Page 26 of Avenging Jessie
This was Bellringer.
He locked eyes with Spence and nodded once. Not a greeting, just… acknowledgement. “Still breathing,” he said flatly.
Spence didn’t blink. “You’re harder to kill than most fungus.”
“Fungi don’t hold grudges.”
“No,” Spence said. “But they do spread.”
Jessie stood motionless at Spence’s flank. Bellringer’s eyes drifted her way—sharp and assessing. She recognized the flicker of calculation: range, reflexes, threat level.
She returned the look with one of her own.
He raised a brow at Spence. “Brought your plus one with you. Cute.”
Jessie tilted her head, all casual like. “I’m the one with the kill shot.”
A twitch of something like amusement curved his mouth, though it never reached his eyes that stayed locked on Spence. “Still going for dangerous women, eh, man?”
Spence didn’t rise to the bait. He stood there, arms loose at his sides, still seemingly as cocky and confident as the Great Conrad Flynn himself.
Jessie felt it, though—the tension beneath the banter. Bellringer wasn’t an ally. He was a weapon they were borrowing. One with its safety off.
Bellringer gestured toward the back of the van. “Let’s get this over with before I start to like you again.”
He yanked open the rear doors. Inside was a black market fantasyland—every inch crammed with gear you couldn’t find in any sanctioned agency locker. Drones the size of hummingbirds. Disassembled rifles with illegal mods. Surveillance bugs so small Jessie had to squint. Military-grade comms. Infrared goggles. EMP patches. A case containing encrypted burner phones that appeared to have just arrived from a darknet shipment.
Jessie stepped closer, careful not to show the awe that tugged at her. Her face remained neutral, unreadable, but inside, she cataloged it all. The sheer range. The caliber. The fact that Bellringer had the audacity to roll up to a drop site with this kind of firepower and not blink.
Spence moved like he’d done this dance a dozen times. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t posture. He just started checking items off a mental list in his head while speaking in low-code phrases. “Crows nesting by the third rail.” “Flashbangs are too spicy.” “Need eyes that see past dawn.”
Bellringer kept up. No explanations. No translations. It was a language of war, whispered across foreign soil and blood-soaked history. He already had two bags filled with the gear Spence had requested in his text. Now, Spence was shopping.
Jessie crossed her arms and watched, alert. She didn’t like being on the outside of a conversation—especially one this precise—but what could she do? Sure, she’d dipped her toes into the black market world plenty of times on ops, but this was a whole other level. This wastheirworld.
Bellringer’s gaze slid her way again. “You let her carry the payload?”
Jessie smiled. “You worried about me? Now, who’s being cute?”
Spence examined a rifle. “Better watch your balls. She’s tougher than both of us.”
Bellringer chuckled. His dead eyes roamed over her, calculating. “From the looks of things, you’d better watch yours. What your dick wants is poor strategy. She might be worth it, but the fallout”—he made a whistling noise that sounded like a bomb falling to the ground—“…deadly.”
Pig. Jessie wanted to flip him off. Instead, she winked. “I’m always worth it, and I’m his ace in the hole, not the bomb that’s going to blow up in his face.”
She hoped that was true.
A grunt, dismissing her. “Still betting on instincts over strategy?” he said to Spence.
Spence froze in mid-inspection of a scope for the rifle. Looked up slowly. “Still blaming me for what happened in Bucharest?”
Silence fell like a line drawn in the sand.
Jessie didn’t breathe.
Bellringer’s jaw ticked. “Some mistakes don’t bury easily.”
Spence didn’t reply. He finished checking the scope, slid it into a pack, and zipped it shut like the conversation was over.
