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“So, your cover was blown last weekend?” Brody asked, a muscle in his jaw ticking. I knew what he was thinking—that I should have contacted him then, but I thought I had a handle on it. I’d thought… Fuck. I shouldn’t have thought, not when it came to someone else’s safety. Dammit.
“No. Not exactly.” I closed my eyes briefly, and when I opened them back up, I blurted out, “It was Belle.”
Brody blinked. “Belle?” He paused, almost as if he was playing the conversation back out in his head. “As in my Belle?”
My stomach dropped, and I managed to get out, “Yeah,” then pushed up off the wall and pulled my hands out of my pockets.
It was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop, and then Brody exploded, “What the fuck was she doing there?” He threw his hands up in the air and started to pace back and forth. “I fuckin’ knew she shouldn’t have gone to college here. I should have forbidden her.”
Jord laughed. “You know there ain’t no tellin’ that girl what to do.”
Jord was right. “I got her out of there, and I told her not to come back, but”—all of their attention was on me now—“Garza must have noticed and mentioned her to me a couple days later after I’d done a job for him.” I took a couple of steps across the room and pulled out the papers of the photos I’d printed off. “He called me into his club today to give me another job, and while he was out of his office, I had a look around.” I handed the papers to Brody. “I found these.”
Brody frowned down at them, his mouth pinched as he read what was on them, and then he slowly lifted his head. If looks could kill, I’d have been dead right now. “He’s done a background check on her.” Brody handed the papers to Jord, who read them with Kyle and Ryan looking over his shoulders. “Which means he knows who I am. And if he knows who I am—”
“Then he knows who I am,” I finished for him. It wasn’t confirmed that my cover was blown, but you only had to put a couple of pieces together to get to that conclusion.
“We need to make sure we have enough to bring him down,” Brody demanded. “No one leaves this room until we have a solid case and evidence. The faster we move, the better.”
* * *
FORD
It had been thirty-seven hours since Brody and the team had come through the door of the safe house, and now we were walking back out of it. Only this time, we were geared up and ready for a takedown.
More members of the DEA had come down to assist us. We weren’t stupid. Garza had the kind of manpower the president had, only these guys would kill you without a second thought because there were no consequences.
None of us talked as we piled into a reinforced black van. We checked our coms, made sure we could hear each other, and went over the plan one last time. We knew Garza would be at his house and in bed. It was the only time we knew he wouldn’t see us coming.
It only took us just over an hour to make it to his mansion, and the driver pulled up a couple of hundred feet away so Jord could jump out. I couldn’t make him out as he stealthily moved toward the gates, and only seconds later, they were opening up slowly. The driver sped through them, pulling up outside the main doors, and we all shot out of the sliding side doors.
Jord caught up to us, and I could hear shouts and warnings from Garza’s men, but I didn’t take in what they were saying. My focus was one hundred percent on getting into his mansion and arresting him. I hadn’t told Brody everything that had happened at the club. I hadn’t mentioned that I’d kissed Belle, so he didn’t realize how close Garza thought we were. Brody’s main concern was that Garza knew who I was and that Belle shouldn’t have been there, but I knew there was a reason behind Garza looking her up. You didn’t just do a background check for no reason.
And it was
all my fault.
I’d shown my hand when he’d mentioned her in front of Rory. I’d played my cards, and now he was ripping them out of my palms and laying them all on the table for everyone to see.
The front man held the battering ram to breach the house, and with one swing, the doors flung open. Several guards were in the main foyer, but they were taken down in a matter of seconds, and then I was leading the way with Brody and Kyle behind me. I’d gone over this route in my head hundreds of times in the last day, so I didn’t hesitate as I ran up the stairs and right toward Garza’s bedroom.
There was no way he hadn’t heard the shouts and gunshots, so I knew he wouldn’t be so surprised, but I also knew his safe room was on the other side of the house, and he would most likely be making his way there through a secret tunnel. Unlucky for him, he had to come out of that tunnel to open up the door, and that was exactly where we were standing, waiting for him.
Not thirty seconds later, he appeared with two women at his back, all of them looking frantic, and as soon as Garza spotted us, he froze. We were all geared up head to toe, so there was no way he could make out who I was, and I had no intention of showing him my face, not until he was safely in the back of the van.
Brody stepped forward with Kyle while I kept my rifle trained on him. One wrong move, and I wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him, and I think he realized that because his throat bobbed as he swallowed, and then he raised his hands in surrender.
Cuffs were slapped on his wrists, and Kyle led him down the hallway as the two women followed while Brody and I brought up the rear. It was almost too easy to get him out of the house, and although I wanted to tell Brody that, I kept my mouth shut. He still wasn’t happy about Belle turning up at the club, and I could understand why, but he was acting like she was a fifteen-year-old girl trying to fight for her freedom when, in reality, she was twenty. She’d be twenty-one this summer.
All the lights were on outside, making it feel like the middle of the day instead of two in the morning. Officers were still apprehending the guards on the grassed areas, but we bypassed them and piled back into the van, this time with Garza in tow. Once we were safely out of the grounds of his mansion and on the way to a black site where he could be detained until we could move him again, I pulled my mask down off my face, revealing myself to him. There was no point in pretending it wasn’t me. He already knew if the way his gaze stayed on me had anything to do with it.
Garza laughed, the sound echoing throughout the inside of the van. “I knew it.” He shook his head and waved his finger in my direction. “I knew it.”
I smirked. I could play that game too. I was a master at it, and even though I’d doubted myself several times over the last day and a half, I didn’t doubt I could rile him up. “Yeah?” I leaned forward. “How long did it take you to figure it out, huh?” I waited for his answer, but all I got in return was his nostrils flaring. He was a man who could shut down his emotions at a moment’s notice, same as me. But just as I had shown my hand with a couple of movements of my body in his office, he also had tells.
“The way I see it”—I leaned back—“I was undercover for so long, I know almost every single place you hide your drugs.” I smirked and tilted my head to the side. “Not to mention the money you like to filter into all of your forty-five businesses.” His eyes flared at that, and I knew then that I had gained access to the right amount of businesses.
I expected him to come back at me, to say something now that he knew all of his businesses were being taken down and his warehouses raided, but he stayed silent, something which was making me want to talk more and more. But I realized that was his tactic. He was trying to get all the information out of me as possible, and I wasn’t willing to give anything more away. I’d already said too much.
