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It was maybe another two hours later when the door beeped and pressed open, bringing in Kai who looked tired, something you didn’t see often. The man was a machine, truly part cyborg. He never even needed the pick-me-up from coffee. So him looking beat, yeah, it said a lot.
“How’d it go?” I asked anyway, needing the details. And maybe the distraction.
“That bastard grabbed my fucking ass,” Miller declared, throwing her bag down on the desk just inside the door, every inch of her humming with agitation.
The lone girl in a boys club most of the time since she spent almost no time in the office with Jules, Miller was a force to be reckoned with.
It was easy to underestimate her at barely five-foot-five and a slight figure, with long, glossy black hair, and big brown eyes, she seemed more suited to spending her days at a beauty salon than negotiating deals between scumbags.
But in Miller’s case, looks definitely could be deceiving.
When it came to balls, she had us all beat. Even Kai.
“So I take it things didn’t go anywhere?” I asked, watching as Kai kicked out of his shoes, then dropped down into my bed, closing his eyes, putting the crook of his arm over his face, and shutting the world out.
Not good.
That was really not good.
I had only seen Kai shut down maybe three times in his time with me. Once, when he was delivering a message about a hostage switch – a big-time drug dealer being held by our client, for our client’s sixteen-year-old daughter. Part of Kai’s job was to suss shit out since he was our first line of defense. And what he found was that the girl had been gang-raped by the entire organization. We took her back within the hour, one of those times when we had bodies lying around, this time a lot of them. Finn got a lot of money that week. And Kai couldn’t function for almost a month after. Another time, when he lost a client right before his eyes, gunshot to the third eye. And, finally, when he suddenly lost both his parents and his little sister in a car accident a year and a half before.
That was it.
Otherwise, he was a rock.
“We have a problem,” Miller said, jerking her chin to the hall as she waved the keycard to her room around, making Lincoln and I move to follow, all of us almost running into Smith as we moved into the hall.
There was tension in him as well, a ticking of the muscles in his jaw, a metal rod in his spine.
It seemed that Miller was the only one holding it fully together. And I think I knew why.
“Alright,” she announced as we moved into her room across the hall, her clothes scattered about the bed, makeup all over the counters in the bathroom. She might have been a certified badass, but she was a girls-girl through and through. “So, we now have two clients,” she announced, reaching into her pocket, pulling out a folded, well-worn and soft piece of paper, one that had been kept inside a pocket for a while.
I reached for it, unfolding it, and found two words inside.
Help me.
“The wife,” I guessed, looking up at her, feeling my body go tense as well.
“She handed it off to Kai after she was paraded around with all her many, many bruises. And, judging by the way she was folded to one side, a few busted ribs as well.”
Shit.
Well, that explained it.
Kai felt guilty for leaving her there, for allowing her to stay even five more minutes with her abusers.
But this, this was tricky fucking business.
Getting them to stop trying to kill Fenway was going to be hard enough, but likely could be accomplished if there was enough money thrown at the whole thing. The same went for the guy who owned the yacht. And the cops in the town where he crashed it.
But this?
This was going to be a long-game kind of project.
We would have to handle the Fenway situation, then pretend like it was over, let them let their guards down.
And then we would have to set up an extraction.
This went from a two-week project that was pretty cut-and-dry to a month or more one that was going to be ugly, messy, and require we fly in Finn and maybe even Ranger, as much as he would kick and scream about it.
Honestly, we needed Gunner too. But I couldn’t leave Jules to hold down the fort and babysit Fenway.
We would need guns and city plans and a fuckload of surveillance equipment.
Luckily, we were smack dab in the middle of a country filled with ex-KGB operatives who would sell anything to someone whose pockets ran deep enough.
“We have to get her out,” Smith said, voice steel.
