Page 26 of Final Exit

“Are you even listening to me? I went to his funeral. And Amber’s.” She swiped her left hand across her forehead. The heat was starting to affect her, too. She was getting agitated, which was the last thing he wanted when she was holding a gun on him.

He gestured toward the keys lying on the seat by her drawn-up knee. “I can turn the air conditioner on and—”

“Not yet. I’m still waiting for you to admit that your men killed my friends.”

“They weren’t my—”

“They weren’t your men, yeah, yeah. Whatever. I want to hear you admit that theFBI’smen killed my friends. Say it.”

It was a trap and they both knew it. If he said they didn’t, she’d call strike three and he’d be dead. If he said they did, same outcome.

“Who set up the funerals?” he asked, keeping his tone calm, reasonable. “Did you see the bodies?”

Her mouth tightened into a hard line, giving him the answer that he’d expected. She and her friends wouldn’t have stuck around to gather bodies for funerals. If they had, they’d have been captured, too. They’d probably held memorial services, no burial.

“What makes you so sure the men you saw were really FBI agents?”

“The letters FBI on flak jackets was a pretty big clue.”

He ignored her quip. He was grasping, and he knew it. But he wasn’t giving up without a fight. “Maybe Sebastian made some powerful enemies, assassinated the wrong person.”

“Right,” she said slowly, as if she thought he was mental. “So the FBI is sending teams after Enforcers and nicely taking them into custody while FBI-imposters are doing the exact same thing, going after Enforcers, except that they’re killing the ones they catch. That’s what you’re saying. Does that sound remotely possible to you?”

Not even a little bit.

He sighed. That brilliant plan he’d come up with earlier today didn’t seem quite so brilliant now. He had a thick file on Bailey, had read it front to back numerous times. And he’d bet his life that he knew her well enough to predict that she’d have snuck back into his driveway early this morning and would have put a tracker on his car. Or at the very least, that she’d have hung back somewhere close and tailed him to the motel.

Yay him. He’d been right about that part.

Too bad he’d been wrong about the next part, in thinking he could manipulate her and neutralize her as a threat, then talk through everything as if they weren’t on opposite sides. Turns out, knowing someone on paper was nothing like knowing them in person. He didn’t have a clue what she was going to do next.

“What about your other friend, Amber?” He was operating without a playbook now, not sure where to direct the conversation. But at least she was talking and not shooting. Yet. “You saw Amber die, too, or think you did?”

“No,” she whispered. “She died alone.”

The pain in her gaze nearly stole his breath. And just like that he was wishing he could pull her close, hold her, chase those damn shadows from her eyes.

Stupid. He was so stupid. She wouldn’t want him to hold her. She’d put a bullet in him before that ever happened.

“Then how do you know that she’s dead,” he whispered back.

“I just do. I haven’t heard from her. Neither has Hawke. And we heard rumors there was a shoot-out with FBI agents who came to capture her. So we held a memorial, a funeral.”

He held out his hands in a placating gesture. “I haven’t heard anything to make me believe that your friends are dead. My boss never reported any casualties from before I took over. And I assure you that my men have orders to bring Enforcers in alive, unharmed, and that we pass them off to another set of agents to take them to the retraining facility. Once they’re deemed not a threat, they’re set up with new lives—like a witness protection program. That’s it. Period. No killing. What would be the point?”

“To protect whoever in the government worked with Cyprian Cardenas, the EXIT Inc. CEO, to establish the Enforcer program in the first place. Or maybe to protect whoever tried to cover it up when the program went off the rails and some Enforcers killed some innocent people,” she said, her voice firm again. “Those kinds of revelations would be career killers, to say the least. I’m guessing this goes pretty high up, to someone with political aspirations who’s afraid that one of the Enforcers will eventually leak information about what they used to do. Someone is shutting us up. The only question is who?”

For the first time since she’d pointed the gun at him, she moved her finger from the frame to the trigger. She was going to shoot him. And he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

“Tell me where Hawke is. I want an address.”

He slowly shook his head, wondering if that was the last thing he’d ever do. “I don’t have that information. Everything is on a need-to-know basis.”

“Trust me,” she gritted out. “You need to know.”

He stared at the dark barrel of the gun. Was this it then? Would he die with all of these unanswered questions floating around in his mind? Not just about the Enforcers, and Faegan, but abouteverything.

A year ago he’d married a beautiful woman. Two months later she was dead and he was in a coma.He’d freaking gotten married, and he could barely even remember the ceremony—at a Justice of the Peace of all things. His memories of his wife were just fuzzy fragments, impressions, blurry images, like little vignettes. It was obscene to have supposedly loved someone and barely remember her. And yet, here he sat, his would-be killer pointing a loaded gun at his head, an assassin for God’s sake, who was anathema to everything he believed in. And he still wanted to pull her into his arms and kiss her.

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