Page 53 of Fire for Effect

“Fuck you,” I said, with no conviction at all.

“We’re going to talk,” he said again. “You run, I will find you. You know I can.”

I heard his footsteps fade into the forest, the quieting sound of leaves crunching telling me that he was going out of sight.

I went into the trailer and put on a pair of warm jeans with flannel lining on the inside. I grabbed my gloves and tied up my hair. I pulled on my leather boots.

Had he demanded that I stay? Yes. But I hadn’t agreed to his terms. His presence, what I had done, the way things spiraled out of control from less than twenty-four hours of him being here crushed my chest in a way that I couldn’t handle. It was too much.

He wasn’t hearing me, or he wasn’t listening. He was too blind to see what was right in front of him.

We would never work. We were too different. And ignorance of that was only because he was the one who was rich, and I was poor. He had a family, and I did not. In the end, he’d ride off into the sunset. I would stay here.

He’d make his mark on the world, and it would be glorious, and wonderful.

My job? My immediate need? It was to make sure that he didn’t make his mark on me so deep that I’d never be able to carve it back out of me again. To fortify myself. To put a protective layer around the softest part of me, so that he couldn’t break it.

To do that, I’d need to breathe. And the only thing that could help with something like that was the wind.

I needed him to realize now that I was far more trouble than I was worth.

Chapter 13

I’ll Sleep With Your Wife, Too

Griff

She left. I heard Daisy, her Ducati, fire up. The sound of the engine receded into the distance.

Was I worried that something might happen to her while she was out? Yes. But I knew where she was going. I knew her like I knew myself - better, even.

She was heading to the one sanctuary she had. To Mack McClanahan’s farm.

Top and his wife only lived three miles down a small highway, with acres and acres of land.

I followed the tracker on her bracelet, and watched the little dot move as she sped down the highway, far over the speed limit. She was a Psycho on a Ducati.

She was fast, banking turns, and moving down side streets in an unpredictable pattern, like she had a tail following her around. She might be a civilian now, but she was still a trained operator. She’d be tricky to follow if she ever got pissed and took off that bracelet.

Maybe the subdermal tracker Sierra talked about wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I mean if I was already going to track her, then I might as well go balls to the wall. That was the Lucky 13 motto, after all: “If it’s worth killing, it’s worth overkilling.”

I’d get to her later. First, I had to dial in, before I started a national incident by not making contact with the government agencies that would oversee our little hiatus.

I walked out into the woods with the satellite phone to my ear. A full-blown conversation was underway the moment I pinged into the conference call.

“I don’t understand,” Sierra’s distinctive Ukrainian accent pierced through the static. “Your wife was in bed with another man?”

“Yes!” That was the voice of Agent Golf. I could hear his distinct Texan drawl.

“So?” Sierra asked, still confused at the significance of his statement.

“She was cheating on me!”

Silence. Total dead air on the line as everyone took this information in.

“Hello? Did I get disconnected?” Golf’s voice again.

I didn’t say anything, trying to withhold my laughter.

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