Page 38 of Javier

“You don’t get compensated to your potential.” He poked around for my weak link. “My employer can be most generous.”

“Speaking of your employer, who might he be?” It was a blatant attempt to get some intel out of the turd. “I might need his name and address, you know, to forward my references.”

“Oh, come on.” He giggled, a high-pitched, unpleasant sound. “You know who he is, and we know that you know.”

“Are we per chance talking about one Xao Li?”

“Give me a moment here.” Snake smiled and slowly lowered one hand. “Don’t shoot me yet, Texan.”

Fuck. He even knew where I came from.

The NWO had managed to insert a mole into our team during our first round. The mole had been a security breach that had cost us much and had provided our enemy with intel about our team, but the info dump ended when we plugged that hole and Dagger dispatched the traitor to hell. I was a lot of things, but a traitor?

Hell, no.

This time around, the NWO was shit out of luck.

“Nobody has to know that you turned a blind eye tonight.” Moving cautiously, Snake slid a cell out of his front pocket and offered it to me. “You can walk out with yourhead held up high and disappear. Or you can join us, if you wish. Name your price, type in your bank account number in the blinking box, and you’ll have deposit confirmation in two minutes.”

“Nah, not even tempted.” I snatched the cell from his hand, tossed it over my shoulder, and heard it plop down in the mud behind me. “Your employer kills his employees more often than not. You guys die at alarming rates. Your attrition rates are fucked up, dude.”

“We could use an inside replacement.” The man widened his vile smile. “My boss asked me to convey his invitation.”

“That’s a ‘fuck no’ and a ‘fuck you and your boss.’” I smothered the surge of rage that burned in the pit of my stomach. “By the way, where are your men?”

“I think you know the answer to that question as well.” He knocked his pointy chin toward the road. “They went after the high value target. That way.”

Shit.

My worst-case scenario materialized. The tangos had slipped away to follow Missy. My heart began to mark my urgency with harder beats. I’d always been cool during my missions, but in this moment, something shifted. The mission became personal and a cold hollowness spread through me.

Was this… fear?

Holy shit.I’d never felt cold terror like this in battle, not even as I laid wounded, in and out of consciousness in a makeshift foxhole with Nix Astor.

I forced my face into a blank expression. “They won’t find her.”

“Yeah, we will.” His certainty increased the icy hole expanding within, but I didn’t show him that. “She carries your comms,” he added casually.

I needed more info than that shitty crumb he threw at me.“So?”

“As you know, we’re well-funded and highly skilled.” Snake studied me with his chilling gaze, as though he still had a chance to persuade me to his cause. “We can hack, ride, or better yet, buy satellites as well as you can. We can also trace a signal and hack a mission computer with the best of them.”

Fuck me to hell and back.

That piece of shit Snake wasn’t boasting about the NWO’s funding and capabilities. Knowing someone from Tracker Team would likely be as close as they were to finding Missy, they must have found a weakness in our newly integrated Tak system, homed in on my satellite signal during my last transmission, and hacked into my location interface. This is how they’d tracked us across the lake and homed in on our little camp.

Mina and Omega had probably found evidence of this. It explained why they’d gone silent on me. The missing tangos were tracking Missy. I needed to get to her and fast, before death caught up with her.

Chapter Eleven

Missy

A heavy weight sat over my chest as I guided the little donkey by the rope down the dirt road. It was quickly becoming a muddy creek around my sneakers. It irked me to no end that I wanted to cry like a baby. I couldn’t believe I was moving away from Javier when every fiber of my being was telling me it was the wrong thing to do.

The rain fell in heavy sheets, obscuring my vision. Thick, heavy drops pelted my head and soaked me to the bone. With my free hand, I wiped the water cascading down my cheeks, but it was useless. More kept coming.

The power of Javier’s kisses still warmed my lips. The pull to return to the camp felt urgent, and I had to grit my teeth and force my feet to keep moving in the opposite direction.

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