Love Op: A Spicy, Cat-And-Mouse, Thriller Rom Com (Love and Other Jobs Book 5)

28. Kael

It took Cohen’s team a full two minutes to tighten their perimeter. I’d have fired every one of their asses if they’d been my operatives—it was sloppy. Their outer perimeter hadn’t even noticed us cross the vineyard, and as Tabitha and I skulked around the darkening, sunset-drenched chateau grounds, I didn’t bother hiding too much. Their attention appeared to be diverted to something inside the house, so even two operatives in full tactical gear—complete with helmets, face guards, and pounds of ammunition and weaponry—didn’t trigger their alarms until it was far too late.

“Target nine neutralized,” Tab’s voice said over her speaker in my ear. She was ten feet behind me, covering my ass and securing and disarming any hostiles I hadn’t immediately killed. It was a difficult balance to strike in a situation like this. No, I didn’t want to put a bullet between every target’s eyes like I might in a military operation. They were hired security guards, and they were just doing their jobs. But I wasn’t going to give them the chance to shoot me, either.

We had worked our way up from the back entrance, clearing a room with two targets first, and that had finally tipped them off to our presence here. Silent takedowns were preferable, but not if they had guns pulled on me right out of the gate. Immediately after that, hostiles had stacked up outside a kitchen that led up a flight of stairs to the main floor, and that was where I wasn’t entirely sure I’d managed to neutralize rather than eliminate. That was what Tabitha was for. I shot, kicked away weapons, and then moved on. She neutralized and kept an eye on my rear.

We bounded from room to room, clearing them and finding cover before moving on to the next. Although I had memorized the schematics for the chateau during the plane ride over, I couldn’t be sure where they had taken Mattie. It wasn’t hard to figure it out, though. Tabitha and I hid in the shadows of a closet room just beyond the main foyer. And then we watched.

Security forces like this one—private companies that looked beefy but had little to no formal training—they were predictable. It was their job to protect the asset. So, when nine of their guys fell, they did the one thing they had been trained to do; they flanked the asset.

And honestly, it didn’t matter where this jackass had Mattie. I didn’t want her right now. I wanted him. I wanted his mouth around my gun and his fear staring right back at the retribution that had come for him.

“The dining room,” Tabitha’s voice scratched in my ear.

We both had masks around our faces that muffled our whisper comms, so I nodded and said, “Ten-four,” before leaving our cover. I knew from the map ingrained in my head that the dining room took up an enormous portion of the lower floor, spanning a whole wall of the chateau and stretching up three stories like a Catholic cathedral. It was close to our position, which meant we’d be coming up behind hostiles. There was a chance we could get flanked by them if there were more than the dozen that had assembled around Cohen’s location, but unless they had a full army tucked away in their back pocket—which they didn’t—then I wasn’t worried. We’d faced worse before.

Tabitha and I bounded, sprinting forward in short spurts before taking cover and securing an area. As I’d predicted, they didn’t station their formation until a good twenty feet before the dining room entrances, anyway. And they had them in a linear defense configuration that was dumb as shit. Why? Because it was easy to train knuckleheads to look like they were being effective, but it was a lot harder to train them to be useful.

Shaking my head, I pressed my back to the wall near a stairwell. Beyond us, the historical house opened up to a hallway maybe ten feet wide and two stories tall. To the right, three entrances led to the expansive dining room beyond. The whole mansion had a classical, baroque feel, with wood-paneled walls, outdated wallpaper, and ostentatious sconces lining the hallway to illuminate the ornate architecture. The problem with older blueprints was how easy it was to get funneled into one small space. This one, for example, put twelve men right in the line of our fire like fish in a barrel. They’d stationed their guards along the hallway and by the dining room entrances. “Twenty feet, twelve hostiles. Five at nine o’clock, two at twelve, five at your three. Linear perimeter.”

“Ten-four,” Tabitha’s voice whispered. “I’ve got the five at nine o’clock.”

That left only seven in my sector of fire. Snore. “I can get my seven before you get your five,” I challenged with a crooked grin.

Her breathy laugh crackled over the speaker. “I’m not taking that bet.”

“I need a more gullible op,” I muttered, hitching my rifle against my shoulder and into position.

A crash from inside the dining room rang through the cavernous mansion. It was followed closely by a male shout, and my grin died on my lips. So, he did have her in there. Rage fired to life like a V8 engine in my chest, and I pied the corner the same instant Tabitha peeked out from her cover.

Two shots to the thighs, one to the chest, got a knee—one more to the side to get his shoulder, one to the face—oops—two to each shoulder, one to the stomach and another in his pelvis, two to the hips. Seven guards went down in ten seconds, and Tabitha laid out her five just after.

I didn’t have time to fully neutralize all twelve of them, and so, taking a risk, I crossed the X, putting myself in the range of fire if any of the black-clad hostiles still had their crosshairs on me. Two shots rang out from my left, and I located the source. One hostile on the ground with a handgun. With shaking hands, he held it between his palms and had it trained on me from across the room. Tabitha shot his hand from ten feet away. His scream joined the cacophony, but I didn’t pause to clear the room. Tabitha could handle it.

I had a more pressing target.

Not waiting to see whether the door was locked or not, I lifted my boot and smashed the plate of the antique brass doorknob that led to the dining area. It crashed open, swishing against a thick, opaque plastic tarp. Gunshots pierced through the tarp, but I’d already flattened myself against the wall beside the doorway. With the plastic in the way, I couldn’t get a visual on hostiles. Even for me, that was reckless. I wasn’t going to pepper shots into a room where Mattie might get hurt.

I couldn’t stand there unprotected with twelve potentially unneutralized threats at my front, either. I waited for their gunfire to cease, counting nine rounds. From the sound of it, they had handguns. Knowing they most likely had some rounds left, I pulled in a bracing breath, prayed for luck, and stormed through the plastic sheet.

My brain registered a lot of things at once, but foremost was that one of the guards had his black handgun aimed right at me. I took him down with one, well-aimed shot to his chest and another to his neck right after. A shot from the second guard made contact with my vest, and I trained my sights on him a split second before two more rounds took him down. Pain radiated along my ribs and chest from the impact of the bullet, and I knew it would leave a nasty bruise, but it was nothing life-threatening.

My brain caught up with the rest of the room after that. It looked like a makeshift medical room had been set up, and a doctor and a nurse had scrambled for cover behind an operating table and standing equipment to the left of the room. Over where the guards had been, Mattie lay on her stomach in the middle of the floor in a medical gown. Jonathon stood over her, dressed all in brown like a fucking newsie, and he held a handgun out to the side with the barrel pointed at Mattie’s prone form.

Mattie raised her head from the floor, and where I expected to find fear, I found a satisfied, cat-like blink instead. Her lips trembled, but they pulled into a smile. She’d known I would come.

Good fucking girl, I thought with a brief flash of pride. Then my focus pulled back to the lethal weapon that the walking dead man had trained on her. I flicked my gaze to Jonathon’s, my rifle sights trained on his pale forehead. “Cohen. Put down the gun.”

“Why? So you can put a bullet through my head?” Cohen asked. He had intelligent eyes, I’d give him that. But they’d been written over with fear and masked by forced calm. The problem with fear was that it made people do illogical things.

Like shooting my Mattie when he knew it would get him killed.

“I don’t want to kill her,” Jonathon said evenly. “But you’re forcing my hand.”

“The only thing I’ll be forcing is the barrel of that nine-millimeter up your ass if you don’t point it away from her head,” I said just as calmly. “There’s death, Cohen, and then there’s unholy justice. Which one do you want from me?”

Cohen backed away, his grip tightening on the gun. “You move, and she dies.”

Typical. Men like Cohen didn’t know when to admit that they were done for. “Have it your way.” I shot his shoulder. It wasn’t a hard shot. I’d advanced within six feet of them both, and I was too pissed off to make the logical move by killing him outright. Was it tactically sound? Not necessarily. He could have fired off a shot toward Mattie if I’d missed.

But I didn’t miss.

Cohen crumpled to the ground, screaming as the pain in his shoulder likely invaded what was left of his sanity—if he’d had any, to begin with. His gun clattered to the ground, and Mattie, the clever fighter that she was, immediately grabbed it and stumbled back toward me. In my ear, Tabitha said, “Hallway is clear.”

“Dining room, too,” I replied, advancing on Cohen with my sights still on his bushy head in case he tried to pull something really stupid. With Mattie safe, I had to set aside my desire to go to her, at least until all the threats were fully neutralized. “There are two civilians in here with Cohen and Mattie.”

“On it.”

As Jonathon blubbered on the ground, I swung my rifle aside, letting it dangle from its sling. I reached him and shoved him to his stomach. Wrenching back his hand, I pulled a pair of handcuffs from the pouch at my side to secure his wrists. He screamed, shrill and long, when his shoulder wrenched with the movement. I grabbed his hair and slammed his face into the ground. “Shut up, Cohen.”

After patting him down and finding nothing but a cell phone in the pocket of his pants—which I took—I left him sobbing pathetically into the polished hardwood. I stood off him, doing one last sweep of the room. Tabitha had the doctor and nurse at gunpoint, and she ushered them out of the room to where her twelve other captives had been handled, I assumed.

Mattie stood several steps away, clutching the handgun to her chest. Her eyes looked enormous as they took me in. With her thin shoulders hunched and her hair disheveled around her sagging medical gown, she looked so vulnerable, it cracked through my heart with a hairline fracture.

I released the velcro along one of my wrists, loosening my glove as I took a tentative step toward her. “Hey, Bunny.”

Her eyes flew from Jonathon’s prone form to me, and her hands tightened around the gun. “You came.”

I yanked the black glove off my right hand, and letting it fall, I brought up my other hand to ease the gray mask off my face. “I told you I would.” With slow steps, I closed the distance between us. I didn’t think she’d do anything irrational, but then again, she’d witnessed a lot of violence in a short span of time.

Mattie swallowed, glanced down at the gun in her hands, and then held it out to me. “Do you—do you want this?”

I reached her, and plucking it from her trembling hands, I threw it to the opposite side of the room where it skidded and clattered so far, it banged against the wall. I cradled her head in my hands gently, my eyes taking in the two marks on either side of her face. One of them still had finger marks that had whipped across her cheekbone and the flat of her cheek. I hovered my thumbs over the marks. “They hurt you?”

“Mostly because I was a brat,” she smiled tremulously.

I kissed her forehead, breathing in the scent of her shampoo that had mingled with something aseptic and medical. “What is all this equipment? What did he do to you?”

She leaned into me as far as she could with my vest in the way, resting her forehead against the base of my throat. Her hands gripped my vest along the sides. “Can we just go?” she asked so quietly, I almost couldn’t hear it.

My gaze flitted to Cohen, who had begun to wriggle his way across the floor on his stomach like an inchworm, gusting out desperate, keening noises as he went for the nine-millimeter I had chucked across the floor. My eyes hooded with irritation. “Tell me what he did to you, and then we can go.”

“Kael,” she growled. Lifting her head, Mattie hooked me with a stare full of desperation and anger. “You blew up his shoulder. That covers it.”

Not by a fucking long shot, it didn’t. I set her away from me. “Tabitha will be here in a minute. Go with her.”

Mattie’s eyes fell to Cohen on the ground, and then found mine again. “Kael.”

Tabitha entered behind us, breathing hard and sweating. “Oh, good to see you’re getting your cuddles in. Do you realize you didn’t kill any of those bastards out there? I had to secure twelve of them, and the doctors, you asshole.” She pulled her gray mask down, freeing her nose and mouth, and then noticed Jonathon making his way laboriously across the floor. She gestured to him and cocked a thick eyebrow my way. “The fuck?”

“Ignore him,” I replied distractedly. To Mattie, I repeated, “Go with Tab. I’ll be right behind you. I promise.”

Mattie scowled. “What if you get hurt?”

I swung an exaggerated look around the mostly empty dining room. “From what?”

Mattie’s molasses brown eyes held mine, and then whatever fear and nerves had taken hold of her shrank back down under a mask of cold indifference. “I want to watch.”

“Ruthless little thing,” I murmured, reaching out to stroke her chin. Her cheeks and eyes were already starting to swell from whoever had hit her, and her chin was the only safe place I could touch. And that alone fanned the flames of fury back to a roaring fire in my blood. “Stay with Tab, then.”

Tabitha drew Mattie aside, and despite the clear lack of threat in the room, she positioned them behind the long walnut table that had been moved against the wall. I rotated my attention back to the sniveling worm who had left a three-foot trail of blood on the floor as he squirmed his way toward the handgun across the room. My boots echoed through the space, bouncing off the inlaid dark wood and up to the beams that crisscrossed the cathedral-style ceiling. Only the tortured sounds of Jonathon’s fear tore through the heavy silence, and I caught up to him just as his nose was four inches from the gun.

I scooped it up.

“Please,” Jonathon shrieked.

I rolled him over with my boot, causing him to scream in pain as his body weight pressed against his shoulder. I bent over, and with my gloved left hand, I grabbed the front of his shirt. I hauled him upright, forcing him to his knees. “Please, what?” I asked casually. “Let you have this?” I held the gun at his eye level.

Two, dark eyes swiveled in their sockets, first to Mattie across the room, and then back to the gun. “I wasn’t going to kill her.”

“I know that.” I pressed the muzzle against his forehead. “And I’m not going to kill you either. Initially. Unfortunately, I don’t think I have the time to take care of you the way you deserve, Cohen.” I pulled back my hand and whipped the gun across the right side of his face. He whimpered, crying out in a high voice and nearly toppling over. I kept him upright and surveyed the angle of the mark I’d left on his face. I glanced at Mattie’s face. Close enough.

As soon as he had righted himself, I pistol-whipped the other cheek with the gun still fisted in my hand. Now his face matched Mattie’s. His head recoiled and blood spattered from a cut on his pale skin. He gasped and cried out pathetically, bringing his head forward again and ducking his chin down. “Please! I’m sorry, dammit. You can have her, for fuck’s sake.”

Have her. Like he had any right to give her. I glanced Mattie’s way again, and I found her hand on her mouth and eyes shining bright with fear. I shouldn’t have let her stay. No matter what she had said, this wasn’t going to make her nightmares any better. Blood trickled down her arm, and I realized it was because she’d had an IV in her arm. I rounded a furious scowl on the sobbing piece of trash on his knees in front of me. “Why are there doctors here?”

“Oh God,” he sobbed. “P-please.”

I pointed the gun at his arm, right where a hole had been put in Mattie’s, and I pulled the trigger. It clicked. Jonathon devolved into pleading gibberish, and I peered at the nine-millimeter. “You didn’t even have one in the chamber? You fucking moron.”

“Please,” Jonathon begged.

I grabbed him by the curly tuft of hair on his head and wrenched his swelling face to look at mine. “What were the doctors for?”

“L-lobotomy,” he sniveled, and then his stomach heaved as he threatened to wretch.

Lobotomy. Brain surgery lobotomy? I tightened my hold on his hair and yanked his head so far back, he’d choke on his own bile if he tried to spew on me. “Say that again. I think I might have misheard you.”

“She-she would have run,” Jonathon blubbered. “It was the only way to keep her happy. Please, I beg of you. I would have been kind to her. I wouldn’t have hurt her.”

“Did you say you were about to give her a fucking lobotomy?”

Jonathon didn’t answer in any kind of coherent way, but he didn’t need to. He sobbed, releasing loud, irritating spurts of panicked noise from his taut throat. I slowly turned again to Mattie. I soldered my burning, rage-filled eyes to her petrified gaze to confirm what Cohen had said. She closed her eyes briefly, like she couldn’t bear to look at my expression of horror.

I took in the kneeling vermin at my feet, and my fist tightened in his hair so hard, he screamed for mercy. My desire to make Jonathon Cohen suffer a slow, agonizing death faded, giving way to the need to end this monster before he could unleash his madness on another victim. He might not chase Mattie after this. He might decide she wasn’t worth the trouble, but men like him didn’t cease being monsters. They only fed their twisted desires with new victims and fresh torture. I knew Mattie wouldn’t be able to live with that thought any more than I could. “Close your eyes, Mattie.”

“Please, no! I swear! I’ll never touch her again!” Cohen begged frantically.

I pressed the long side of the top of the barrel against his swelling cheek, gritting my teeth. “You forgot to cock this.” I pushed the gun hard, sliding the catch against the side of his face so hard, it tore through flesh and wrenched his head back with the force of the motion. The gun racked, sliding into place and shoving a round into the chamber.

I pointed the muzzle at his forehead and pulled the trigger.