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“And Kelly,” Trace said.
Nicolai stiffened.
I narrowed my eyes. He’d forgotten about the girl.
Trace’s voice went low. “And Kelly too. She was loved by someone in our camp.”
“Of course. Justin loved her. She would’ve been family one day.”
I snorted at that.
Nicolai sent me a dark look.
“Somehow I doubt that.” I put the safety on, seeing our work was done here.
We saw him. He wanted to keep the ceasefire in place, and I’d rattled him enough. In my eyes, he was a coward. I was sure Trace would have a whole different take on him, one that was more convincing and more intellectual, but I didn’t care. I was going to kill Nicolai Worthing one day.
I couldn’t wait for that day.
“The ceasefire will continue, but if there’s one more aggression, we’ll stop waiting.”
Nicolai stared at Trace before dipping his head in a brief nod. “Thank you.” He glared at me before he went to his vehicle. His men moved immediately, swarming him.
They all were in their cars and speeding away within seconds.
“Tell me that gunshot was ours?” Trace looked at me.
I checked my phone.
Avery: His man is down. Orders?
I called him. “Is he alive?”
“He is. I have his gun packed up.”
I slid my eyes to Trace, seeing him cursing and shaking his head. “Bring him in. Take him to the downtown warehouse.”
“On it.”
“You serious?” Trace asked as I put my phone away. “Who’d you call in?”
“Avery.”
He swore again but took in a deep breath. He was aware how good Avery was. “He had a man out there?”
“Sniper, or I’m guessing from the distance. Avery didn’t specifically say he was a sniper.”
Trace’s eyes closed for a respite before he shook his head. “We just agreed on the ceasefire, and one of our men took out one of his right after?”
“No.”
“What? Yes!”
“No. It was in the middle of negotiations. The gunshot happened before you both agreed on the continued ceasefire.”
Trace rolled his eyes, but I was right, and he knew it.
I was grinning, enjoying this moment. I got one over him, my genius analyst best friend. He flicked his eyes upward again but gave me a half grin back. “You’re such a cocky shit.”
“I’m a cocky shit that’s right.”
Trace nodded, and his whole demeanor shifted. I knew this look. He was moving into the mulling phase, where he was pulling up all the information he had taken in from our interaction, and he was sifting through it. He was a computer, bringing everything up on the screen so it could get studied and grouped in the right category.
“This ceasefire doesn’t make sense.”
I grunted. Now he was getting it.
“He wasn’t worried about Kelly. He forgot about Kelly. He was only worried about who killed Justin . . . or was he? I couldn’t read him when he mentioned Justin. But it’s like he’s more worried about the ceasefire than anything else.”
I was figuring that too.
Trace kept on. “You kidnapped one of his cousins. You killed three of his men. You just had his sniper taken out, and he is still insisting on the ceasefire. Why? That makes no sense in our world.”
The answer came to me, and it was glaringly obvious. “Yeah, it does.”
Trace looked my way.
“He’s planning something else, and he needs time. We’re giving him that time.”
“There’s no ceasefire then.”
“Exactly.”
We shared a look.
“That means we can hit him back.”
I smiled. “Finally.”
He grinned back. “It also means he has no idea we already took his cousins.”
Crispin and Penn. General dickheads, but yeah. Nicolai left without saying one word, so he had no clue.
“His sniper isn’t dead. We got that man, too, and his gun.”
It was a good coup for us.
Trace nodded. “We need a big hit.”
“We need to find out why he wants a ceasefire so damned much.” I remembered something else. “We still need to take care of Marco and Remmi.”
His grin vanished. “Let’s handle the sniper first.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
MOLLY
I got my dad’s voice mail, again. “Dad, you need to call me. I’m actually worried. For once.” I hung up before I could say anything more, like how I wanted to murder him, because if he heard that, he’d never find Kelly’s murderer.
“No luck?”
I straightened, hearing Jess come into the kitchen.
I’d left the bedroom around six because my stomach was doing its best rendition of a pterodactyl squawk, or how I was assuming they would’ve squawked. It would’ve been more like a roar.
I’d realized this was not Ashton’s house or another one of Ashton’s places when I went down the stairs and saw a picture of Trace and Jess together. The next picture over was of her mother. Her brother. There were more people, but I didn’t know them, and then I meandered into the office and was captivated for the next hour because there was an entire wall of pictures of Trace during his high school and college years. A lot of those pictures had him and Ashton, and yeah, my stomach was doing all these little flutters seeing Ashton smiling and looking young and dare I say . . . cute?! He was hot, but he was cute too.
