Page 18 of Kill Me Sweetly

“He was searching for Maxwell to kill him, and until he succeeded, he wasn’t allowed back to the consortium,” Mason concluded.

“Uh huh, thanks, we figured that much out.” I rolled my eyes, earning a glare from Mason.

“So, Maxwell’s still alive; is that what’s keeping him here and why he’s not leaving?” JJ looked at Four. “Is that why you’re not fighting us on leaving?”

“When the job is done, you can come home.” He spoke like it was a repeated message, one he’d heard many times and was burned in his brain.

“We need to kill Max in order to follow him to this place?” Mason scrunched up his nose.

“Hey!” Max argued.

“Calm down, no one is dying here. There are other ways.” I narrowed my eyes at Four. “Question, Four. What happens if you don’t return home?”

“Jobs take time,” he mumbled around the cookie.

“How long do jobs normally take?” JJ reached over and brushed some crumbs from Four’s face.

“Depends.”

“How long were you searching for Maxwell?”

“Didn’t know he wasn’t home. Waited. Fourteen days, three hours, seventeen minutes.”

I turned toward Max. “Where were you?”

“I was at the hospital for a whole week, stayed in a hotel across from it to be closer, and afterward I had a business trip.”

“Why didn’t you go to the hospital?” JJ asked Four.

“Only at his home. Nowhere else.” That explained why he wasn’t attacking Maxwell here. He’d been ordered to kill him at his home.

“Four, if you don’t return after a certain amount of time, what happens?” JJ’s voice was small.

Four looked up and tilted his head at JJ. “They’ll come get me.”

“And how would they do that?” I had an inkling of how but hoped I was wrong.

He held out his arm. There was a tattoo. Simply the letter A, so small JJ and I both had missed it. “They know where I am.”

Well, that changed everything.

CHAPTER NINE

JJ

So Four basically told usthere was a tracker on his person, and all hell broke loose. When we’d tried to contact him before talking to Four, Gabe had said it wasn’t a good time, that there were too many people nearby, but now it couldn’t be avoided. Mason called Gabe, who growled a lot, unable to shout in the hospital corridor. Angel did, in fact, yell a lot—there were some colorful words coming out of that man. Nick and Noel immediately began discussing protocols for what to do should the evil overlord consortium (which I thought was a better name for them personally, and I didn’t even know them) and then it turned into, “We need to remove it.”

That was where I was like, no. “Angel, when you get back, you can cut into him. None of us is equipped for that. How I see it, is they haven’t come yet, and I think we’re okay for a bit. We’ll take extra precautions and be vigilant. When you get here, you can play doctor.”

“Can we maybe just assume they already know where Four is? He’s been gone for over two weeks. What’s to say they aren’t monitoring him daily?” Mason made a good point. “We need to address the fact that as soon as we remove the tracker, we could be starting a war we aren’t ready for.”

“True.” Shep hummed. “So we don’t destroy it. We remove it, drive to another location, and toss it there. When it comes time to retrieve Four, they’ll go there.”

“Unless the tracker is attached to him in a way that removing it disables it. They’ll for sure go to the last location it pinged, ie: our home,” Angel countered in all his smartiness.

“Will you know that once you’re inside and can see it?” I had to wonder.

“Maybe, but there’s no guarantee.”

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