He barely managed to refrain from violence. “The feeling is mutual.”
“I told you no drama, so give it a rest, you two.” Logan rolled his eyes. “If I can work with my older brother, you can get along enough to get your shit done.”
Bryant raked a hand over his military-short hair and shook his head at Logan. “I will never trust him enough to be on an operational team with him again. If he wants to quit, I say good riddance.”
Logan slammed a fist on his desk. “Cutter, I don’t give a shit that Pierce slept with your girlfriend.”
“One-Mile,” he corrected through clenched teeth.
“Whatever.” Logan waved a hand through the air.
“No! It’s not whatever,” Cutter insisted. “I can’t work with Brea’s rapist.”
What? Had the dickhead convinced himself that the only way Brea would have ever been underneath him was unwillingly?
I got news for you, buddy, and it’s all bad…
“I had her consent.”
“You manipulated her so that she had no choice but to say yes.” Cutter clenched his fists.
One-Mile glared at the cockroach, arms crossed over his chest. “If you wanted her that badly, you should have claimed her sometime between junior high and July. You had plenty of time. But it took you too long to find your dick. That’s not my problem. She’s mine now.”
Cutter narrowed fierce eyes his way, glowering as if he’d lost his mind. “She’s not even speaking to you, asshat.”
He shrugged it off. “Misunderstanding.”
“No, reality. Something you’re clearly not familiar with. And if she fucking winds up pregnant—”
“That’s enough,” Logan shouted. “I don’t care if you beat the hell out of one another after hours, but stop bringing your personal shit to work. If you can’t, I’ll lock you in a room together until you learn to get along or one of you kills the other. I don’t care which at this point. Be professional and do your damn jobs.”
Silence fell in the wake of Logan’s verbal beatdown. Cutter swore and stomped away.
Despite Stone watching with rapt interest, One-Mile felt a stupid urge to explain, probably because if he was stuck in this job and his bosses despised him, the rest of his two years here would really suck. “I didn’t rape her.”
“Since she had to choose between saving her boyfriend’s life and sleeping with you, I’d say you coerced her. It doesn’t get much lower than that in my book. Now get the fuck out.”
Goddamn it to hell. They’d bought into Cutter’s version of events without talking to him. Even when he hadn’t done anything wrong, he got labeled the bad guy. Whatever. He could set them straight, but he really didn’t give two shits about their opinion of him as a human being.
“Roger that.” One-Mile sent Logan a mock salute, nodded Stone’s way, then marched the hell out, making a beeline for the coffeemaker.
Before he could pour his first jolt of liquid caffeine, the elder Edgington peeked his head around the corner. “I need you in my office.”
One-Mile rolled his eyes. “One minute.”
“Now.” Hunter disappeared around the corner.
One-Mile sighed. Somehow, this place had already become asshole central, and Hunter looked like he had even more attitude than Logan. He definitely needed java to deal with this.
After his mug was full of steaming fortification, he dragged his ass to the elder Edgington’s digs. Trees Scott slouched in one of the two office chairs yet somehow still towered over everyone.
“What’s up?” he asked, staring at the other two.
“Shut the door,” Hunter barked.
Frowning, One-Mile complied, then when his boss gestured him to put his ass into the empty chair, he planted it beside Trees.
Hunter pressed his fingertips together, face taut. His voice dipped to something just above a murmur. “We have a mole.”
“What?” One-Mile couldn’t have heard that right. Fuck, if they accused him…
Hunter nodded. “Yeah. Someone inside this office. We’ve autopsied the most recent Mexico mission, trying to figure out what the fuck went wrong. Both of you thought on your feet and kept the whole thing from turning into a death trap. But I don’t have to tell you how close it was. Somehow, the Tierra Caliente thugs not only knew we were coming in but when and where, too. Trees, if you hadn’t hauled Zy out of there when something felt wrong—”
“We’d be dead,” said the tall man.
“Exactly. Same with you and Bryant.” Hunter nodded his way. “Logan, Joaquin, and I all talked to the colonel about this. We’re in agreement that someone on the inside must have fed the cartel information, so we’re trusting you two—and no one else—to help us figure out who.”
Being on the good guys’ team was an interesting turn of events.
One-Mile leaned in. “Uncle Sam hired us. No chance it was someone closer to Washington DC?”
Hunter shook his head. “We didn’t tell them our exact plans. Sure, they knew we were going in, but not when, where, or how. Only our guys had those details.”
So unless the cartel had guessed their multiple locations really fucking well—and what were the odds of that?—someone he worked with was a traitor.
The thought turned One-Mile’s blood to ice. “What’s the plan?”
“First, I have to take a step back and give you two a history lesson.” Hunter sighed. “About eighteen months ago, Arnold Waxman, a wealthy doctor from Atlanta, hired the colonel to infiltrate the Guerrero region in Mexico and find his daughter, Kendra. She had traveled there with a group of doctors to give medial aid to the poor. They got caught in the crossfire when a couple of factions within the Tierra Caliente cartel started warring and they were taken hostage. Waxman paid the ransom, but Kendra wasn’t released. That’s when Logan, Dad, and I stepped in and discovered that another rival splinter gang, headed by Emilo Montilla, had overrun the first and taken the hostages. We located them, got in, then extracted Kendra, along with the rest of the survivors.”
This was all news to One-Mile. But something must have gone to shit
