“Just her. She was killed yesterday after coming to tell me you were in trouble.” The thought of her lying on the ground made his throat tighten. She would’ve told him that this wasn’t the time for sentiment, which was reserved for the dead of night when the mission was over, and then you killed it with strong whiskey. Drown the sorrow before it drowned you.
“And this Richard Powell . . . he knows about Section 8?” Avery said, and realization slowly dawned on Dare . . . and on Avery.
“The men you killed—,” he started.
“Are the men sent by Powell?” she finished it as a question, and there was surprise in her voice, since she’d obviously just come to that conclusion with Dare’s information. “Do you think they tortured her, trying to get information about my father, to see what he’d told her about Section 8?”
Dare forced his eyes to stay on the road, kept his breathing slow and steady. “Maybe.”
“Still think I should be in jail?” she asked quietly, and he shook his head no. “I didn’t know I’d be dragging anyone else in. I didn’t know anything about the group. I only knew I was trying to avenge my mom’s murder.”
“I was already dragged into it,” he told her. “You heard Darius—I’ve been marked for death, same as you.”
“All because Darius was part of Section 8?” she asked, and he nodded. “Are you part of it too?”
“No. There was only one S8, and they’d disbanded long before I would’ve been able to work with them.” It had been a moment in time. It had been so perfect . . . and it had all gone so horribly wrong. “On what was supposed to be their last mission—twenty years ago—they lost a man. Almost lost Darius. He left Simon behind and then got a call that S8 was officially disbanded.”
“But they kept working.”
“Yes. Plenty of work for operatives like that,” he agreed. And whether he’d wanted to or not, his formative years had been spent learning from each of them. Adele in particular had come in most useful with her love of demolition—she took it to an almost spiritual level with the way she wired the bombs, predicted the blast outcome.
Darius was the mastermind, second only to S8’s handler—he kept the team together, let them work on their individual strengths and made up for their weaknesses. And he’d never replaced Simon—they’d continued to work one man down.
And now they were all gone.
“Did you know their families?”
“No. We were all kept apart, for good reason.”
“So you couldn’t be used against one another.”
“That was the theory.”
Darius had been more secretive than ever these last years, like he knew letting Dare in on everything would sign his death warrant. As it was, the burden of the legacy of Section 8 was falling firmly on Dare, even though he knew only the sketchiest of details on the missions, where the bank accounts were, who S8’s enemies had been.
But the name Powell . . . that was new.
Avery was telling him, “But we’re part of it . . . because we were born to an S8 member.”
“Trust me—you don’t want to be a part of it. It’s not conducive to staying alive. Anyone who had a connection to S8 is being systematically hunted and killed for their knowledge, no matter how much or how little.”
“Doesn’t the CIA care?”
“S8 fell off their radar a long time ago.”
“But not off this Powell guy’s,” Avery pointed out.
“I’m guessing he was their handler.”
“You don’t know for sure?”
“They were never supposed to find out. I’m guessing Darius did, and that bought him a world of trouble.”
We’re running for our lives, he wanted to tell her, but she knew. No reason to say the words out loud.
At some point, they were going to have to turn around and run toward the enemy, just like Simon had done. Sometimes that trick didn’t work. But sometimes it did.
“Can we stop Powell?”
“We don’t have much choice.”
“We could hide.”
He’d been doing that, but nothing had changed. The evil was still festering, and if he didn’t try to stop it, he couldn’t live with himself. “We’ll get Powell.”
“Don’t you think he knows we’re coming for him?”
“Sometimes that’s the best way.”
She nodded and felt her resolve steel like a palpable force. “We’re kids of Section 8—we need to live up to the group’s rep, right?”
“No, we don’t,” Dare told her, heard the fierceness in his voice for the first time in more than a year. “We need to exceed it.”
