Chapter 11 Wesley
Wesley
A perfectly reasonable reason to do some creepy ass stalker shit
“Madison Cooper is one of my spiders.”
The time hovers close to midnight, but the silence in the office following my news is wakeful and tense.
Fully dressed but looking a bit tired, Dimitri processes the information with a scowl, parked on his kneel-chair against the edge of the desk.
Mac is more disheveled—he obviously threw on whatever he could find, because his rumpled tee shirt is backwards and inside out.
He scrubs his face and straightens in the faded red wingback chair he always sits in.
“Whoa, really? And you didn’t know before you started watching her?” Mac’s tone is full of disbelief.
“Yes, I also assumed you knew the identities of all your informants,” Dimitri adds.
“You losing your edge or something, Short Round?”
I lift a brow. Personally, it thrills me she was so good at evading discovery, and my team knows better than to question my abilities. Still, I’m a man with an ego, same as they are. “She’s the only one I could never find.”
Mac whistles. “She must be good, then.”
“She’s my best spider,” I correct, feeling oddly proud on her behalf.
“You don’t want to kill her,” Dimitri assumes.
“We won’t be killing her,” I correct again, trying to control my tone so it doesn’t sound combative. I succeed—barely. “No one will.”
Dimitri’s scowl is deeply etched on his face after all these years. He cocks his head, lost in thought. “If the General wants her dead and we do not take the hit, he will send her name to another,” he points out.
“I know.” I nod and take a deep breath, sitting back in my chair.
My resolve is made of steel, but my stomach flops over anxiously.
Every second I wait is another that she’s unprotected.
“I won’t risk another hitman coming after her—I won’t allow that kind of danger to her life, or anyone important to her.
I want to tell the General we’ll take the hit. It’ll buy us some time.”
At that, Dimitri’s scowl deepens. “Hmm. I suppose a skilled informant is an asset worth protecting. Though, the repercussions will be challenging to manage. Will you—”
But the expression on Mac’s face shifts slightly, and he cuts in, “Wait a minute, D. I don’t think she’s just an asset. Wes… do you like her?”
“What is this, primary school?” I return, raising a brow at him.
“You do!” Mac realizes, eyes rounding as a grin settles onto his lips.
He looks to Dimitri, wanting to share in this newfound excitement and enthusiasm, but finds only the usual emotional wall.
Rolling his eyes at Dimitri’s impassive face, Mac digs in his pocket for his phone.
“What was her name again? Madison something?”
“Cooper,” Dimitri helps.
I grit my teeth. “What are you going to do, look her up?”
“I’m gonna friend her on Facebook,” Mac shoots back, rolling his eyes. “Of fuckin’ course I’m looking her up. I gotta see the girl who finally caught your eye. I bet you like ‘em wild, huh? Or are you more of a lady-in-the-streets kind of bloke—”
“You like her?” Dimitri repeats the question, but in a far more accusatory way that implies my decision-making abilities are compromised.
He doesn’t know the half.
“Yes,” I admit, grimacing when the word falls so woefully short of describing my feelings.
The part of me that’s primitive and instinctual wants to take her—to claim her as loudly as I can so everyone knows.
But old habits die hard, and there’s a much louder part of me that guards the truth—even about this, even to them.
It’s a deep, dark fear I can’t rationalize away: that bad things happen when people know the truth.
“She’s much more than just a spider to me, if I’m honest,” I say, and even that truth still feels like a compromise.
“But even if that weren’t true, she’d never pass our test. She sells information to me and, I assume, others—but she’s not hurting the innocent.
She’s not a bad person who deserves her fate at the end of your knife. She’s…”
My mermaid. My Madison, now.
Sure, I just learned her name, but you don’t need to know someone’s name to know who they really are. I know her heart. I know her soul. And I don’t care if she’s good or bad—it doesn’t matter to me. She’s mine. And if I’m honest, I’ve been hers ever since that first message.
Already several steps ahead, our fearless leader spears me with a meaningful, almost understanding look.
“She will never be safe,” he points out, refusing to let me ignore the very thing I’ve been trying to.
“Even if you fake her death, she will live the rest of her life with a target on her back. And if he finds out we defied him, so will we.”
I heave a sigh and lean forward onto my elbows, rubbing my face harshly. It’s time for another piece of the truth.
Because he’s right. There’s no trying to reason with a man like the General—to convince him not to kill her. It’s not as if we can pay him off, and I doubt he can be threatened effectively. If he lives, he won’t be satisfied until she’s dead.
It was never the plan to let him live.
I grind my jaw. “As far as I’m concerned, the General just signed his own death warrant.”
Mac reels back, blinking in surprise at the vehemence in my voice.
A muscle in Dimitri’s jaw ticks, but he doesn’t look shocked.
The words sit heavily in the air. From their perspective, it’s a declaration of war against the man who brought us together.
A man who, for all intents and purposes, has never done Mac or Dimitri any personal wrong.
“Look, this isn’t your fight—either of you,” I say, giving them each a serious look in turn. Do I want their help? Of course. But I can’t ask it. Not after everything I’ve done and kept from them. “You don’t have to—”
“Oh, fuck off with that selfless bullshit,” Mac cuts me off, slashing his hand through the air.
“Like I’d let you do this on your own. I was all for collecting intel and being careful, since we don’t know jack shit about the General, but frankly the wait-and-see approach gives me the scratch anyway.
I’m all in and ready to take this fucker down. What about you, Big D?”
Dimitri casts his eyes skyward and mutters something in Russian, too low for either of us to hear—I catch stupid decision and all be killed.
He sighs. “The General will become a problem eventually, I suppose. As he claims more power, he will go after anyone who threatens that power. Your spider is likely the first of many innocent targets, and I will not work for a dictator. Still, making a move on someone protected by anonymity is incredibly dangerous...” He scrubs at his scar, up through his short hair.
“I know you have other people to think about,” I start. Everyone in the house knows that he and Nicole are trying for a baby. “I wouldn’t blame you—”
Dimitri makes an irritated, dismissive sound. “That is not what I meant. I am with you. Of course I am with you, my brothers,” he adds, emphasizing his loyalty. “I was considering the danger so we could plan for how to proceed. I do not intend to die or to allow either of you to die.”
Pride and gratitude for my team—my family—swells in my chest, though it twists around the guilt. The ever-present guilt. “Magnanimous of you,” I return wryly.
He waves me off, though whether it’s because of the sentiment or the fact that he doesn’t know that particular English word, I can’t say. He taps his bicep with his thumb, thinking. “Do you have any idea why the General wants her dead?”
I shake my head. Motive is key when trying to find a killer, so that’ll be my first step. “I’m assuming this has something to do with her work as an informant.”
“Does he know of your spider network?”
I blanch. I never considered the possibility that the General knows that he sent me the name of one of my own informants. “I don’t know. I’ve never mentioned it to him, but I have no way of knowing how far his reach is.”
“Da. He could be anyone, anywhere. We must know who is she to him. What if she works for him? What if she sees or speaks with him every day—with or without knowing? She might accidentally give something away.”
“He might have put sleepers in her life,” Mac adds—another possibility I hadn’t considered.
“He might be monitoring her online activity,” I add, thoughtfully tapping the top of my desk.
“Since we don’t know who he is, I need to be as cautious as possible.
Best to move quickly and do it in person.
I’ll let her know what I can about the situation, then we can start assembling a list of anyone she sold intel to or about.
With any luck, we’ll find him among those names. ”
“You believe she will be willing to assist us with this?”
“I’ll figure out some way to persuade her,” I say, though internally I lack some of the conviction I project.
I have no idea what I’m going to say to her.
How would she react—how would anyone react—to finding out the man she’s dating has actually been sent to kill her?
Luckily, she trusts me—SpyderMan, anyway.
Once I explain everything, I’m confident that she’ll cooperate, but I know her well enough to know that getting to that point will require finesse.
Excitement thrums in my veins at the idea of working to find the General together. Working with her, side by side—a personal fantasy of mine.
“What will you do to ensure the General does not learn of our plan?” Dimitri presses.
“I’ll accept the job to buy some time, but I can’t appear to be flagrantly ignoring a kill order, and if he finds out I’m looking for him, we’re all at risk. The safest course will be to fake her death—at least until we can find him and he’s not a threat anymore. We’ll have to lie low.”
“Will you bring her to one of the safe houses?”