Not now that that son-of-a-bitch Barnes was taken care of.
Just one shot and it would be done.
He’d wait until he was in a safe place and go through that asshole’s computer and emails later. See if anyone else out there needed to be taken care of; then he was finished with this shit.
Mexico was waiting.
But the girl had been weeping as if her heart had been breaking. The sheer amount of emotion coming from a woman so small had had him pausing. Watching.
She had been playing a classical piece on the piano that was far too big for the room. It hadn’t seemed as if she was even aware of what she was doing, as if the ranch house was in actuality a grand concert hall.
How could a woman so young have experienced enough life to play like that, to grieve like that?
Eugene didn’t know.
But he had listened. Had watched. Had remembered the emotions he had felt when he had listened to her mother play all those years ago.
If he had ever had a friend in his life, it had been Felicia Jones.
Eugene wanted to see Felicia in her daughter’s eyes when she died. Wanted to imagine that was what Felicia had looked like when she’d been murdered.
He’d needed to see that.
Had wanted to see if he could find the grief he’d felt for Felicia once more.
Could understand it.
Emotions—he’d admit it, he wasn’t one who understood every nuance of emotion like so many of those damned shrinks in the CCU and elsewhere in PAVAD. No. He was the kind of man who did his job—without messy emotions screwing everything up.
But he had always been fascinated by those who did feel like that.
Felicia had felt so damned much. Love, for her friends, for her daughters. For Eugene and Ed and everyone else who had been assigned to guard her all those years ago.
And for that bastard who hadn’t deserved even a moment of her love.
Now, Felicia’s daughter was hurting. Feeling.
Eugene only felt emotions of that depth when he watched others die. Then and only then could he get an inkling of what they felt.
He wasn’t stupid, he knew the technical term for what he was: sociopath.
Eugene was a confirmed sociopath.
He was incapable of feeling much at all.
Oh, he’d wanted to. Wanted to understand what everyone else seemed to take for granted.
But Eugene just didn’t care about other people.
Maybe his wife, to some extent. He was supposed to, after all.
Or he once had.
Mostly, he’d married her because she was convenient sex and someone to listen to him talk. She’d taken care of his mundane needs like laundry and food while he was busy building his career.
He’d stuck with her because it was easier than leaving.
But now…he wanted to try a few other things before he died, first.
He had to finish with the past first, too.
With Felicia’s daughter.
Eugene tightened his grip around her neck. Silky hair fell over his hand. Soft.
Pretty girl; not beautiful like her older sister, who was the spitting image of her mother, but she’d do.
Well, she would have.
If she’d lived.
He pointed his spare weapon, one taken off a street punk a long, long time ago, right between those unusual green eyes of hers.
Waiting for the terror.
It didn’t come.
That gave him pause. Felicia would have been shaking like a leaf, passing out from the fear. But her daughter just stared at him from eyes shaped like her biological father’s.
He’d always hated that man’s eyes. They were brown, not the green of this girl’s, and capable of stabbing a man in the gut. But it didn’t matter; he looked at her, and he saw the truth.
“Don’t move. Or this will be over in a blink.”
116
For a moment Jac just stared, unable to process what she was seeing. For just a nanosecond. Then training kicked in. Training that went well back before she’d ever stepped foot in the FBI academy seven years ago.
Before she could even think about what she was doing she had the door open and was calling out her sister’s name. “Nat! I’m back! I need to change shirts, then we can go to Smokey’s for lunch. You won’t believe what happened.”
She hoped she was distraction enough for the man holding a gun on her sister.
Jac had hit speed dial and video on her phone before she’d unlocked the front door. She sat it deliberately on the counter in her kitchen, keeping her back to the living room, as if she hadn’t even realized someone else was there with Nat.
She pointed the phone right at the center of her living room, hoping it would grab what she needed it to.
It would be PAVAD.
Be help.
There was no way she was losing her little sister.
“Nat? You almost ready?” Jac was a damned good actress—she’d learned at the colonel’s knee how to portray exactly what he had wanted. Those skills had just grown over the last decade. “Do we need to walk Kudos and Karma first? I saw her in the front yard, and he’s in the back, acting like a total idiot again. I know she’s ready to just take off on an adventure, like always.”
Karma had never taken off on an adventure in the five years she’d been a certified rescue dog. Jac and Nat were both well aware of that.
She just had to communicate with her sister—let Nat know that Jac was planning something.
That Nat wasn’t facing Eugene Lytel alone.
117
Eugene Lytel. His entire team. Five men Max had trusted at his back for years. That they were involved in targeting PAVAD pissed him off and made him want to rip them to shreds.
Jac had depended on them, too. Jac, Miranda, Whit, Alessandra, Carrie, Evan, Jazz, Josh, and J.T.—agents Max had worked with hundreds of times.
None of them had ever forgotten how dependent they were on the auxiliary PAVAD teams for backup and security. Auxiliary were an integral part of the success of PAVAD.
Needed and necessary.
The betrayal cut deep.
Barnes had outlined everything he knew and everything that had happened in front of him since he
