Page 211 of Alessio

Frustration slipped through Alessio’s bloodstream, heavy and thick. Like every other conversation he tried to have with Dare, he suspected this one was going to end the same exact way as it always did. Dare talking him in circles, Alessio getting pissed, and after he’d walked away, he would realize he didn’t get shit that he wanted.

“I want an assignment,” Alessio said.

“And you will get one when you are ready for one.”

“I’m ready now!”

Dare pointed at the map he’d been surveying since the moment Alessio came to his office. “That’s a mountain range there—do you think a complex within a mountain would be a possibility? A back up, we’ll call it. Just in case something happened, and I needed to move out the main area of operation for safety reasons.”

“I … what?”

“A complex inside a mountain range.”

“What does that have anything to do with the fact I want to go out on an assignment?” Alessio demanded.

Dare glanced over his shoulder, his brow furrowing. “Oh, I thought you realized I was done with that conversation. So, if you don’t want to indulge these new plans of mine, you don’t need to keep standing there.”

Alessio balked.

It took him entirely too long to come up with a suitable response to that, and it wasn’t nearly as insulting as he wanted it to be. Shame, really.

“You’re impossible,” he snapped at Dare.

“But am I really, though?”

“Yes.”

“And you wonder where you get it from, no?”

The two of them stared at one another for a spread of time, neither of them moving an inch or giving a damn inch. Finally, Alessio’s irritation spilled over as he made a disgusted noise under his breath and turned to leave the office.

At his back, Dare called, “And don’t bother the trainees today, Les, they need to focus.”

“I want an assignment!”

“Soon.”

Yeah, right.

To Dare, that could mean months.

Fuck it.

He’d go to Cree.

Prospects for The League were given one week to recover after phase one before phase two began in full force. A single week with whatever medical care they needed, all the rest that would put them mostly back on their feet again, and then it was back to business as normal.

If intensive, seven-day-a-week training was normal.

The prospects were shoved from one thing to the next—tested on every skill The League could throw at them within a few weeks, and once they figured out where someone really excelled, then that’s where they started to focus.

For himself, it had been weapons.

Knives, guns, and more.

Any weapon they put in his hands, he could use. And he could probably use it in several different ways to kill someone, if that was the need. He could also make a weapon out of just about anything because to him, everything was dangerous enough to kill. He just needed to figure out he wanted to do it.

Corrado and Chris were still in their second week of skill testing. Which was why he wasn’t very surprised to find Cree hanging a few steps back from the mats set out on the gym floor where the twins were currently working with a League member who excelled in weapons, and specifically, fighting with weapons.