Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 91212 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 456(@200wpm)___ 365(@250wpm)___ 304(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91212 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 456(@200wpm)___ 365(@250wpm)___ 304(@300wpm)
"Murdered?" I hedge.
"Or an OD that the brother is trying to cover up," Kincaid says. "Either way, stay on the spa until we know otherwise."
"Will do," I tell him, ending the call.
The reminder of Cerberus and all that they do hits me in the gut, just like it always has.
It feels selfish to wish I'd made a different choice all those years ago. Although Noah made his own decisions, he followed me from Cerberus. He wanted the same thing we all did, and that was a safer America. We had stars in our eyes and we were riding the high that working for an organization like Cerberus provided. We were going to save the world, and we held our own for years and years.
That was until Noah was sent to Mexico as an undercover. I was left behind here in the States as his handler. Although that day was over thirteen years ago, it seems like yesterday that I pulled him to my chest, clapped him on the back, and made him swear he'd stay safe. It was the last time I ever saw him in person. Had I known what the outcome of that job would be, I would've hog-tied him and kept him from going. Knowing Noah, he wouldn't have changed a thing. He was that dedicated to his work.
Working a mission with a team and going into a compound with your brothers at your back didn't compare to what he was sent to do.
We both knew how fucking dangerous Alejandro Cortez was. We had proof in the line of bodies he left behind in his abandoned compounds as he moved around Mexico at just how quickly he would turn on those who worked for him.
We knew the dangers and chose to infiltrate anyway. The goal was to get as much information as we could in six months. We just needed to discover how his pipeline from Mexico to the US worked. Shutting that down stopped an excessive amount of drugs, gun, and sex trafficking. Cortez dipped his toes in anything and everything that made money for the cartel, and he didn't care whose toes he stepped on to put another dollar in his pocket.
Noah worked the daughter angle. I remember joking with him about how big of an ask it was to spend time with the gorgeous drug princess, but then the calls became fewer. He was close but couldn't get close enough. Cortez was paranoid and didn't trust easily. Six months turned into a year, with Noah vowing he was only a month away from being in the inner circle. He just knew he could get there.
Noah wasn't even the one to tell me about his marriage to Cortez's daughter, but I had access to the photos. He didn't look like a man undercover. He looked like a man in love. I knew better. I knew he was in deep, but at the heart of it, he was still ICE, and he was still on our side, no matter how it looked to everyone else.
It didn't stop the whispers that ran rampant through ICE. It didn't stop the meetings I was called into so I could discuss my rogue agent.
A year turned into three, with infrequent calls, but he fed us information. We were able to get the drop on several houses in the US that were processing the goods they were trafficking, but he was never capable of giving us the direct pipeline.
As time crawled by, the less convinced I was about his loyalties, but in the end, it was his wife who betrayed him when she discovered his burner phone. Instead of taking it to her husband for answers, she bypassed him and went to her father. She was confident in her loyalty to her family but quickly discovered her paranoid father had lost all confidence in her.
I pinch the bridge of my nose. Now is not the time to take a fucking trip down memory lane. It's marked with regret and the most painful loss I've ever felt in my life.
Trying to shove the thoughts away doesn't work. I'm locked into the memories until they play out. I've been down this road a million times, and I know every what-if and what-could-I-have-done will play out before I'm capable of escaping the memories.
The tape was sent to us with his bloody wedding ring. although I knew what I was going to find, I had no fucking clue just how bad it was going to be until I played it.
We'd heard rumors that Cortez had grown increasingly paranoid because although he'd killed some low-level dealers in the past for sampling his drugs, he himself formed an addiction to the cocaine he was sending out of Mexico, making him even more distrustful than before.
The tape never showed him, but voice analysis determined it was him in the background, issuing commands to his men.