Sharpshooter (Shadow Agents #3)(49)
Author: Cynthia Eden

“I did love you. Once.” That feeling was nothing like what she felt for Gunner.

He was still staring out of the window, and presenting such a fine target. “Before Gunner,” he growled.

“Before you started to change,” she whispered back.

* * *

SLADE’S FACE FILLED Gunner’s scope. The rage there, the hate, was frightening to see.

But Sydney wouldn’t see it. She couldn’t. Slade wasn’t looking at her. He was just staring out into the darkness.

Planning his attack.

Gunner’s left hand pressed against his transmitter. “He’s going to make a move soon. Be ready.” That much fury couldn’t be held in check for long.

They were wired into the audio feed that Sydney had set up, so they were hearing every word that she said. She was baiting Slade, pushing him.

That pushing was working.

Gunner hadn’t been at a state championship game the weekend that Sarah Bell died. The game had been two weekends after the fire. But it looked as though Slade didn’t remember that.

A flaw in his plan.

Then Sydney started talking again, and Gunner felt sweat trickle down the side of his face.

* * *

“YOU MADE SO many trips down to South America before—before—”

“Before Gunner left me for dead?” He turned toward her, his face expressionless. “Let’s not forget that part. Gunner and you both left me.”

“I wondered about all of those charter trips. Especially when I discovered that every account you had was empty. Cleaned out.”

His lips curved. The sight was chilling.

“You’d become angry before that last trip, too. I remember the fights we had. You accused me—”

“—of cheating?” he finished. He glanced down at his hands. Both hands had fisted. “I thought you might be sleeping with Gunner back then. I saw the way he looked at you, and the way you looked at him.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Not then. But now?” His eyebrows climbed. “You’re going to try telling me that the baby you’re carrying isn’t his?”

“It is.” They are. “And that’s why I had to keep digging. I couldn’t give up on him. I couldn’t.”

“You should have.” So soft.

She kept talking. “It was when I was digging, trying to find where all your money went to…that was when I discovered that you’d set up extra accounts in the Caymans.”

He laughed. “You and your damn computers. You could always find out too much on them.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out his weapon. “Like I said, you should have stopped.”

* * *

GUNNER’S FINGER TIGHTENED around the trigger.

“Hold!” This was Logan’s order, growled through the transmitter. “She’s still got him talking. We need to learn as much as we can.”

They needed to make sure that not a single bullet so much as grazed her skin.

“Hold, Gunner. That’s a direct order.”

He wasn’t following orders now. He was protecting the woman he loved.

Slade hadn’t aimed the gun at her yet. It was still by his side. The second that gun started to rise…

Gunner would fire. Brother or no brother.

* * *

“I FOUND OUT you were never the man I thought you were. Even before your plane went down…back then, you were drug running, weren’t you?”

He laughed, and completely dropped the mask that he’d been wearing. The twisted fury and hate was there for her to see, burning so hot. “Yeah, I was. I was earning more money than I’d ever made in my life. Those jerks at the EOD had turned me away. Said I was too unstable. Screw that! I was the best they could’ve had, and they wouldn’t even give me a chance.”

Her hand tightened around the weapon that was still concealed in her oversize robe pocket. “So you took your own chance?”

“I took the jobs that came to me. I made connections…money…so much money.” He rolled his shoulders. “You don’t know what it’s like to have nothing. I do. I grew up with nothing. Dirt-poor on a reservation in the middle of nowhere. No father. No mother. I wasn’t even raised by my blood. The grandfather that Gunner talks about so much? Not mine.”

“But he took you in,” Sydney said. “He helped—”

“My father signed custody of me over to him. Said I’d be with family. I didn’t want to be with them. I didn’t want Gunner’s castoffs. Didn’t want to always be in his shadow.”

There was pain there, breaking through the fury.

“I swore I’d do anything I had to do in order to get out of that place. I wouldn’t be poor again. No one would look down on me.” His smile flashed—not the charming one, But the cold grin of a killer. “Do you have any idea how much money I have? How much power?”

“No…” Tell me.

“I am muerte. I found it on one of my runs. I knew I could take over down there. When you and Gunner came for me the first time—”

When they’d all nearly died.

“I was fighting for power then. Your entrance, your backup…it was appreciated.” The grin kept chilling her. “Of course, it would have helped more if you hadn’t abandoned me.”

“You were dead!”

“Actually, yes, I was.”

Her breath burned in her lungs as surprise rolled through her.

“But thanks to the muerte, I came back.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My men dragged a doctor to me—some relief worker they found. He brought me back, I don’t even know how…injections, luck. Hell, maybe the devil just didn’t want me. The doc even said that the muerte might have saved me, that it was working in my body, stopping the blood loss.”

“What happened to the doctor?”

“When I recovered, I slit his throat.”

Brutal. But she knew that was exactly who—what—Slade was. A brutal killer. “And you became the cartel ruler down there?”

“I am muerte.”

“Why?” She breathed out the word as if she was frightened. And she was. The man before her was a walking nightmare. “Why did you want the EOD to come and rescue you? You were free and clear. We thought you were dead. Why—”

“Because I was ready to expand. I knew that you’d taken out Guerrero recently….”

The Mexican arms dealer. Now everything was connecting. Her heart thudded into her chest. “He had links to the drug trade. That’s why you accessed his file at the EOD, you wanted to know—”