Page 121 of Affliction

Chapter Forty-Nine

Jackson

We had found the bastard. We knew where he was hiding out. Where he was planning his next attempt on Mia. But he wasn’t going to get that chance. Because we had found him.

Riding in the van with the team, I prepared to go over the plan one more time. It had been reviewed several times, but I wasn’t leaving anything to chance. We needed to get this guy. I wanted to make sure Mia was safe and that her life was no longer interrupted. I also wanted to protect Catherine. This guy was a nutcase, and who knew if his focus would switch from harming Terry to others in her life. I couldn’t risk what that would mean if Catherine became a focus for him.

I sighed and looked at the faces of the men riding with me. There were seven of us in total—six riding in the back of a nondescript delivery van, traveling to the location where Chad was hauled up.

“You okay, boss?” Wolfman asked to my left.

I nodded. “Yeah, I’m good. Let’s go over this one more time,” I commanded and the attention of all the men in the van snapped over to me. “He’s hauled up in a warehouse. It has a large, open floor plan, which should make it easy to extract him. Especially since the surveillance showed it was empty except for him and his stuff. It appears that’s where he’s living. Policemen come by every few hours and feed him intel. I have word from the DAs office that as soon as we round him up, they’ll do the same with the officers that are helping him.”

The men nodded. Some of them looked bored, some of them were listening intently. I wasn’t worried about the ones who looked bored, though. They would be on their game when I needed them to be; they always were. This wasn’t going to be as challenging or as dangerous as we were used to dealing in. But nonetheless, it was a job where we were needed, and Cole Securities didn’t just deal in high-end, highly dangerous jobs. No, we helped anyone in need. Especially when that woman was living in fear of a man who had badly beaten her in the past and had come back to finish the job.

“Let’s just play this clean. Surround the place and get in and out without too much gunfire. From what I understand, he’s armed. I don’t think there are any explosives on the property, but be on alert.”

More nodding. The van slowed to a stop. “We’re here,” a voice from the front of the van called.

“Everybody arm up,” I commanded. Everyone did as I asked and headed out of the van.

We assembled in formation and got ready to split up and surround the building.

“All right, team. Stay alert, stay alive,” I said. Everyone nodded.

“Let’s do this,” Athens said.

I pointed out the teams—who should split up and where they should head. The plan was in motion. I radioed back to home base and let them know we were on the move. The plan was in motion.

Members of my team were surrounding the building while Athens, Wolf, and I would go in the front. We wanted to face this bastard head-on. Another team would enter through the back, and the other two teams would cover the side entrances. I had even placed a sniper on the roof. If he ran, they could wound him and stop him from running on us. That was the order that the team had: wound him only. That wasn’t unusual for the team, but sometimes we needed to assassinate the mark, and this wasn’t one of those times.

It all happened so quickly. We stormed the front door, and there he was, just sitting in a chair, smiling at us. We drew our guns and ordered him to the ground.

But he laughed.

That was when he drew. A gun came out from behind the chair; it might have been sitting on the shelf behind him, but I couldn’t be sure. It was an automatic weapon, that much I was sure of, and it was pointed at me and my team.

In that moment, the plan didn’t matter. None of it mattered. He had an automatic weapon trained on us. He didn’t know who we were and what we were capable of. In his mind, it was a him or us situation. And I wasn’t going to let it be him over any member of my team.

He went to fire, but shots came from behind him, wounding him in the leg. And that should have been where the fire stopped, but Chad hit his knees and continued to fire.

So I fired.

I shot and hit that son of a bitch in the heart.

He was dead.

Gone. Just like he deserved. He didn’t deserve to be breathing the same air as Mia. Not after all the strings he had pulled, all the connections he had used to find out about her. To keep tabs on her over the years.

He was done now.

It was all over.

Chad fell to the floor, and the life drained out of his eyes.

He was dead.

I breathed a sigh of relief and met the eyes of my team. Some of them were watching me, one had kicked the gun away from Chad, and the rest were surveying the area where he had been living.

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