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Also, his homestead was mine. I wasn’t gonna piddle around with his jam cellar or steal his precious greenberries; I was going to annex the whole lot and train Hux’s former villagers to blow razzberries at him on sight. And as for his alter ego, Smitty…
As I sat at the keyboard in Linus’s hotel room, pretending to worry about showing him the cartel data, whole swaths of my conversations with SmittyKitty came streaming through my memory. His rage at Anomaly’s overstepping. His pride when I told him about the dick rocket. The way he’d tattled on Huxley—on himself—when Hux had looted my jam cellar. His cheerful “Have fun storming the castle, Pip”s that had made me smile, made me laugh, made me feel good about myself, even when Hux and I had been too entrenched in our pride and insecurity to bridge the gap between us.
While I waited for Linus’s Horn data to download, I remembered my most recent Smitty conversation—the first conversation we’d had since Hux and I had declared a truce, a conversation that conveniently had happened just hours after I’d confessed to Huxley how much I missed Smitty’s presence in my life—and Smitty’s confession that he’d stopped playing as much because…
Because he was falling for someone. Someone amazing. The best man he knew.
He loved me.
I held back a laugh. He hadn’t just fallen in love with me last night, in the suite, in a moment of danger. It had happened days ago, even before I’d realized my own feelings. And when he’d blurted it out earlier, it hadn’t been because he’d wanted to do some kind of tearful goodbye before I walked into danger because he didn’t think I could handle myself. That wild look on his face in the suite had been the terror of a man who knew the man he loved was going into a dangerous situation, and he wanted me to carry that into battle with me because he trusted me to get the job done.
He trusted me to storm the castle.
My heart felt huge behind my ribs, like it would burst out of me and fling itself up two flights of stairs to Jasper’s own chest. Knowing Jasper loved me that much, trusted me that much, made me feel invincible.
Which was probably incredibly bad timing, what with the whole bringing-down-a-cartel thing happening literally in the room with me.
I wanted this bullshit to be done even more than I had before, if that were possible. I wanted the cartel out of our business and off our minds. And I wanted Linus Asshole Dixon to go down.
In order to do that, he needed to confess where my recorder could catch it. There was no way for me to know if we’d gotten any incriminating evidence on his Horn. I didn’t have a comms unit in my ear. So I had to get as much evidence as I could before leaving the room.
Which sounded great and totally doable… until he pulled out the gun and approached the door.
Stay calm.
I took a breath and let it out. We’d known he probably had a weapon. Champ had laid it all out for me, along with the likelihood of him using it. As long as he didn’t realize that I was working with the feds, I was safe.
Safe-ish.
Kinda.
“Tell me what Champ knows,” Linus demanded, turning away from the door—and the FBI distraction team on the other side of it.
Oh, damn. My vision went squidgy on the edges. Our conversation after that seemed like it was happening underwater or through thick glass. Everything was slow and weird.
Vince kept stalking closer to me, and I kept backing away, and all the while, he explained his crimes like a mustache-twirling villain at the end of a B movie. Worst of all, he spoke about these horrors in an oddly soothing sort of voice, like this was all some bizarre kind of virgin seduction foreplay.
Did this shit actually work?
What kind of guys had he been sleeping with?
It wasn’t until he’d fingered Gustavo for a different killing that I finally pulled out of my fugue state and thought, Holy shit. We did it.
He’d accused Gustavo of a murder. He’d admitted to his involvement with the cartel.
That meant this whole nightmare was… was over.
When the door opened and agents streamed in, life seemed to speed up again. By then, my hindbrain was chanting one word over and over, like a magical incantation. JasperJasperJasper.
I looked to the door, too numb to move my body, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw Linus lunge for his gun on the table where he’d set it down.
When the shot hit my ears, I wasn’t sure who’d fired it. Had it been Linus? An agent? But then Linus’s eyes got wider for a split second before he crumpled to the ground, knocking the desk chair over on his way down. Agents raced to get his gun.
