Page 37 of Ruthless Commander
I glanced at my phone, finding a message fromCaller ID Unknown.I didn’t need to be a genius to know who it was. But it wasn’t just a message…it was a photo. I opened up the attachment and stared at two bodies lying flat on the floor. Clothed, bloody…an assassination.
My phone vibrated barely a second later. I answered with, “Who exactly am I looking at, brother?”
“By the information I found in the apartment, it looks like the two responsible for your kid’s murder.”
I flinched, my heart hammering as I pulled the phone away and brought up the image once more. I looked more closely, narrowing in on the clothes they wore and anything else I could find around them before lifting the phone to my ear once more. “You didn’t think to keep them alive for us to question?”
“Oh, this wasn’t me, brother. This was what I found.”
“Where are you?”
“I’ll send you coordinates,” he replied. “And Mateo…you might want to lock the place down. This wasn’t retribution, this was silence.”
I froze, my mind racing as I took in his words. “They were the damn scapegoats.” In an instant, the asshole from Marcus's shooting came to mind. We'd captured one…one that had screamed of this exact thing. We didn’t get any information him, and now we wouldn’t get any from the men who'd killed Marcus Baldeon. “I’m on my way.”
“See you soon then,” he answered, and hung up.
I made a call. Getting the chopper to the mainland would be quicker, but I couldn’t risk it with the damn cyclone heading our way. So the boat would have to do. I headed for my office, stepped inside, and strode to the false wall. One push and the catch released before I pressed my thumb to the scanner.
The plexiglass wall popped open and slid back, revealing enough weapons to arm a small army. Memories of another war came echoing back as I grabbed two Sigs and a sniper’s rifle. I was the kind of man they sent in first, the one that was dispensable…and who always came home, no matter what.
I grabbed my weapons and filled a backpack with loaded magazines and ammunition before hauling it over my shoulder and walking out. Barely fifteen minutes later and we were racing across the water, heading for the mainland. I had men waiting for me, men who’d take me not just to the place an hour away where the two bodies of the hitmen were found, but also to my brother.
* * *
Four hours later,I stood in the doorway of a dingy cabin in a seedy part of the city. Ruined buildings and lean-tos made up the landscape, reminding me far too much of the life I’d worked so hard to leave behind. But as I stepped into the doorway, it was like I was back there again.
Edon stood in the shadows, his arms crossed, watching me as I stepped forward and looked at the two bodies lying face-down in the middle of the space. “Has anything been touched?”
“Not a thing,” he answered coldly, as though I should know better than to ask.
And I should. Sometimes I forgot who I spoke to.
Edon wasn’t just a hitman. He was a trained specialist in covert operations, born not from the life our mother gave him…but from the death I'd saved him from. He and death danced the most terrifying dance. It hunted him….and he hunted it, bringing it out of the shadows and into the light. I glanced from my brother to the two men lying face-down and took a step closer.
They were evil dressed in black, the same clothing I’d seen on the monitors from the CCTV footage taken as they left the building and raced to the waiting boat on the shoreline. I turned them over and took pictures of their faces.
“I already ran them,” Edon murmured. “Their fingerprints, too.”
“And?” I lifted my gaze.
He just gave a shrug. “Ex-military, special ops. Nothing spectacular.”
Spectacular enough to hire them to kill an unarmed man. Still, I stared into the milky hue of their wide eyes and took another picture, this time sending it to the members of the Commission. The men who'd killed Marcus Baldeon were dead. I didn’t know if they'd organized the hit or someone else had, and I doubted I’d get any answers. Right now, honesty was the least common trait amongst the men who made up one of the most powerful rings on US soil. But at least now, with the men who'd completed the hit dead, it might appease them…for a moment, at least.
Just until I could get ahead of this.
I lifted my gaze to Edon. Maybe having my brother here wasn’t a bad thing, after all…who better to hunt these bastards down? “Are you on the trail?”
He pushed off the wall and took a step toward me. “Do you want me on the trail?”
I thought about it for a second. Didn’t really have a choice, did I? “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
He turned then, striding toward the door. “Then consider me employed.”
I gave a nod to the two men standing outside, then watched as they bagged the bodies and hauled them out to the truck to dispose of them later. Right now, I needed to get back to the island and the cyclone bearing down on them.
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