10. Michael
MICHAEL
Flint walked over to me, shaking his head as he watched the events play out on the news. Cash hadn’t done it, just as I suspected, and now there would be retribution.
“I thought you said he was good.”
I gritted my teeth, pissed that I was in this position. “He is.”
“Then why the fuck did our other man have to pull the trigger?”
Because Cash was too fucking moral. It didn’t matter if he had joined the Shadow Government to take it down. There was a line he wouldn’t cross, and taking out President Codi was apparently that line.
I turned away from the TV and poured myself a drink, desperately needing it. After all I had sacrificed for the job, this was the last straw. My daughter had been forced into a life of hell, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it without the support of the Shadow Government.
“He has my fucking daughter!” I shouted, my whole body shaking in rage. “She was off limits, and you know that.”
“Zavala is a loose cannon,” Dagger said. “There’s no fucking way we could predict what he would do.”
“Predict, no, but we can sure as hell stop him from turning my baby girl into a ? —”
I gasped for air as the pain of my situation struck hard.
My little girl, so fucking full of life, was now in that monster’s hands.
I knew evil resided in every element of our lives, but that’s why I signed up— to make sure that evil was controlled.
There was no stopping it, no preventing it from happening, but I could minimize the damage.
Except, I couldn’t save my own daughter.
I fell to my knees, broken, barely a man at this point. My heart ached with every day that passed. All I wanted was to get her back, to stop my wife from suffering any further, but I couldn’t even accomplish that. With all my contacts, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do.
“Please,” I begged, tears welling in my eyes. “She’s innocent.”
Dagger turned, his face blank. “We’ve all made sacrifices, Shadow. This doesn’t work unless we all feel the pain.”
“Not like this,” I argued. “Not in that monster’s hands.”
He charged forward, getting in my face. “Do you really fucking think my wife deserved what happened to her? Buried in a fucking shallow grave after her body had been mutilated? Who the fuck saved her?”
Nobody. We hadn’t reached her in time, but we sure as hell tried. But not even the most powerful secret society in the world could always get its way.
“You know we all would have done anything to save her. You know we never intended for that to happen.”
“And yet, it did,” he scoffed. “Like I said, we all make sacrifices. Going in now to retrieve her would be tantamount to war.”
“He’s just one man,” I argued.
“He’s part of an organization that we’ve fueled for years,” he snapped. “You screw over one man and you have the weight of the entire organization after you.”
I stared at him, my sadness turning to anger in a flash. “Only in that organization?”
“What?”
“It seems it’s only this organization that won’t gather to save each other.”
He turned from me, cursing under his breath.
“We can’t afford to be sentimental, Shadow.
You know I feel your pain. But we have too many other things riding on The Syndicate.
It’s an organization that needs to exist for the rest of the economy to function properly.
If we go after Zavala, he’ll gather his army and come after us.
We can’t afford for them to get any bigger than they are. ”
“Then we shouldn’t have put the whole fucking thing into motion. If we can’t stop one man, then what the fuck were we doing?”
He was silent for a moment, and I thought maybe I was getting through to him. But then he shook his head with a sigh. “I’m sorry, Shadow. It’s out of our hands now.”
The memory hit me like a sledgehammer, reminding me what we were really doing here. We had a job to do, and if we failed, everything failed.
“Bring him in.”
“Dead or alive?” Flint asked, a trace of humor in his voice.
The man was more sadistic than anyone I knew, and I’d met Cash’s friend Fox. He was about as bad as they came. But where he only got off on killing bad men, Flint didn’t care if you were good or bad. Wrong or right, he would kill anyone for the right price. And he enjoyed it.
“Doesn’t matter. Just make sure he’s brought in.”
“Does that mean you don’t care if I have some fun first?”
I knew what he was doing. Everything was a fucking test around here. The only difference was that I had been here longer than Flint. I knew exactly where I stood and what needed to be done. He could bait me all he wanted. It wouldn’t fucking work.
“Do what you have to, but his body had better be here in one week.”
A glimmer of excitement swirled in the inky depths of his eyes.
He was one man you did not want on your bad side, but he was great for certain occasions.
I just wasn’t sure the good outweighed the bad.
A man like him couldn’t truly be controlled, so when he went off the deep end, I knew it would be bad.
“He’ll be here.”
I grabbed his shirt, jerking him toward me. “Don’t fail me, or you’ll end up in the ground along with him.”
I shoved him away, reminding him of who was in charge. As he walked out the door, I turned my attention back to the TV. There was only so far Cash could get before the borders would close down and he would be trapped. In the meantime, there was another aspect that had to be put into motion.
Cash had to be hunted, and there was only one way for everyone to know who he truly was.