by Warren, Rie
I’d refused sleep aids or any prescription drugs to help with my PTSD. You couldn’t find work if you were on narcotics, whether a doc wrote out the script or not. You couldn’t work if you weren’t stable in the field. And you sure as fuck didn’t collect pay if you weren’t active. So every person I’d lost, every day I’d assumed a different darker persona, every fucking mission I’d survived boiled to the surface during REM time.
Brodie Steele had once accused me of being unfeeling. Cold, calm, cool, detached. He had no idea. The dark calm came from knowing I couldn’t afford to get attached. Once again I was in danger of compromising my one underlying principle, because of JB.
I was trying not to get involved in any more life-threatening cases. The problem was I liked the high. I was a danger junkie, just like Walker. I kept telling myself I could be normal: raise my son, get on the MPPD payroll thing for good.
I needed Jack and Mel to be safe from my dirty past. I needed Jessica to know nothing about it.
I’d been deep cover inside Tampa Bay Outlaws MC for twelve months with only Walker as my outside contact. Everything went down with that club in the very worst way for all involved a mere two months before I relocated to Mt. Pleasant, hoping to find a permanent homestead and finally get off the X-Ops crazy train that threatened to destroy my humanity. I’d put out feelers for a legit position as an LEO. Vice, no more SWAT for me. I’d done danger day in and day out for near on a decade.
While I sat on my hands waiting for Chief Tilden to either pull the plug on me or deem me fit to redeem duty as Lieutenant, I thought about all the other job offers I could accept from underground networks, Walker’s just the latest. I ignored the temptation, at cost. The adrenaline rush needed another outlet. Fucking used to do it for me. Random, anonymous, faceless. That didn’t cut it anymore. Only Jessica interested me.
Walking into the bedroom after some serious tooth brushing and two glasses of water, I quickly changed the sheets. Night sweats accompanied the night terrors. The first time I’d slept peacefully through was after Jessica had come home with me.
I lay down, stiff as a corpse. As soon as I shut my eyes, I heard gunfire shots. Memories chased off any sleep headed my way.
****
“Tampa Bay Bitches, Kemosabe.” Walker fist bumped me. “RICO Suave is taking them down.”
“Shut the fuck up, cocky bitch.”
After a final run through the plan with Walker and his premature victory dance, I’d led the raid on the warehouse where Tampa Bay Outlaws stored their illegal gun shipments that night in May last spring. The docks had been quiet, only a distant foghorn booming across the misty silence.
I’d determined it was safe. I’d signaled my men to follow me inside. X-Ops mercs like Walker and me comprised the team: wraiths, ghosts, nightwalkers who dealt out silent death on a daily basis. Nameless warriors no one would miss, just like me. Except now I had Jack, and a reason to live.
The Feds had been unable to catch Vicente’s MC in the act. My employers had planted me into Tampa Bay Outlaws, trusting I’d get the job done with my looks that passed as Hispanic and my streetwise Spanish lingo, my MC history, and my ability to blend into any scenario.
And I had. I’d gotten tight with the club. I’d merged with them, risen through the ranks, become badass numero dos right behind the Prez, Vicente Valderas. Gotten in so deep I’d finally been trusted enough to go on gun runs and meet shipments, the coke for weapons trades. I had the location and intel necessary to bury the Outlaws in a rubble of their own making.
The five-foot-high stacks of crates had stood empty when cracked open with crowbars. We’d been surrounded by Outlaws, Vicente at the helm. High-powered Tech-9s pointed at us from all directions, four Cuban illegals to every one operative on my team. I’d raised my hands in defeat. Vicente had grinned harder, like a dark leather-faced alligator with his jaws about to snap shut. It was hopeless. Walker may have been a crack sniper, but no way he could take out the entire tribe before some of us got gunned down.
I’d been made.
“Don’t know how you do eet in Okefenokee, mijo, but we have a rule of honor. And you just took a dump all over la fraternidad.” He snapped his mouth shut with a clack of teeth, black oily eyes on mine as he signaled silently to his homegrown army.
Their weapons raised, the Cuban brotherhood took aim.
“Noooo!” I roared, dodging the spray of bullets, leaping toward Vicente.
My uppercut split his lip. We grappled to the ground. His snaky fist drove into my stomach over and over again. The gunshots distracted me. I watched, I listened, sickened at the sound of bodies hitting the floor all around us.
Vicente raised his weapon above my face. I looked down the barrel, flooded with true fear for the first time in my life. He swiveled it around with a malicious smile.
“Lights out, jefe.”
I felt my flesh pop and break open as the gun butt made contact. The smell of fresh blood spilled filled the air, more than my own, huge quantities shed. The second time his gun slammed into my cheekbone, I blacked out.
Salty air, summery sweet, warm, sand. Death. Above all death. The remembered sounds of my team being slaughtered assaulted me at once, and I came to, struggling to retch and stand and wrestle away from oncoming death as I was dragged across white sandy dunes too pure in the glowing moonlight to fit with what had gone down earlier.
Vicente made sure I knew, stopping long enough to pull me to my bound feet. “Keeled them all, jefe. Stinking pendejos.”
That little speech made him sound completely fucking loco, but I knew differently. He was one of the sanest men I’d met, which was what made him so successful and so completely dangerous.
His double-barreled shotgun prodded between my shoulder blades as I walked down a long lonely stretch of St. Pete’s Beach in the midnight hours.
Everyone was dead because of me.
“Cazador Saucedo—Hunter Sexton—are you ready to die?” He pushed me to my knees.
“I’ll die honorably, not with a bullet in the back.”
Gripping my long dirty hair, he pulled me around to face him. “Right between the eyes. Si.”
In that moment before my certain death, I saw Jack, my baby boy. I never wanted him tied to me—Hunter the Ghost—or to know how his dad went down, shot in the face from point-blank range.
I kept my eyes open, willing an honorable death to find me.
Behind Vicente, Walker rose from the dunes like a phantom. Covered in seaweed and sea-slime, he slipped across the silent sand, quiet as a harbinger of death. He slammed into Vicente’s back, taking him down.
They rolled in the dunes while I chewed through the tension-tight rope tying my wrists together. Blood dripped to my fingertips, but finally I was free with a quick slip of the knot around my ankles. Outlaws was going down.
Vicente slashed at Walker with a blade he’d drawn from inside his boot. Crimson blood saturated white crystals of sand. He held the knife above Walker’s chest, aiming for the heart.
With an almighty bellow, I dove at Vicente. My punch landed at his temple, a hard enough blow to incapacitate him. Then I made one stupid mistake, checking on Walker, forgetting about the wily Cuban.
When I looked up, he was a dot on the dunes, nearing the street. Unharmed for the most part, and fully armed, he scrambled away.
“Fuck!” I burst into action, gunning after him at a hard run, Walker hot on my heels.
The night blurred, my vision swimming, but still we kept him in our sights. Barely. The on-foot pursuit ended in a wild goose chase when Vicente simply disappeared from one alley to the next.
Walker stopped, shoulders braced against a building. “Can’t go on.”
He was too hurt to keep going, and I wasn’t fresh off the shelf myself. “Fuck!” I punched the brick wall, adding a new bruise to my busted up knuckles. “Fuck,” I said more quietly.
This was why going in solo was preferable. Why keeping women, friends, family, kids a
nd the whole lot out of the mix was better. It wasn’t about getting medals for combat—we weren’t those types of people. It was about doing something so everyone slept safer at night even if they didn’t know why.
If Walker hadn’t been here, I’d be dead.
If he hadn’t been here, I’d still be in hot pursuit of Vicente.
“Let’s get gone.” We limped-ran to his safe house, both of us keeping the other up.
We weren’t heroes. We’d never be invited to the White House. We did the dirty work so other people looked good.
In the safe house, which was no more than a flea-bitten, cockroach-ridden motel room in the gutters of Tampa, Walker did not look so good. I filled the ice bucket, bought a fifth of whiskey, and found my suture kit.
His blood dripped into the yellow-stained basin in our room.
“Saved your life again.” He took a long pull from the bottle.
“Should stop trying to get killed.” I slapped his side when he squirmed. “Keep still, ya cunt.”
I stitched his gashes with neat little loops and tied off ends. We both had so many scars—under our skin, on our flesh, in our souls.
“Death wish. You got it,” he said.
I didn’t, though. The opposite, in fact.
I needed to feel alive all the time.
“We made it through tonight.” Visibly pale, Walker gingerly checked my stitches with a nod of appreciation.
“To die another day.” I pressed a square of gauze on him and taped it to his skin. “Probably tomorrow.”
“Plan B?” he asked.
“As long as you’re steady enough to have my six.”
Tomorrow. Dawn. Possible death. Plan B. Take the rat-faced racketeering fucks down once and for all.
“Thank you, brother.” Walker looked back at me through the mirror.
Vicente had lived for one more night.
So had Walker and I.
The rest hadn’t.
I wasn’t a good guy, a bad guy, or even traceable.
THE GHOST.
I was the man they sent in when all else failed—rules of engagement, laws of Congress, notions vetoed by Homeland Security—all that red tape meant nothing. I was the back door. Deep black cover. No out. And the only way in was to lose myself to the darkest side of my soul.
I laid my life on the line, and if I happened to get killed in the line of duty, I’d be no more than a body six feet underground beneath an unmarked gravesite. No one would claim me as their own.
I didn’t want to die like that.
Chapter Six
JB. JESSICA BARNES. SHE was honest to goodness perfection. Sweet and sassafras. Naughty and wholesome all rolled into one. She had me by the ballsack without even trying. Despite swearing her off, I wanted her.
I needed her.
I managed to stay away from her for all of two more days. Yeah, I had the willpower of a smack addict when it came to the woman. With a groan of frustration, I flipped open my laptop, did a little investigating, and came up trumps almost immediately.
After a long hot shower while I tried to talk myself down from my current course of action, I pulled on some fresh clothes, my old boots, and my battered black leather jacket. Twenty minutes and one pit stop later, I pulled up in front of a small pale yellow cottage in one of the older neighborhoods of Mt. Pleasant. I’d ridden around the entire area to get the lay of the land before turning my motorcycle into Jessica’s cul-de-sac where a group of kids played on a rope swing in the yard next to her house.
“Wicked bike, man!” One of the boys next door shouted. “What kind it is?”
“Deus Grievous Angel,” I called back, getting off and unbuckling my helmet.
“You know Miss Barnes?” A young girl asked, her breath a frosty plume in the dark November air.
“Yeah.” I gathered the bags from my ride and started toward the porch.
“Your motorcycle’s almost as cool as hers.” The same girl suddenly appeared beside me, wearing an odd mixture of pink camo vest, a ruffly skirt, and striped stockings.
“It’s hard to compete with Miss Barnes.” I smiled down at the kid.
“She lets us touch the Ducati sometimes. Can we touch yours too?” the brave little girl asked.
“Maybe tomorrow, when I can supervise.”
“Awesome!” she exclaimed, holding a small hand up for a high five.
I gave her a light tap—going full force on the possible-seven-year-old would send her over the side of the porch. Then I waited for her to move on. She grinned at me with big gapped teeth.
“Do you mind?” I asked.
She shook her head.
I put on my mean face—the one I’d used that time Jack had experimented mixing milk and toothpaste in a cup in his bedroom at my house, then hid it behind a chair until I found it, rotting, several days later.
“Skedaddle!” I barked. “And don’t touch the bike or heads will roll.”
As soon as the girl disappeared, I knocked on Jessica’s door. Then I took a step back and waited, nervous all over again. The lights blazed from inside, but it was Friday night. Maybe she had plans.
Maybe she has someone else over.
She swung open the door. As soon as she saw me, she tried to slam it in my face.
I caught it in my hand.
“Go away.” She seethed.
I stood awkwardly on her step with my arm barring the door. “Came to apologize.”
“You’re making a habit of that.”
“Being somewhat of an asshole makes it necessary.” I chewed on my lip.
“Somewhat?”
“A big asshole.” I shifted my weight and the paper bags rustled in my hands.
“How’d you get my address?” Jessica let the door creak wider. She planted her hands on her hips.
I looked at her meaningfully. “Wasn’t that hard to find.” A fact I wasn’t thrilled about. Even standing out here on the porch I felt like I was putting her in harm’s way.
“Right. Of course.” Her night-dark eyes skimmed past me.
“Friendly kids over there, huh?”
“Oh, them? They go to my school. Can’t get away from them.” Her expression softened slightly.
“Someone should tell them not to talk to strangers.”
Jessica blew out a husky laugh. She looked me over with a slightly diminished murder you in your sleep expression. “What are you doing here, Hunter?”
“Brought dinner. And wine. And flowers.” I hefted the bags in front of me. “You know, to say sorry, and since I’m a shit cook.”
Releasing a huge sigh, she stepped back. “Better come in then.”
I stepped in from the frosty night after wiping my boots on the welcome mat. A staircase rose from the entry, two rooms on either side of the front door. I leaned one way then the other, making a quick scan of the living room and the kitchen. Jessica moved off to the living room, and I shut the door and followed. I set the bags down on her coffee table and took off my jacket while Jessica reclined on the floor, her back against the couch. An open bottle of wine and a full glass sat within her reach. The room was lit by a warm crackling fire, several table lamps, and a few glowing candles.
“Tuscan red.” I swept a hand against the painted wall to my left.
She sipped from her glass of wine with a nod in my direction.
Quaint, charming, homey . . . all those words came to mind as I took in her refuge. Cushions and throw blankets covered the cream-colored chairs and sofa. Antique-looking bookshelves and side tables sat on spindly legs. I felt like a big bull in a china shop until I spied a pile of greasy motorcycle parts laid on top of newspapers . . . next to a stack of auto parts books.
That was what I liked about JB. She was all woman and hardcore at the same time. I grinned, sitting next to her.
“Welcome to my palace.” She blushed and ducked her head. “It’s not much compared to your spread.”
“I like it. It’s intimate. It’s you.” Unlike my house,
which was virtually unlived in, this place was a veritable open book about her. “It’s pretty. Like you.”
“Hmm,” her face averted, she hummed.
I stretched out my legs, enjoying the heat from the fire on my feet. “Thanksgiving decorations too.” I pointed my chin toward the cornucopia on the mantelpiece.
She leaned her head against my shoulder. “I have to celebrate every holiday. I work with kids, remember?”
I gently kissed her forehead and she laid her arm across my chest.
“Why are you here, Hunter? For real this time.”
“Couldn’t stay away from you.” My voice lowered. “Sometimes I get tired of fighting, and fighting what I want.”
She remained silent, her face tucked against me.
“Plus, you smell damn good.”
I felt her smile against the skin of my neck.
“You were working?” I indicated the school papers fanned out beside her.
“Oh. It never stops. Class prep, tests to grade, special help to give . . . instruction courses to take.”
“And you’re still wearing your school clothes,” I remarked.
Her hair was unpinned, a glorious sable mane down her back and over my arm, but otherwise she had on the hot for teacher clothes. An outfit that was professional and totally seductive to a man like me. Another nine-to-five skirt molded against her sweet curves. It had ridden up, showing the lace at the top of her sheer thigh high stockings. She’d loosened a few buttons on a rose-colored blouse and still had on a pair of killer black heels.
“Teachers didn’t look like you when I was in school.”
“I bet they were all mean old hags.” She shook with laughter.
“Truth.” I tickled my fingers along her side and whispered at her ear, “I’d say let me massage your feet, but I really like the shoes.”
I heard the quick hitch of her breath.
“So how about you sit right here”—I patted between my legs—“and let me rub your back.”