Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 133321 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 667(@200wpm)___ 533(@250wpm)___ 444(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 133321 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 667(@200wpm)___ 533(@250wpm)___ 444(@300wpm)
“I’ll come get you,” I say, releasing her and heading for the other room.
By the time I’m at the front door, tension is radiating like a pulse down my spine. I open the door and Eric arches a brow at my slow response but like Mia, he and I have a history and not just with each other, with Ri, too. We all went to school together for a year before Eric changed schools and then went into the military. Now, years after leaving his family fortune behind, Eric is my best friend, confidant, and damn near a billionaire, by his own making.
I back up and allow him to enter. Adam and a brunette female in a skirt and blouse follow with Blake on their heels. Blake stops to talk to me as I shut the door. The rest of the group follows Eric into the apartment. “Who’s the woman?” I ask.
“My wife, Kara, who’s ex-FBI. We arranged to have her sent to Ri’s office as a temp today. She’s reporting to Mia’s floor and I promise you this, she’s lethal. I was undercover when she met me. She thought I was the enemy and she drugged me and left me flat on my ass. Not a moment I’m proud of but the point is, she knows how to get the job done.”
“Or you don’t,” I counter.
He laughs. “Fuck, man, you had to take the shot, right?”
“Had to,” I assure him.
His eyes meet mine. “As an added bonus, you know that the thing I cherish most in this world is with your woman.”
“Keep talking,” I say.
“We can’t know that Ri didn’t have Mia followed. He could know she was with you this weekend. I couldn’t send Mia in there without knowing I had someone who would kill for her within reach. And Kara would.”
“How much risk do you think there is to Mia?”
“I dug up enough on Ri to know that he’s capable of just about anything.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning he didn’t scrub his data as far back as he should have. Five years ago, he was communicating with a mob affiliate named Rosemond, a man whose people will kill, smear, wound, and repeat for the right price, and he was doing it to win a case. You don’t use someone like that guy and not have a really nasty side yourself and you don’t connect yourself to Rosemond and walk away. I don’t trust Ri. I don’t want Mia near him, and yes, I considered telling you to pull her out of this completely.”
“But you aren’t. Why?”
“Pulling her abruptly doesn’t just get Ri’s attention and get him accelerating his efforts to take you down. It places attention on her. I’m going to tell you a story I tell very few and while some might consider it a poorly timed story, I do not, and I’ll explain why after I tell it. Before Kara, I was engaged. I was undercover and so was Whitney, my fiancée. The man, the leader of a drug cartel, not only figured out I was ATF, he figured out that Whitney was everything to me. He killed her and she bled out in my arms.”
His confession punches me in the chest and I turn away from him, pressing my hand on the door, a reaction I wouldn’t normally allow anyone to see, but, “Fuck, Blake,” I murmur, forcing myself back off that wall and to face him. “Tell me you killed him.”
“That’s a long, complicated story, but do you get what I’m telling you?”
“If he believes she’s back with me, he’ll see her as a weapon to use against me. I’m crystal clear on the point you’ve made. You better fucking protect her.”
“I will,” he replies.
I look up to find Kara standing a few feet away. “I’ll protect her,” she says. “I need to talk to her and help her with the wire. I need to come up with a plan of action for every possible scenario and Adam is working as a janitor in the building. He’ll be right there with us.”
I have to let Mia go to Ri today and it’s killing me, but I’ll never be captive like this again. I turn to Blake. “Make this count. Let me repeat what I told Adam, just to be clear. End him. I don’t mean dead. That’s too good for him. I want him to self-destruct. I want him to lose everything.”
“And he will,” Blake promises, “but you need to be removed from the process. It can’t be about you, and my reason is this: If he’s in bed with these gangsters I’ve connected him to and you take him down, you hurt their bank account. You don’t want to cut the head off a snake to watch it grow another. You get the two of them fighting and they forget about you.”