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“Yep!” she said cheerily.
I stared at her, then swiveled to face Sinner. “Why would you do that?”
“Because no one else had any better ideas. I’ll have you know I went to great lengths to procure that medicine for you.”
“Yeah, he got himself shot with a dart and everything,” Knight said lazily.
“My whole body went numb. Hell, I was as close to death’s door as you could get.”
“You were not,” Rocco snapped. “You fell asleep and had a weird dream. That’s it.”
Sinner shifted uneasily, and if my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me, he was looking at me like he knew something…maybe something I knew also. I narrowed my eyes—well, in my head I was narrowing them. In reality, I was probably just looking at Sinner through swollen eyes.
Did he have the same dream? Was that even possible? It was bad enough that I had been trapped in multiple alternate realities, but was it likely that I shared that reality with someone else?
“Well, it certainly felt like death,” Sinner rattled on.
He was covering up for what really happened, and now I had to wonder just what Sinner’s dream was about.
“Well, now that the story of your heroic rescue is clear as mud, what the fuck are we doing here?”
19
SINNER
The last few hours of my life were completely lost on me. Not to mention, I had the most insane dream that couldn’t possibly ever happen. But as I stared at Cap, it was like we shared a connection deeper than anything I’d felt before. Almost as if we…were linked.
I shook my head, trying to dislodge the horrific nightmare from my mind. I would never tell another living soul what happened under the influence of that dart. In some ways, I wished the dart was actually poisonous and had killed me. That would have been preferable to the trauma I incurred in my dream state.
“Guys, I’m not kidding. I’ve been poisoned, poisoned again, and would really like to know why the fuck we’re down here,” Cap snapped.
When no one else immediately offered the truth, I decided it was up to me to step up and explain in only a way I could. I grabbed a cigar from my pocket. It was meant for when the job was done, but this seemed like the right moment to use it—for effect and everything. I sat down on the bench seat and lit the cigar. The bright light illuminated my face for a moment as I inhaled the sweet odor of the Cuban.
“It was precisely one week ago today,” I said, blowing out a puff of smoke and choking on it as I waved the puffy cloud away from my face.
“Should you be smoking that?” Rocco asked.
I shot him an irritated glare and continued with my story, staring off into the dark night that had overtaken the jungle. “As I said, we got the call precisely one week ago. It was late at night, but like tonight, only it was raining.”
“It was still daylight, asshole,” Wolf muttered. “And there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.”
I slowly turned to him, taking another draw from my cigar. I blew it out in his face, attempting to make that O that the Cheshire cat made. It didn’t work. “Do you want to tell the story?”
“It might go faster.”
“Anyway,” I said loudly, turning back to Cap. “Whether it was dark or light out doesn’t matter. We got a mysterious call…one that none of us was expecting. He said he was a friend of Cash’s and desperately needed help. We didn’t realize at the time just how dangerous this job was. Had we known, we might never have taken it.” I paused for dramatic effect. “The man went by the name of Rafe. He claimed an alliance with Cash, but said we couldn’t contact him, that he couldn’t be drawn into this particular problem.”
“Did he say why?” Cap asked through swollen lips.
I shook my head sadly. Standing, I stretched slightly, walking to the edge of the boat as I placed my hands on my hips and stared at the shoreline. “No, and since it was for Cash, we all readily agreed to take the job. Biggest mistake of our lives.”
“I don’t know,” Knight grumbled. “Allowing Alec to have a tank on the property doesn’t seem like a very good idea.”
“Wait, so Chance’s team volunteered for the job?”
“In a way,” I said slowly.
“Then in what way was it?” Cap snapped.
