Page 27 of Burning Justice

“When you want to kill him, remember that.” She grabbed his elbow and tugged him away, toward the front of the house. “Tell Saxon we’re leaving.”

No one else had disembarked that chopper. Her father wasn’t on it.

“Your dad isn’t here?” He sounded genuinely disappointed.

“I have a copy of Howards’s hard drive. We might be able to get something from it. Find out why the canister hasn’t been deployed yet.”

“Because they need a code.” Kane walked with her toward the front yard. “Because they need your dad to make more since we got all the rest.”

Maria frowned. “If they need more, why not just steal it from evidence? I doubt it’s been destroyed. That wouldn’t happen until after a trial.”

Kane said, “Sax, did you get that?”

Maria switched channels on her comms in time to hear Saxon say, “I’ll call Rio.”

She said, “We need to find Raine. Elias Redding can’t see us here, or he’ll recognize us and we’ll never get our hands on the canister. They’ll disappear, and I’ll never find my father.”

Kane squeezed her hand, then didn’t let go of it. “We didn’t come this far to give up now.” Those words had become their mantra—the code they’d lived by since they were declared dead. After a second pause, he said, “Raine shut off her comms, but we can go in the front again and find her.”

“I’ll go. One of us will draw less attention than both.”

“You don’t need to protect me from him.”

“I’m protecting all of us.”

Kane didn’t respond to that. But then, she didn’t need him to, did she. After this long, she knew what he was thinking.

As much as she might want to tear through that house and search every inch of it for her father, she would have known if he were here. For such a high-value asset as her father, there would have been way more armed guards in the house. She’d seen it in other places, when she’d come close to finding her father before.

“I’ll go get Raine.” She tugged on her hand, but Kane didn’t let go.

“Be careful.”

“I’m better at this than fighting fires.”

He smiled. “I believe you. I’ll be out here praying.”

Maria bit her lip because he knew how she felt about God. She went to the front door, and the bouncer guy let her in, but not before she gave him a twenty-dollar bill.

In the front entryway, she scanned the crowd for Raine and spotted her friend over by a bar that had been set up in the corner by the pool table.

She caught Raine’s attention and motioned with her head.

The other woman said something to her grandfather and kissed his cheek before wandering over. “What is it?”

“I need to go. And so do the guys.”

“My grandfather was just about to introduce me to someone.”

“He isn’t the kind of guy you want to know.”

Raine tugged a folded paper from her purse. “Like the kind who would give me a note for you?”

Maria unfolded it and found a handwritten note, unaddressed and unsigned.

I’m sorry. I’m going to fix everything.

“Who gave this to you?”

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