“Two. They’re downstairs, dead.”
Without looking at him, she said, “Okay. Go get the ties.”
He jogged out of the room.
“You won’t shoot me,” her attacker said in accented English.
“Try me. Who are you? Who do you work for?”
He didn’t respond.
“You said something in Russian. Why is a Russian hit man working for the cartel?”
He smiled.
An odd response, but she kept pushing. “Tell me.” She took a step closer to him.
“I work for the highest bidder. Doesn’t matter to me. A job is a job.”
So now the cartel was hiring professional hit men. Maybe Diego had expanded his horizons because the cartel members hadn’t been able to seal the deal.
Hunter ran back into the room and fastened the hit man’s wrists with the zip ties. The Russian grunted.
“I just started questioning him,” Layla told Hunter.
“I’m not saying anything else.”
“Yes, you are. If you want to live.”
Hunter shot her a worried glance. Of course she wasn’t going to kill the guy, but he didn’t know that. She needed to play the bad cop right now, and she was the one holding the gun.
“I need answers. You start talking, and we’ll see what we can do as far as a deal. You don’t, and I’m going to blow out your kneecap.”
The man’s eyes widened.
“Layla, you can’t do that,” Hunter said.
It was actually to her advantage that Hunter didn’t know she was bluffing. It made the act more convincing. “I can and I will.”
She moved an inch closer and pointed the gun toward his knee.
He cracked. “Okay, okay. Yes. I’m working for Mejía. I don’t know what you did, but Diego is out for blood. He will not stop until you are dead. You should’ve just let me kill you because the next person might not make it so easy for you. Being tortured by one of Diego’s henchmen will be much worse.”
Her breath caught, but she kept her hand steady on the gun. “What were your orders?”
“To kill everyone in the safe house.”
“And how did you know the location?” Hunter asked.
He shrugged. “It was provided by the cartel contact. I’m not sure how they got it.”
She glanced at Hunter. “We need to get out of here. Let’s call this in, and then we need to move once backup gets here and can take this guy into custody.”
She pulled out her burner phone and made contact. She only hoped she wouldn’t be too late.
Hunter couldn’t believe this turn of events. They’d taken one of the Agency SUVs and were driving, but he had no idea where. He just wanted to put some distance between them and the safe house.
Layla said the Agency was working on a plan, but she’d been pretty quiet since they left.
One minute he’d been lying down, reading because he couldn’t sleep, and the next, he’d heard the commotion in the other part of the house. A barrage of gunshots had made him jump into action. Layla’s security detail had exchanged fire, killing one of the hit men, but unfortunately, both Ace and Dax were killed before Hunter had killed the second man. The CIA team’s sacrifice had given him and Layla a fighting chance. When he’d pulled the trigger, it had been pure survival instinct kicking in, but he was trying not to think about it.
“You really did a number on that guy,” he said to Layla. “He was huge.”
“It was touch and go for a minute. He got the drop on me, and I had to fight a bit dirty, but when you’re smaller, you have to fight differently.”
“Another thing you learned at the Farm?”
“Yeah. I had some great teachers. Women my size who understood that we’re never going to be able to take on a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man using normal techniques.”
“You weren’t really going to shoot him, were you?”
“Of course not, but I needed him to think that I would and that I wouldn’t hesitate. Sometimes half the battle is the mind game.”
“It worked,” he said softly. “Layla, I’ve never taken a life before. I’ve been on some dangerous jobs, but nothing like this.”
“You had no choice, Hunter. You acted in self-defense. You heard that guy. Their orders were to take out everyone at the safe house. If you hadn’t defended yourself, we would’ve all been dead.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I get that. It just feels a bit strange, that’s all.”
She put her hand on his arm. “You did what you had to do. We’re up against vicious enemies who will stop at nothing for revenge. They kill without any regard for human life.”
“Have you ever taken a life?”
“Unfortunately, yes. On the Honduras op, I returned fire. I saw some of the men go down. I have no way of knowing if I’m the one who killed Diego’s brother or if it was someone else on the team, but we were in a pretty hostile firefight, and we had to defend ourselves.”
“How did you cope with that?”
“I asked for forgiveness for taking the lives, but I also know that the Lord understood the circumstances—that we were all fighting for our lives. I thought about those men and their families—who were probably completely innocent—and I cried for them and prayed for them. Experiences like this will test anyone. I wanted the analyst job so that I wouldn’t have to make those life-and-death decisions, but here I am, making them anyway and trying to deal with the fallout the best way I can. And the only way I know how to handle it is to ask for God’s help. I couldn’t do it alone.”
Maybe she had a point. “Thanks for that. Hearing your perspective on things helps me.”
“Don’t expect to process this overnight. You will need time. I know I did.”
He nodded. “We need to figure out our next steps.”
“I can’t believe Ace and Dax are dead.” She sniffed.
He knew she was not only in great pain, but also holding back her emotions over
