Page 93 of Royal Pain

He grinned as he stood, his nostrils flaring. “You have no idea. You are… everything.”

Everything.

If only he understood how that single word made me feel, the tingles sweeping through me.

If only things could be different. Normal.

Whatever normal was.

CHAPTER 24

Gage

There was a practicality to running an organized kill mission.

That’s the way I wanted to think of what we were doing tonight. I was fully aware killing everyone, especially given the FBI’s presence, wasn’t in my best interest, but a guy could have thoughts.

We were in several SUVs, old-fashioned walkie-talkies allowing us to communicate together. While I’d wanted to spend more time watching the beginning of the community’s destruction during a breaking news cycle on pretty much every television station, I’d seen enough to know their world was crumbling around them. And the social media outlets were going insane.

What I doubted anyone suspected was the number of outside neighbors hanging around the outskirts of the community. The story couldn’t have broken an hour before and some had picket signs. I think we were all amused, perhaps with the exception of the lovely woman sitting in the back seat.

“You sure you want her to have a gun, boss?” Jeff asked.

She looked like a badass herself wearing dark clothes, her hair pulled up in a tight bun.

“I can hear you, Jeff. The man who trained me to shoot was not only a former Black Ops member but a decorated detective in the New York police department. He’d just retired, which meant I got lucky. He refused to allow me to sign a permit to purchase a weapon until I knew exactly what I was doing. I can shoot a tin can off a fence post at three hundred yards. Can you?”

Jeff and the other man sitting beside me, the two behind choked in order to muffle their laughter.

“There’s my girl,” I said casually.

Jeff shook his head. “I guess I don’t want to piss in your Wheaties.”

“No, you do not. You don’t fuck with women or their breakfast cereal. My father’s house is on the right. After that, we enter the zone. I suggest you park across the street in the park. It has nothing to do with the community, although they tried more than once to purchase the land.”

“Anything else you can tell us?”

“Look, I’m not one hundred percent certain about this but there are a few basements in the community. They hold more secrets than what I was able to find. When the girls believed I was one of them, we used to play a game of trying to figure out what was locked away in the darkest portions of various houses. That included Ashley. Her father was an accountant. Little did I know he worked for the community. He had a small business operation within miles of his house, but a lot of people did. If youput their businesses on a map, it was like they couldn’t venture out more than two miles. Maybe they were all imbedded with some chip when they were born.”

Her sigh forced me to look at Jeff. He was taking her lead, heading into the park. There were a few lights on but nothing that did more than create ominous shadows ghosting along our vehicles. “Go on.”

“Anyway. We were doing a little sleepover one night at Ashley’s place. Now, I’m talking we’re maybe eight years old. Her parents were at a party next door, which I thought was strange but there was no crime in our neighborhood. We were playing our game when Heidi was the one determined to look in their basement. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. I won’t bore you with the details other than it was locked, the lock used pretty significant but nothing was stopping Heidi.”

Jeff parked and I sensed FBI presence even though they’d promised they wouldn’t be seen until they were ready to advance.

“Anyway. Heidi found a crowbar and broke the lock. She thought she was bold and daring. I’d felt like a chicken shit. We ribbed each other to head downstairs. It was just like you’ve seen in horror flicks where there’s a single bulb light highlighting a tight set of steep stairs. It looked creepy, a slight chill wafting up to us. We made up ghost stories, for God’s sake. Anyway. I did my best to ease down the stairs first, wincing every time one of the boards creaked.”

“What did you find?”

“Nothing at first. A storage area for stuff in boxes and some shovels and picks. But there was a room we almost ignored withanother closed door. It wasn’t locked. What we found in there was… surreal. Weapons attached to gun racks on two sides, boxes of ammunition. But worse than that was a freezer. I’ll never forget Rachel decided to be the brave one, opening the damn thing. What I can tell you is her scream was high pitched and we were lucky we were partially underground plus there was loud music next door.”

“What did she see?” I asked her.

“The other four of us didn’t look and it took her six years to admit what she saw. By then, no one believed her. Heidi laughed, telling her it was just the girl’s fabulous imagination, but I’d seen the fear in her eyes.” As soon as the SUV was stopped, I lifted my head, locking eyes with Gage. “A head in a plastic bag. Several other body parts that she said couldn’t belong to one person. Ashley’s father was keeping dead people stored in the freezer until they could be disposed of.”

“Fuck,” Ron hissed from behind me. The other two soldiers had hung on the back of the seat, listening intently.

“No one ever tried to go back into a basement?”

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