Page 55 of Surrender (Angels Halo MC Next Gen)

“It was a clean extraction. I left no traces behind. None.” I’d made sure it was the best job I’d ever handled for my mom, because it was supposed to be my last.

She promised.

“If you weren’t careless, then what does any of this have to do with Pop now?” Ryan asked, annoyed, no longer blank-faced since I hadn’t admitted to killing anyone.

He could pretend a little longer. It was fine. I liked to pretend too. It was all part of the sickness that rotted both our brains.

“Maybe nothing.” I glanced at Mom, who wasn’t quick enough to hide the regret on her face. It gave me pause, but not enough to fight this war for her. She needed to have regrets—Ishould have been a regret that haunted her. “Maybe everything.”

Instinct had taught me to follow my gut. And right then, my gut said she either knew or highly suspected there was a connection between what had happened in Budapest and the events leading up to Papa losing his shit the night before. Something was definitely sketchy about the favor I’d handled, but she wouldn’t hear it when I’d bitched about it just a few days after returning with a healing gunshot through my leg to mark the happy occasion. “You said the favor was traded. How, when I pulled the politician’s kid out of that nightmare?”

“These people have no compunction when it comes to their own flesh and blood,” Mom said with a sigh, sounding put out. Like I was being overdramatic, when really, nothing was ever dramatic enough.

Eight-year-olds should not know how to take apart a gun, put it back together, kill a man, and disassemble it again. Definitely not to time themselves doing it. Because it had been drilled into me that a few seconds could mean the difference between life and death. My life. My death. Or theirs. But semantics. Little kids should be able to stay innocent. Not have a twisted taste for blood. To know what it was like to see the life drain from another person’s eyes as they choked on their own blood and vomit. All while feeling absolutely nothing.

Vaguely, I wondered if my niece had been subjected to the same fun education Mom had pushed on me—the same, albeit watered-down, version that Nova began when she was ten. If only my own lessons had been an annual week-long trip to Paris to “shop.”

Not an everyday event that started before I even left for private school with four bodyguards in the limo Monday through Friday. I got weekends off. Sometimes. When I begged Papa for a sleepover because I needed a break. And pretending to be a happy and innocent preteen was less emotionally draining than waking up to some fresh new nightmare scenario that made Hell Week with Marines seem like a cakewalk.

And I was just as fucked up as everyone else who looked the other way when it came to Mom, my education, mybrokenness. Because maybe I was just like them when it came to Wren. Maybe I didn’t want to know. Mom thought she was protecting me. Protecting Nova. And if—Christ, I was sick in the head—but if she was training Wren, then she was doing it to protect her as well.

She loved us.

Sadly, my head didn’t want to listen to what my heart kept so valiantly trying to remind me.

“Quail used the kid to help set it all up,” Mom groused.

My blood turned to ice. Suspecting was one thing, having her actually admit it was entirely different. I hated what Mom had put me through, what she made me feel. Mostly what she made menotfeel. But I would burn the world down if someone attempted to hurt her. “Someone set all that up to assassinate you?”

Tears glazed her eyes so fast, I felt like I’d been pulled into an alternate universe. “No,” she choked out, blowing my mind with how emotional she suddenly was. My head and my heart were at war with what her wet eyes meant. “They knew I would send you. I’m still trying to figure out who was behind it.”

Ryan made a wheezing noise, taking a stumbling step toward her. “Assassination attempt. Why haven’t you mentioned any of this?”

“It was need-to-know, and at the time, you didn’t need to worry about it,” Mom told him quietly.

“Did Nova know?” he snarled.

“No, of course not!”

My phone vibrated twice, and I ached to pull it from my pocket. To read Elias’s words. To see if he missed me as much as I missed him. But if I let myself focus on him, I wouldn’t care about what Mom or Ryan or anyone else did. And I needed to care. For just a little longer. Get all this shit cleared up so I could wash the stink of it off me once and for all in order to start my new life with a clean slate.

I was supposed to have had that after Budapest. Mom hadn’t kept her promise.

But maybe it wasn’t all her fault.

Someone had set us up from the beginning.

I didn’t like it. They weren’t just playing with me. They had taken me away from Elias. Tried to hurt Papa.

Unacceptable.

“I took care of Quail after the first chatter reached me. He didn’t give up any information about who he’d traded the favor to.” I sucked in a breath, knowing how hard that must have been on the man. But it told me more than if he had talked.

Whoever Quail had traded the favor to, whoever he had willingly helped to set up an attempt on Mom’s or my life, he was more scared of them than he was of Anya Volkov Vitucci.

“Cristiano has been having more off days than good,” Mom explained, dashing away a random tear. “I just thought his illness was progressing faster than expected. The doctors all say the same thing. This disease is unpredictable. No one can guess how slowly or quickly each stage will go.”

“But?” I gritted out, my mind already working through what she was saying, trying to piece together what might come out of her mouth next.

---