Page 24 of How Much For a Life of Lies?

With a surge of adrenalin, I wrestled the gun from Matteo’s grasp, my fingers closing around the trigger as I aimed it squarely at his chest. In that moment, there was no hesitation, no remorse, only the cold certainty of what needed to be done.

I shot that fucker through his heart. Once. Twice. The sound was deafening in the confined space of the warehouse. And then there was silence.

“No! Zach, Kerry’s hit,” Kai shouted in my face, and I went to a crouch next to her. She was bleeding from a wound in her chest, her eyes shut.

“Who shot her! Did you shoot her?” I shouted at him, and he shook his head, backing away, his eyes wide, shock in every line of him.

“Of course not!”

I stared at Kerry lying in a pool of blood, supporting her head. Beside me, Kai checked for a pulse, and then, in a flurry of motion, he shoved at me.

“Help me pick her up. There’s a pulse. We need to get her to a hospital,” he shouted, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Now.”

Together, Kai and I lifted Kerry into our arms, her body limp as we carried her out of the warehouse and into the night. The journey to the hospital was a blur, every step weighed down by panic.

The doctors worked to save Kerry and her baby’s life, and through all of it, I watched and waited, with Kai by my side. The bullet hadn’t been from my gun, or Kai’s. It had been a stray shot, an accidental hit, from the gun I’d wrestled from Matteo.

My fault.

If I hadn’t pushed at Matteo, then it would never have gone off. If I’d done something different…

Kerry never reopened her eyes, never saw her baby, and when the doctors revealed they’d saved her little boy, my heart cracked with anguish at the loss for that child.

And then I saw him—she’d had a boy with red hair like mine.

Mine.

“Jesus, Zach,” Kai said, his voice choked with emotion. “He has to be yours.”

TEN

Kai

I knocked on the door and Zach opened it immediately, as if he’d been waiting for me to arrive—which he probably had, given the 911 text that had pulled me out of deep sleep and sent me barreling to his place at speed. He’d moved into the place outside San Diego when Charlie had landed in his life, and it was telling that I got a place an hour away—sue me, I had nowhere better to live and at least that way I was close to my godson.

Well, not officially my godson, but as good as.

“Is C okay?” I snapped and pushed past Zach to find Charlie.

Zach grabbed me. “Charlie’s fine.”

I shrugged off his hold, and headed to the nursery, winding my way through the chaos that had gotten worse in the months since Zach had brought Charlie home with him.

“Gotta find my sugar!” I called and bypassed the mess to step inside the tiny second bedroom where there was no chaos at all. A crib was in one corner, a changing table next to it, and sleeping soundly was baby Charlie, his red hair sticking up in tufts.

“I only just got him down,” Zach said from next to me.

I side-eyed the piles of paperwork on a small chair, recognizing the Sanctuary Shadow Team logo. “Did you read him mission reports again?”

“It works,” Zach said and shrugged. “Heard your op went to shit,” he added as he walked away from Charlie and the room, leaving me to pull the door nearly closed.

“Who told you that?”

He rolled his eyes at me. He might have taken a leave of absence, coming up three months now, but he was still looped in on existing operations.

“You know how it is,” I replied, weaving in and out of boxes and the general detritus of the life Zach was letting build up around him. I’d gotten used to the chaos surrounding Zach. The center of this disarray was something new, though, a large board cluttered with photos, notes, and lines connecting various pieces of information; the old photo of his twin, along with a big pros and cons list.

“What’s this?” I asked, and he sighed.

---