Page 29 of Coup De Grâce
He charged forward, getting in my face. “Do you really fucking think my wife deserved what happened to her? Buried in a fucking shallow grave after her body had been mutilated? Who the fuck saved her?”
Nobody. We hadn’t reached her in time, but we sure as hell tried. But not even the most powerful secret society in the world could always get its way.
“You know we all would have done anything to save her. You know we never intended for that to happen.”
“And yet, it did,” he scoffed. “Like I said, we all make sacrifices. Going in now to retrieve her would be tantamount to war.”
“He’s just one man,” I argued.
“He’s part of an organization that we’ve fueled for years,” he snapped. “You screw over one man and you have the weight of the entire organization after you.”
I stared at him, my sadness turning to anger in a flash. “Only in that organization?”
“What?”
“It seems it’s only this organization that won’t gather to save each other.”
He turned from me, cursing under his breath. “We can’t afford to be sentimental, Shadow. You know I feel your pain. But we have too many other things riding on The Syndicate. It’s an organization that needs to exist for the rest of the economy to function properly. If we go after Zavala, he’ll gather his army and come after us. We can’t afford for them to get any bigger than they are.”
“Then we shouldn’t have put the whole fucking thing into motion. If we can’t stop one man, then what the fuck were we doing?”
He was silent for a moment, and I thought maybe I was getting through to him. But then he shook his head with a sigh. “I’m sorry, Shadow. It’s out of our hands now.”
The memory hit me like a sledgehammer, reminding me what we were really doing here. We had a job to do, and if we failed, everything failed.
“Bring him in.”
“Dead or alive?” Flint asked, a trace of humor in his voice.
The man was more sadistic than anyone I knew, and I’d met Cash’s friend Fox. He was about as bad as they came. But where he only got off on killing bad men, Flint didn’t care if you were good or bad. Wrong or right, he would kill anyone for the right price. And he enjoyed it.
“Doesn’t matter. Just make sure he’s brought in.”
“Does that mean you don’t care if I have some fun first?”
I knew what he was doing. Everything was a fucking test around here. The only difference was that I had been here longer than Flint. I knew exactly where I stood and what needed to be done. He could bait me all he wanted. It wouldn’t fucking work.
“Do what you have to, but his body had better be here in one week.”
A glimmer of excitement swirled in the inky depths of his eyes. He was one man you did not want on your bad side, but he was great for certain occasions. I just wasn’t sure the good outweighed the bad. A man like him couldn’t truly be controlled, so when he went off the deep end, I knew it would be bad.
“He’ll be here.”
I grabbed his shirt, jerking him toward me. “Don’t fail me, or you’ll end up in the ground along with him.”
I shoved him away, reminding him of who was in charge. As he walked out the door, I turned my attention back to the TV. There was only so far Cash could get before the borders would close down and he would be trapped. In the meantime, there was another aspect that had to be put into motion.
Cash had to be hunted, and there was only one way for everyone to know who he truly was.
11
CASH
I was drowning in grief,barely making it from one day to the next. The only thing keeping me going was the fact that someone was behind The Syndicate’s success, and they had to be taken down.
I poured myself a drink, swallowing the contents and relishing in the burn that accompanied it. I fucking hated myself. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Rafe’s eyes pleading with me to end his life. He knew I was there. He fucking looked right at me, his gaze drawn by that fucking twin connection.
He could feel me, just as I could that same day. Except now, where there was once a tether between us, there was only an empty feeling that I knew would never leave me. He was gone. Taken down by his own brother. Never in my life did I imagine that our lives would intertwine and end in such a brutal way.
