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“Criminal history?”
“Nope. Nothing. Fucking model citizen. On the books at least.”
“Does he have blue eyes?” I asked, voice a little distant.
“What?”
“Does he have blue eyes? Meadow mumbled about blue eyes.”
Quin leaned down, reaching into a briefcase for a file folder, passing it toward me. I was pretty sure now we didn’t seem like mobsters to the people who were clearly eyeing us from inside the coffee shop. Nope. We seemed like a spy and a handler.
I flipped open the file folder, finding a picture stuck to the front of the file.
Ice blue eyes.
Dead too.
I’d seen those eyes many times in my life. In the eyes of sociopaths, in psychopaths, in people who lacked empathy, who didn’t know the meaning of right and wrong.
They were the eyes of a monster wearing the skin of a man.
This was the man who’d drugged her, who’d beaten her, assaulted her, tried to cut her open.
Rage for me wasn’t a hot thing.
The military had beaten that out of me.
Hot was too unpredictable, it made you act on impulse, get sloppy, make mistakes, go overboard.
We were trained, instead, to take the rage and douse it in ice, make it cold. Doing that allowed you to view the situation, think of all the possible ways it could go. Finding the ways to make it have the outcome we wanted, then give us what we needed to execute the plan.
“You could call Bellamy,” Quin told me, knowing me well enough to know what was happening.
When it came to getting out of the service with most of your sanity intact, Quin took the cake. Followed maybe by Lincoln. They had a little darkness. And they had drowned it in other things. Acceptable things. In Quin’s case, before he met his woman, it had been work. Nonstop. Day and night, weekends, never taking vacations. For Lincoln, it was women and cars.
They managed to exist without having to run away, or by becoming obsessive about something or another.
And they had, as a whole, left that other life behind them. And had no interest in revisiting.
While Quin could – and would – take a life again should he need to, he didn’t opt into it. He didn’t choose it.
Which was why he had needed Bellamy on the team – someone to do the dirtiest of dirty work.
He couldn’t quite wrap his head around considering planning to kill someone.
But the man who had hurt his woman had been dead before he had even met Aven.
Had she been in his life, shared the darkness, the pain with him, and that man was still alive? Yeah, make no fucking doubt about it; he’d have killed him in cold blood too.
“Don’t need Bellamy.”
“Ranger,” Quin started, sighing out his breath. “Just think on it for a minute.”
“Would you sit on this for a minute?” I shot back eyes accusing.
“Probably not, but we are not the same men. We’re not in the same place.”
“You think I’m too fucked up to do this and come back from it.”
He didn’t deny it.
He sat on it for a second, weighing his response.
“You’d come back from it. You’ve come back from worse.”
“But?”
“But I don’t know if you’d be the same.”
“Meadow will never be the same,” I shot back, teeth clenched so tight that my jaw ached.
“That’s true,” he agreed, waiting, knowing I wasn’t done.
“And for that, he needs to pay.”
“I don’t disagree. I’m just not sure it has to be you who makes him pay.”
“Tell you what, Quin. When you fall asleep with a woman you give a shit about, and she wakes you up in the middle of the night screaming in her sleep for someone to get off of her, then you can talk to me. Then you can tell me it’s not healthy to want to grab that bastard, bathe the fucking forest floor in his blood, and show him there is still some mother fucking justice in the world. Until then, keep your opinions and judgements to yourself.”
Quin was the boss for a reason.
Because he was unshakable.
Because he stayed calm in the face of everything. Which was the number one ingredient necessary for making a high-class crisis manager. A fixer. He had to take everything on the chin without even wincing. He had to keep his pulse slow in high-pressure situations. And he couldn’t flinch when someone lashed out at him.
“Well,” he said, taking a breath, slowly getting to his feet, his hand fastening the middle button on his suit jacket. “Alright,” he said, nodding, reaching down for his suitcase.
“Alright?” I asked, brows furrowing.
“Yeah, alright. Just make it clean. Don’t want anything tracing back.”
“This is me you’re talking to,” I reminded him.
“Still. Rage makes you stupid. I would prefer it if you acted smart. If you need Finn, give him a call. I’ll give him a heads up just in case.”
