you’ve done so many times over. You can’t control things that weren’t your fault.”
“I made choices.”
“You made the best choices you could at the time. I hate that Landon used us to force your hand.”
“He knew what would work.” He paused. “You haven’t told the others.”
“No.”
“I don’t want Grace to know . . . to feel like she’s responsible. Because she’s not.”
“Gunner, we all feel responsible.”
“I didn’t have to go to the island,” he told her. “I chose that. I knew. Didn’t care, because saving her, Dare, Darius . . . it was important to you. And you’d already lost so much.”
“Then don’t make me lose you. Not when we just started.”
He didn’t trust his voice, so he nodded. And her arms wound around him. Hugging him. Healing him. Welcoming him home.
Within the hour, they were in a truck with bulletproofing and tinted windows. Avery pushed him into the passenger’s side and he didn’t argue. He was bruised and sore and he gulped down some ibuprofen.
“Jem was doing it out of love. You know that, right?” she asked as she tried to leave on a song that sounded like a cat wailing. “Hey, I love that song. It’s Fiona Apple.”
“It’s depressing.” He found some classic rock, AC/DC, then rubbed his ribs. “Asshole you claim loves me tried to waterboard me,” he sniffed.
“I’m sure he’ll make it up to you.”
He leaned his head back and let the easy rhythm of the truck moving fast on the highway lull him into thinking everything was going to be all right.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked quietly after they were a couple of hours into the trip. She’d gotten them fast food at a rest stop, but that was the only break they’d taken. Couldn’t afford to be out in the open, not at all.
“Everything.” Because it was easy to let it all overwhelm him. He realized he’d lost count of how many jobs he’d done. There’d been no point in counting them. After he’d left Avery in the hotel, he’d completely immersed himself into James’s old life and hadn’t looked back. He had zero contact with anyone or anything from his old life. He hadn’t kept an e-mail address or a phone number. Nothing to tempt him or make him think or wish he could’ve held on to something.
After a couple of months of carrying out orders, he’d stopped thinking or dreaming about Avery. In fact, he’d stopped dreaming at all. Dead inside was the only thing that would work.
None of the new jobs were as bad as the one that had nearly broken him all those years ago. But that didn’t mean one wouldn’t be. If Landon asked, he’d do it, because even though he was dead inside, he remembered the stakes.
He knew Landon was waiting for him to be dead enough inside so he wouldn’t remember those stakes. And he knew what Landon would ask him to do, eventually.
Could he?
He guessed that remained to be seen.
“I meant what I said, about us both running from things. About starting over. I know it’s hard—” she said tentatively.
“Do you know what it’s like to live a lie?” he interrupted. “When you ran, it was toward family. You started over, but you were still you. I’ve been living a lie since I was twelve, in one way or another. Gunner was who Josie wanted me to be.”
He paused then, and she said, “I know about Josie, Gunner. Billie told me some . . . and then . . . Jem and I met with Mike and Andy.”
“Fuck me,” he muttered. That’s how she and Jem had tracked him. It made sense now.
“I hear what you’re saying. So show me who you are.”
“It’s that simple?”
“For me, yes.” She paused. “Do you think I don’t know you’re capable of violence? You always were. Dare, Jem, Key . . . they’re far from saints. So am I.”
“What you did was avenge your mom’s death. I was never able to do that for Josie.”
“Until now,” she reminded him.
“You really have no idea who you’re up against.”
“I do have some idea. He can’t be worse than Powell.”
He was, in a different way, though. “Landon was a tough taskmaster, but it was better than living with Powell any day of the week.”
“What about your mom, Gunner? Mike and Andy didn’t know much about her. They said you barely mentioned her.”
“I still try to keep her life and death covert, the way she would’ve wanted it. She was killed when I was twelve. She was an SAS operative and she and Powell crossed paths a few times. I came out of a very brief affair. But she had no other family, didn’t want me to have no one if she died. A lot of people never knew what Powell was like, even those who were supposed to be close with him.”
There wasn’t anything she could really say to make it better, but he gave her credit for trying when she said, “You made it out.”
“I guess I did. Lot of backtracking along the way, though. I don’t know what the hell she’d think of me. Of what I’ve done.” He paused. “But anything good I’ve been able to make out of the bad situations Landon put me in . . . well, that was because of her.”
Planning the jobs was intense. Each one took anywhere from two to four months of meticulous research. Figuring out the trafficker’s next move, predicting his next job. Buying intel without getting him suspicious. Sometimes even infiltrating the inner circle and working a job for them was the only way to get close enough. And sometimes, if it wasn’t safe for the women and children Gunner would be looking to save, he would be forced to let an opportunity pass and wait for a prime one.
Because if he couldn’t save them from the traffickers outright, he wouldn’t risk killing them in an explosion meant for the real criminal. He was painstaking. Brutal. An avenging angel. It was the only way he could justify the greater good.
His mother would say that sometimes in order to do good you had to do bad.
His mother was always so conflicted. Couldn’t have been more right. She’d been teaching him lessons, as if she was desperate for him to understand why she did the work she did.
He hadn’t understood the full extent until Landon gave him her files. She’d been an SAS-sanctioned assassin, a top spy with a shooter’s eye. One of the best there was, one of the best they’d ever had. Even without knowing what she did, he’d learned how to move quietly and stealthily, like a ghost. It was part technique and part genetics, that ability to move though a crowd and no matter how tall or attractive you were, not to be noticed.
She’d done it every day of their lives and somehow pulled him into that magic circle of space. Being with her was exciting. Comforting. How she’d balanced that kind of work and motherhood was summed up by what she told him every time she’d tucked him in and left for work.
“Going to make the world a safer place for you, James,” she’d say to him before she went out on a job, even before he had any idea what she did for a living.
He’d done his best over the years to honor her sentiment. “I think she’d hate what I was doing.”
“You’re wrong. I think she’d completely understand. Everything you’ve done was to keep doing good. If you weren’t under Landon’s protection . . .”
He frowned. “Hear yourself? Suddenly you’re a Landon fan.”
“I’m a Gunner’s mom fan,” she said.
“Her name was Yolanda. She was awesome, Avery. She made me know we could do what we do and still have kids. She always protected me. She thought putting me with Powell, and giving me a trust fund he knew nothing about that I could access through a lawyer myself, would make me okay.”
“Guess we were both raised by strong moms.”
“Yeah. She traveled everywhere, but every single summer, we’d spend three months at the beach. All different places and she was there twenty-four-seven. I wasn’t in one place long enough for traditional school, but
