’s . . .” Nick shook his head.
Ty patted Zane’s shoulder to calm him, nodding for Nick to continue.
“When it got too hot, he went in and pulled Zane out,” Nick said. He was still shaky, but he seemed to be gaining confidence in relating the facts of the case to them, as opposed to when he was trying to justify his own actions.
“Why not just let Zane rot down there? Take the heat for him?” Kelly asked. “Why pull him?”
“Covering his own ass,” Nick answered. “Cartel gets a hold of Zane, finds out he’s FBI, they know where the money went. Cartel gets a hold of Zane, turns him, he has the information to maybe come after the money himself. Burns couldn’t risk either scenario; he had to keep Zane on the straight and narrow.” He glanced to Zane almost apologetically and dropped his voice. “Probably why he put you in rehab. That, and he needed you sober and predictable.”
Zane laughed bitterly. “I never could figure out why he cared so much. Why he’d bother getting me clean. This is the first explanation that’s ever made sense. He sent me back to Miami to die. He had so little faith in me that when I didn’t fuck up and get myself killed, he thought I had to be on the cartel’s payroll.”
Ty squeezed his husband’s shoulder. He knew how much of Zane’s initial self-worth Zane had tied into Burns’s belief in him, how much he’d looked to that as a reason he belonged in the Bureau. But Zane didn’t need that now. He’d proven himself a thousand times over. Ty would make sure he remembered.
“Why’d he bring me in?” Ty asked after several moments of heavy silence.
“My guess?” Nick said. “He had to clean house. He used your loyalty, to him and your dad. He knew you wouldn’t ask questions, knew you’d . . . you’d want to prove yourself worthy. Knew what you were capable of.”
Ty nearly staggered as pain washed through him. He’d so blindly followed what he’d thought was right. He’d hurt so many people doing it, including himself. “This is why he recruited us in the first place,” he said to Nick. “You, me, Eli. He only wanted us so we could clean up his messes.”
“Makes you wonder if Sidewinder got pulled from active duty so we’d be free to use in civilian operations,” Owen said. “NIA, FBI, the Corps. How high does this go?”
“We don’t know,” Nick answered.
Liam cleared his throat, looking grim. “I’d say high enough.”
“You ever wonder why Sidewinder got sent off right before our time was up?” Kelly asked. “Right after we all survived a brush with the NIA in New Orleans?”
“You think the NIA sent us back to war?” Ty growled.
Kelly nodded, his eyes as gray and hard as steel.
“Why?”
“So they’d have unhindered access to one of us. They pulled Nick for this hit and then sent us home,” Owen answered. “We were sent back over there just so Burns could be taken out of the game.”
“It’s free labor,” Digger said with a shrug. “NIA tugs a string, Corps calls us back. They tug another string, Nick is sent to their door. Tug that last string, Burns is dead. They only lift a tiny finger and don’t put out a cent for the trouble. Not a bad setup, if you’re an evil bastard.”
“Okay. Okay,” Zane said, eyes wide. “But how was Burns such a threat to the NIA that they’d orchestrate all this?”
“We don’t know,” Liam said grimly. “I know I’m scared, though. Because whatever they wanted from him, they didn’t get it. You and Garrett, and all of us, are next in line for their particular brand of borrowing.”
“What about Eli?” Kelly asked. “Did Burns kill him?”
Nick shook his head. “Not that we’ve found. Eli was . . . he was just in the wrong fucking place.”
Zane cursed quietly and raised one of the other pieces of the file he’d been reading over.
Ty almost didn’t want to know what Zane had found. There was dread in his voice when he asked, “What?”
“Deuce,” Zane croaked. “These are wiretaps from Burns’s office. He was having Deuce report to him about us. Whether we were working well together, if we could be partnered.”
“No,” Ty gasped, and he snatched the transcript from Zane’s hand.
“There’s no evidence in there whatsoever to tie your brother to anything,” Nick said quickly. “Burns was using him, just like everyone else.”
“My God.” Ty scanned the transcripts of Burns’s conversations, his voice losing strength like a balloon gasping out its last bit of air. “He was like a fucking father to us.”
“Ty.” Nick stood quickly enough that Zane’s hand went to his gun. Nick froze. He turned to Ty, hands still raised. “I wish he was the person you thought he was. I wish I’d been wrong.”
Tears pricked at Ty’s eyes again. Burns may have been like a father to him, but only because he’d been there when Ty was growing up. Nick . . . Nick was his brother, and he’d earned that with his blood being spilled across the sand.
Nick took a tiny step toward Ty before he seemed to realize he might not be welcome to do it and halted. He was so flustered that he probably didn’t even know he was fidgeting. “I know what he was to you. I know what . . . a father . . . I would have given anything if it could have saved you from what this feels like. I would have been the bad guy.”
“Nick,” Ty choked out. He shook his head, gasping for breath. “I can’t do this right now.”
Nick didn’t say anything further. His eyes were still on Ty’s, though. He never looked away. That was the first thing Ty had ever loved about him.
“There’s more,” Nick told him, and Ty rubbed his eyes dejectedly.
Zane pulled out the next file, holding it up. He frowned, confused. “I don’t get it, who is this guy? It says he was an undercover federal agent.”
“Burns’s last hit,” Kelly answered. “Couple months before the boys were sent off.”
“Who is he? How does he connect to us?” Zane asked as Ty took the file and read over it.
Ty’s heart sank when he saw the picture attached. “I killed him,” he said, feeling the heat drain from his face. “This man was a Fed?”
“ATF. Working undercover in the cartel,” Liam told him.
“Was this one of the men Burns sent you to Miami to take out?” Zane asked.
“Yes.” Ty felt ill as he looked at the file. He’d executed this man without question, thinking his death was vital to keeping Zane safe. Burns had lied to him at every turn, made him into a cold-blooded killer.
Liam continued talking even as Ty grew more distraught. “His death was the one that got the NIA involved, got me into this mess. He’s the reason I was in New Orleans. Both the cartel and the NIA sent me looking for the man who ordered his hit, which is when I figured out there was a third party involved here. When I saw you, Tyler, I knew it had to be Richard Burns. You’d do anything for the man.”
Nick slowly reached to the small of his back and pulled out a combat knife. He stretched toward the end of the bed, taking Liam’s hands in his and slicing through the zip tie Liam had been strugglin
g with.
“Thanks, mate,” Liam said, rubbing at the red marks on his wrist.
“Tell them what you told me,” Nick said, low enough that Ty could barely hear it.
Liam glared at Nick for a moment, then turned mutinous eyes on Ty and Zane. “When you two headed to New Orleans, it wasn’t this mole you think you have that alerted the cartel.”
“Who was it?” Zane demanded.
“I don’t know. But I was embedded in the cartel for a year. You weren’t on their radar until New Orleans. Someone put you there on purpose, and since Nicholas has convinced me it wasn’t him, I now suspect it was Burns.”
“Burns is the one who told us my phone was being monitored,” Zane argued.
“Easy misdirect when he realized you weren’t dead in New Orleans like you were supposed to be,” Nick guessed. “When Ty called him, said he was still alive, Burns knew he had to cover his ass.”
“But he came,” Ty reminded them. “He came to help us.”
“Yeah,” Nick said bitterly. “Landed right after the action went down.”
“You’re saying he was done with us, and so he sent the cartel to go after us,” Zane said slowly.
Liam and Nick were both nodding. Liam took a deep breath before speaking one last time. “Tyler took out every undercover agent placed in the cartel except me. Once he did that, Burns didn’t need him or you anymore.”
Ty’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Zane rested his hand against Ty’s back, squeezing him gently. But Zane had no way to combat the betrayal and pain seeping into Ty’s soul.
Ty sought out answers in his eyes that just weren’t there. “He told me we were protecting your egress from Miami.”
After a few tense seconds, Nick broke the silence. “He lied.”
Zane sat at his desk, staring at the paperwork in front of him but not seeing it. His mind was elsewhere, off with Sidewinder and his husband, who were either still in the hotel trying to decide how to gain access to Richard Burns’s home and office, or off gallivanting around Washington, DC.
Every time his phone rang, he thought it was Ty calling to tell him they’d killed Liam and tossed him into the ocean, or they’d been arrested breaking into Burns’s home or office in DC. Every knock at his door, he hoped it was Perrimore coming to him with something he’d dug up on those accounts, and not word of his brand-new husband involved in a high-speed car chase on the news.
He was so close to faking an illness and leaving the field office in the very capable hands of his second-in-charge. The only thing keeping him there was the knowledge that differing from his routine would alert the mole to something going on, and that was just one problem they did not need to be dealing with right now. So here he sat, useless and distracted and thoroughly exhausted.
A knock at his door had him straightening in anticipation yet again. “Enter,” he called, and he almost deflated in relief when Perrimore stuck his head in.
“Got a second?”
“Yeah.” Zane waved him in.
Perrimore looked apologetic, though. Not a good sign. “I hit a dead end on those accounts.”
“What kind?” Zane asked, trying to keep his expression neutral.
“The government kind. My clearance isn’t high enough.”
“Which branch flagged it?”
“Us.” Perrimore flopped a thin file on Zane’s desk. “The Bureau flagged every single one of those accounts. I couldn’t touch them without alerting someone.”
Zane opened the file to the single paper inside. Perrimore had handwritten it, apparently not trusting the wireless printer in the office. Zane glanced up at him with a hint of admiration and appreciation.
Perrimore shrugged. “I know off the books when I see it. I wrote down the ID number of the agent who flagged those accounts. Figured that might help.”
“Thanks, Freddy. I owe you big for this.”
Perrimore clucked his tongue. “Offer’s open, Garrett. You into something? You need help?”
Zane looked up guardedly, meeting Perrimore’s eyes and holding his gaze. He considered himself pretty good at reading people. He didn’t see anything but concern in Perrimore’s eyes, but could he trust the man?
“I’m good, Freddy. Promise.”
Perrimore lifted one eyebrow and nodded. “Okay. You on for Alston’s party tomorrow night?”
“Party?”
“Yeah, his girl’s doing some Valentine’s Day shit.”
“Oh fuck.” Zane smacked his forehead with an open palm. “Oh God, tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.”
“Yeah,” Perrimore drawled, his deep voice finding a whole new tenor as he began to laugh. He turned to see himself out. “Good luck with that, newlywed.”
Zane waited until the door was closed, then had a brief moment to panic over having forgotten Valentine’s Day. He and Ty had once been surprised when they couldn’t find a restaurant on Valentine’s Day, because they’d both forgotten what day it was. And they’d gotten married the week before the most romantic holiday of the year without realizing it. With Ty going through a little Sidewinder-induced crisis, Zane was pretty sure he didn’t even know what month it was anymore.
Still, it was their first Valentine’s Day as a married couple, so Zane needed to figure out something.
He set that aside as a problem to deal with soon, and instead examined the piece of paper again. There was no name attached, just a number. He didn’t dare look up that number on his own computer; he’d have to find another way to access it. But the implications of an FBI agent blocking this information were pretty hefty, and it seemed to support what Nick had been trying to get at: that Burns had been up to something dirty. And who knew how far the corruption went into the Bureau? Zane had to tread more carefully and keep his head down.
If Burns wasn’t the one who was dirty—and Zane was still on the fence about that—someone involved in the cartel operation had been. Someone who had worked that case with Zane had been stealing cartel money and orchestrating dozens of deaths. Jesus Christ. And whoever belonged to this ID number was either guilty, or had some information Zane was pretty sure Ty would want for Valentine’s Day far more than a box of chocolates.
He unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and dropped the file in there, then closed it and made sure it was locked again before going back to the report he’d been trying to read.
Since when did doing his job get in the way of the things he needed to be doing? He really was turning into Ty.
Another knock at his door had him tensing up all over again. “Enter,” he called out, trying not to sound like he was terrified of whatever was coming next. He was the boss; he was not supposed to be afraid when people knocked on his door, they were supposed to be afraid of him.
The door opened, and Digger poked his head in. Zane sat up straighter, alarm streaking through him.
“What are you doing here?” he blurted. “How’d you get past security?”
Digger made an effort to look hurt, but he was still smiling when he pushed into the office. Owen followed after him, his expression a little less mischievous, and he closed the door behind them.
“Everything okay?” Zane asked.
“Yeah, it’s fine.” Digger threw himself into one of the chairs across from Zane’s desk. “The others all headed down to DC for some sightseeing. But we missed you, so we decided to stay behind.”
“Missed me?” Zane repeated, sinking back into his chair as if it could protect him from whatever plan Sidewinder had concocted while he wasn’t there to supervise. “The office is clean, there’s no bug here.”
“Oh!” Digger grinned at Owen. “That makes this easier.”
Owen huffed and sat beside him, remaining on the edge of his seat while Digger lounged with one leg tossed over an arm of his chair. Owen gave Zane a tired smile. “Six and the Doc are heading for Richard Burns’s office. Irish and Bell went for his house. They’ve got six hours to check in before we follow if there’s trouble. Until then, w
e’re here to do a little digging on your vermin problem.”
Zane raised an eyebrow at that. “What do you propose?”
Owen smirked and reached into his pocket, withdrawing a badge that he placed in front of Zane. Zane picked it up, meeting Owen’s eyes with more than a hint of suspicion. “Caliburn Technologies. This is where you work?”
“Yeah. Weapons systems, government contracts. Stuff. We poach a lot of federal agents for security, and since I started out scouting talent, this wouldn’t be the first time I snooped around an FBI office asking questions.”
“You sneaky son of a bitch,” Zane said with a smirk, pushing Owen’s badge back toward him.
Owen grinned and gave Zane a wink as he stood. “It’ll help sell it if you give it about an hour, then toss us out. Loudly.”
Zane chuckled, biting his lip as he took in the utter glee on both their faces. “Toss you out on your asses. Got it.”
Nick parked their stolen sedan in a shady spot along the sidewalk of a tree-lined residential street. The stately houses were situated on sprawling lots, with massive oaks dotting the landscape and overly obvious security systems with signs announcing their presence for good measure.
Nick didn’t know a lot about DC or the surrounding suburbs, but this was obviously an upscale neighborhood. Hell, Richard Burns had probably put out more per month for his mortgage than Nick earned in a year.
Liam let out a low whistle. “Nice digs.”
Nick nodded as he scanned the surroundings. “Richard Burns liked nice things.”
“Says the man who lives on a yacht.”
Nick shrugged. “At least it’s not built on blood.”
“I didn’t know the man, but he was a piece of work, hmm? Anyone who can wrap Tyler around his finger must be.”
Nick didn’t respond. He was watching a vehicle parked facing them, roughly a block up. “Shit.”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“Cops.” Nick nodded in the direction of the car, then ducked his head to look at his lap as if he were studying a map.
“Why would they be watching this house?” Liam asked. “Are you sure they’re cops and not cartel?”