Page 4 of Double Shot

“I saw the news, too.” She scowled. “They didn’t name names; the investigators said the heat of the explosion was high enough that a handful of bodies they identified were only through dental records and that some they couldn’t identify at all.”

“I know.” I looked away. I didn’t want to think about Roan, charred to the point of being unidentifiable…

“If they were in the room with that fucking bomb, where he was, there’s nothing left of them. They’re just memories and... and… and fucking tomato sauce!” Her voice cracked and she left the room, hands over her face.

I sat back heavily in my chair. That didn’t go how I wanted it to go.

* * *

The next day,when we had our sparring match, she took my leg out from under me and put me on the mat again. “You know what this means?” she asked.

“That I am going to be making dinner tonight and probably doing the laundry for the week?” I asked.

“Well, yes.” She smiled. “But I was more thinking about your suggestion, revenge…” she trailed off, growing quiet and staring up and away from me, eyes distant.

I waited her out and finally with a shuddering breath she said, “I want it. I want it so fucking bad… but not at the cost of losing you, too.”

She looked down at me and I smiled, raising my hand to cup her face like I’d seen Roan do I don’t know how many times.

“I’m not going anywhere, baby. I promise.”

Tears brimmed on her bottom lashes but didn’t spill as she choked out, “He promised me, too.” She squeezed her eyes shut, her face a study in agony that mirrored my own, but I steeled myself. “He promised he would never lie to me, but he did. He looked me in the eye and said he would be right behind us and hewasn’t.” She opened her eyes, tears spilling crystalline down her smooth skin, and fixed me with those deep brown eyes of hers and said, “So don’t, please don’t. Don’t you lie to me too.”

I felt my face go as serious as it’d ever been and I nodded, smoothing one of my thumbs through those tears. I brought it to my mouth and sucked it clean and nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, I won’t lie.”

She nodded and sniffed and got up off of me, pacing several steps away and then back about half the distance away again as she took in deep breaths and got herself under control.

“So, what now?” she asked. “What’s next?”

I sat up sharply and rested my forearms on my knees.

“We start looking up the members of the Escadrille that we know of, and we start taking them out, one by one,” I said. “We make them pay.”

“Do we know who they are?” she asked and gave me a hand up.

“We know who a lot of them are; he did background research and we have a dossier. It’s in the recovery drive. I’ve looked at the list of them and I know the ones we have to kill, and those that would be good practice.” I considered the expression on her face. “But you realize that this is killing people.”

“They deserve it.” Her voice was ice.

“I’m glad we’re on the same page then.” I assumed a new stance. “I’ll need to make a few contacts, see about getting us some new body armor, and some weapons newer than the stuff hanging in the arsenal here. I want Berettas back in my hands.”

“I want to break someone’s neck.” She stared at her hands.

“The neck snap is actually pretty hard. Nine times out of ten you’re going to just give them a neck sprain, or release a lot of tension they’re carrying,” I said. Roan would make jokes when we sparred, so why shouldn’t I?

“I want to choke the life out of them,” she said, and her fingers flexed.

“That might be the hottest thing I’ve heard come out of your mouth,” I said with a laugh. “I will mention that is also harder than it looks, but yes, it is as satisfying as you are imagining.”

“I want to do it.” She advanced and struck at my head. It was a good feint, and I blocked it, but she put some effort behind it. I deflected and blocked several more strikes and then caught her in a judo throw. She hit the ground with a grunt.

Could she kill? It wasn’t something everyone could do. I had seen soldiers in the field completely fail, unable to take the life of someone who was intent on killing them. I had also seen green hitmen, fresh from the military, or some intel background, completely balk the first time they were confronted with a non-combatant kill. It was different when your target wasn’t a person from another culture, ethnicity, and linguistic background. When you were drawing down on a fellow American, things changed.

I had had my own moment. My first balk had almost cost me everything. I didn’t know her name. She had been some blonde-firecracker aide to a man I had been hunting. I ignored her, thinking she would duck and cover when the guns and blades came out.

She put me on the ground with a kick to the leg. I had rolled, got a bead on her and froze. How could I shoot a woman that at any other time I would have bought her a drink in an effort to get into her panties? I laid there as she drew her own pistol, and if Roan hadn’t put a shotgun round into her chest, she would have popped me between the eyes.

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