“Just shoot him and be done with it. I’m bored,” Paavo whines like a child.
When Leesa hesitates for the quickest second, I use her delay to my advantage. Even the strongest couple crumbles when infidelity is placed on the line. My once-blossoming relationship with Melody is living proof of this. We haven’t spoken in years.
Paavo balks exactly as planned when I murmur, “She can’t. The memories we share are too strong for her to forget.”
Like a child fighting for his favorite toy, Paavo falls into the trap I laid out for him. “What memories? What is he talking about?”
I steal Leesa’s chance to reply by asking, “Does he know about the little freckle high on your thigh?” I have no clue about any of Leesa’s freckles, but even someone with flawless skin has some sort of imperfection. However, men like Paavo don’t seek them out like I do, so he is as blindsided by my comment as Leesa. “It sits just below the tattoo you got two weeks after your mother died of cancer.”
This part of my comment is factual. Tobias ranks applicants on their academic accomplishments and word of their peers. I look at their pasts. Almost every single man and woman in the Bureau are there for a reason other than the wish to protect their country. They’re either running, have run, or will run at some stage in their lives. Leesa fills more than one box. She’s running from both her past and her present, and she’ll be running in her future too. I guarantee it.
“Made you look like the ideal daughter, didn’t it? But only you and I know the real reason you got that tattoo.” When I peer down to her right thigh, Leesa’s breaths become shallow and weak. “It wasn’t in memory of your mother, it was a reminder of how you swore you’d never end up like her. That you’d be a moral and upstanding member of society. That you wouldn’t be this.” I throw a head nod to Paavo during my last statement. “You’re a fraud, Leesa. You are exactly like your mother.” A solemn tear rolls down her cheeks when I add, “A whore for sale no matter how low the bid.”
With Leesa’s eyes on me, wide and terrified, and Grayson in position, I make my move. Paavo is fired on first. I take him down with a direct hit to the heart while Grayson pops a bullet between the eyes of the two men flanking him. There’s another six to be contained, but my focus must remain on one. Leesa.
Her finger hasn’t moved for the trigger of the gun she’s holding to Tobias’s head, but that doesn’t mean she’s stable. The instant she realizes everything I just said to her is true, she’ll go from calm to deranged in under a second.
An appreciation for perfect hearing pummels into me when Leesa’s howling squeal overtakes the hiss of my bullet rotating through the air. This time next week, she’ll be wishing I had aimed for her head. Instead, I ignore the pleas pumping out of her watering eyes and take a second shot at her right shoulder. It has her gun falling away from Tobias’s temple before her finger gets anywhere near the trigger and has her spare hand shooting up to apply pressure to her wound.
She either applies pressure or bleeds out like Tobias is in the process of doing.
“We need a medic!” As bullets halo my head, I carefully lie Tobias onto the shell-case riddled floor. “Just hold on, all right? Help is on its way.” After tearing a large swatch of material from my undershirt, I bunch it up then press it to Tobias’s wound. The way it spurts at me when I switch his hands with mine reveals a vital artery has been severed. He’s seconds from death. “We need a medic, now! He’s not going to hold out for much longer.”
“B-b J-j…” Excluding my mother, Tobias is the only one who has called me BJ the past six years. “I-I-I…”
I watch him through both the eyes of an agent and a mentee when he slithers his bloodstained hand to a little pocket in the front of his bulletproof vest. After pulling out a tiny slip of paper, he attempts to hand it to me. I can’t take it. If I do, he’ll bleed out even quicker than he is.
“Izzy. Izzy,” he stutters out, tapping on the sheet of paper.
“Your daughter?” My daftness can be easily excused. He’s not a fan of nicknames, so he’s only ever called her Isabelle.
When confirmation flares through his eyes, I say, “It’s okay. She’ll be okay. I’ll look after her.” I peer over my shoulder to the members of Tobias’s team not gunned down in a motherfucking shitstorm. There are more dead agents than militants. “Where’s the medic!”
I return my focus to Tobias when he covers my warm hands with his dead-cold ones. “G-g-give her this.” My brows furrow when he adds, “Make s-s-sure she knows.”
When he shoves the slither of paper at me again, I snatch it out of his hand, dump it down the front of my bulletproof vest before screaming for the medic. Tobias convulsed through his last two pleas, and the cooling of his skin is all too familiar. It’s as cold and as white as Joey’s was when I attempted to resuscitate him.
The memories it bombards me with are sick and twisted. They have me responding in the way a deranged man would. Instead of pressing my hands down on a wound no longer pulsating since Tobias’s chest is still and lifeless, I wrap them around my Sig Sauer P226, storm to Leesa cowering in the corner of the room, grip her chin, then ram the barrel of my gun between her teeth.
She doesn’t recoil or flinch. She begs for me to kill her, to free her from the hell she’s about to emerge in, to let her join Paavo on the other side.
I almost answer her pleas.
The only reason I don’t is because Associate Deputy Director Agent Rogers tells me to stand down. He walks through the carnage being highlighted by the spotlights of helicopters hovering above, his shoulders high, his brows pinched.
From the stories Grayson shared, his father hasn’t been on the field in years, so his arrival on the scene tonight announces that an ambush by a Sicilian criminal entity will seem like a walk in the park after the department heads are finished with Tobias’s team. Heads are about to roll, so I may as well go down in a blaze of glory.
The guns of my comrades swing my way when I discharge three bullets into the brick wall Leesa’s head is resting on. Her cheek will hold the scold of my bullet casings for years to come, but it will be nothing compared to the wound she inflicted on Tobias’s daughter’s heart.
3
BRANDON
M y eyes lift from the inch by three-inch-long piece of paper in front of me to Grayson when he slumps into the chair next to me. He was the last of our team to be debriefed. The strain shows on his face. His father made him go last for a reason, and it’s the sole reason I stayed here waiting for him. I know what it’s like to be raised by an anal-retentive man who thinks the sun shines out of his ass, so the least I can do is lend Grayson an ear if he needs to vent.
“How’d you do?”
Grayson scrubs a hand over his recently clipped hair. “Four weeks. You?”
