Page 21 of Assassin's Game
Turning to the computer, I pulled up the e-mail we’d received from Mr. X. “Have a look.”
It took ten seconds before Remi’s “Holy shit!” hit my ears. Levi took slightly longer, long enough to get through the entire text, and then a string of nasty curses rent the air.
“My thoughts exactly,” I said.
“This came in when?” Remi asked.
I braced myself. “Two days ago.”
“Holy fuck.” Levi twisted on his heel to pace across the room, then back. “Why are we just hearing about this now?”
I shrugged. “You were busy.”
Remi tightened arms tight across his chest, his knuckles white against his inked biceps. “You could’ve come to me, Eli.”
And I’d known that. “I could.” Remi no doubt understood why I hadn’t. “I wanted to wait until it was absolutely necessary.”
“What finally made it necessary?” Levi barked on his second lap of the room. I didn’t miss the sarcastic twist onfinally.
I turned my back on Levi’s anger and clicked the mouse a couple of times. The e-mail closed, and my image program appeared on-screen. “This.”
Levi and Remi stared at the pictures of the team I’d encountered at the restaurant while I related what had happened. Their low curses went unacknowledged. I’d known what I was doing was risky; I’d done it anyway. End of story. In their heads my brothers knew I was as capable as they were—Levi had made sure of that when he trained me. In their guts, though, both of them had a hard time accepting that.
“I figured, just low-level surveillance, you know? I didn’t know there was another team tracking the target.”
Levi didn’t reprimand me for going out alone. Even he couldn’t have predicted another team. He did, however, have excellent instincts, proven when he asked, “Any chance they were there for you and not the target?”
“Unknown.” I’d considered that option as well, but I couldn’t say definitively either way given the new information I’d dug up. I clicked some more, brought up the intel I’d found on the team members. “These four members were all I caught, though there could be more. These three”—I pointed to the three shots of the men on the team—“are former Delta Force. They were mixed up in a scandal involving the possible murder of their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jay Nixon. That was five years ago.” Skimming down the page I’d pulled from military records I was not supposed to have access to—as if—I pointed to an official military portrait of Nixon. “They disappeared before formal charges could be brought against them.”
“Disappeared?” Remi asked.
“Mm.” Moving to another screen, I showed them the information I’d collected on Nixon. Halfway down the page was a picture of the fourth member of the team. “Mikaela Nixon,” I said, purposefully not looking directly at the image. I didn’t need that kick-in-the-gut reaction right now, not in front of my brothers. “She’s the lieutenant colonel’s daughter. Seems odd that she’d take up with men involved with her father’s death.” Some women gave off that whole black-widow vibe—most of them, in our world—but I hadn’t picked it up at the restaurant. A tough soldier, yes, but she hadn’t seemed like the kind of soldier with that black core. The kind that would kill a family member.
I’d had an uncle like that. He’d killed both my parents and would’ve killed my brothers and me if Levi hadn’t kept us safe. You could never know another person a hundred percent, but my gut said Mikaela wasn’t the type.
Of course, my gut was having issues since I’d first seen her, so…
I reached down to pet Diesel where he lay next to my feet. The feel of his fur beneath my fingers settled me in a way I’d never experienced before, and suddenly I understood that scene in the Grinch cartoon where the ugly green guy’s heart grew larger and larger in size.
Remi straightened, pulling my attention back to the conversation. “So there’s a four-member team, minimum. What’s their objective?”
“Protecting the target?” Levi asked.
“I don’t think they were protecting Sullivan,” I said. “First, though there is a record of Sullivan hiring security, it was a known firm and only for special events, not lunch in Buckhead. Second, all four of them came at me, leaving the target in the dining room. There could be more team members who stayed behind, but…” That answer just didn’t feel right.
Levi started to pace again, more slowly. I could practically see the wheels turning. “Makes sense. What else?”
“They could be working for X, making sure we’re following through,” I suggested, ignoring the foul taste that rose to the back of my tongue.
“The man isn’t asking.”
Levi’s words ended in a growl. I understood the anger—X wasn’t simply a threat to the three of us. Having our identities revealed would harm everything we’d built the last year. Give us time to get the smallest lead on him, and he wouldn’t be alive long enough to collect.
He.I’d bought into the “he must be a man” thing too. I looked directly at Mikaela’s image a moment, my gut cramping. Was she X? But then, why ask about him at the restaurant? They’d hammered that question into our convo more than once.
It could’ve been an act, but it hadn’t felt like one. The way Redhead had vibrated with anger when he’d questioned me resembled Levi a little too closely right now.
Remi scratched the weekend stubble on his chin. “X could be forcing them to work for him, either targeting Sullivan or us.”
