25. Cameron
CAMERON
Reaching over, I pulled Dax’s hand away from her mouth. I didn’t think there was much left of that thumbnail and when she noticed, then she’d start picking at her bottom lip. Once she started that nervous tick, it was almost impossible to get her to stop.
“Beautiful, you’re killing me with all this nervous energy,” I murmured into her ear.
She let out a sigh and yanked her hand out of my grasp to run it through her hair. “You know this whole waiting shit drives me crazy.”
“You handled it out in the quarry just fine, loba,” Cognac pointed out.
“That’s because we were outside, and I didn’t have to be cooped up in a car parked on a side street lurking near our target's house,” she snapped. “Why did we have to get here so early?”
Magnus shifted in his seat to look back at her. “Oh, I’m sorry if my need to be prepared has set you on edge. We still need to drive another ten minutes down the way, but they live in a gated community, so it’s not like we could hide out there.”
“Listen, Thing One, you don’t want to pick a fight with me right now because I’m more than willing to make it happen,” Dax shot back.
“Knock it off, both of you,” Wes barked. “I need to finish this program so we can get in the side gate and avoid the guard at the front entrance.”
“I thought you had that settled?” Jaxson asked, peering over his shoulder to look at the screen.
Wes shoved him back into his seat and continued working. “Yeah, well, when we drove by the front, I noticed the sign for the security company was different, so I looked it up. They switched two days ago, and I was working off what Tommaso gave us. Now I have to alter it slightly.”
“Gee, isn’t it a good thing I got here so early and did a test pass out front,” Magnus said, looking at Dax in the rearview mirror with a smug expression.
She lunged forward, but I caught her and pulled her onto my lap. “Settle down, beautiful. Soon enough, you’ll get to have your claws in the man who really deserves them.”
Grumbling under her breath about chopping off dicks, she settled into my hold.
“Got it,” Wes announced. “We can head on over now.”
Magnus turned the key, and the SUV rumbled to life.
For this mission, we didn’t have any extra people.
It was just the seven of us to get this done.
Everyone agreed having a smaller party infiltrate was smarter since it was in a neighborhood, and it would draw unwanted attention.
Diego’s house backed up to the golf course right at the eighteenth hole.
The plan so far was to leave the car in the golf course parking lot since there wasn’t much security other than a gate closing off the entrance.
Once there, it was a matter of getting across the course to the back of Diego’s home, where he had plenty of security.
As we pulled up to the gate, Wes used the garage door opener he programmed, and it started to retract back on its rail, opening the way for us.
Magnus found a spot that was deeply shadowed by trees keeping it hidden from any security checks.
Not like there were many reasons to sneak onto a golf course in this kind of neighborhood.
It was farther than I thought it would be to the house, but any other option we tried just didn’t get us to a place where we could sneak up on security.
Dax pulled out her gun, screwing on the silencer, as did Jaxson, ready to pick off those we could.
All of us could shoot, but when you needed someone who could hit with only a second to aim and make the choice.
Diego’s backyard had dense privacy bushes that concealed the first floor of the mansion he lived in.
Our intel had told us his wife and children would be home as well, so we needed to keep on the alert. No one had said it yet, but the chances of anyone in this family making it through the night were slim. This was one enemy we couldn’t have coming to bite us in the ass later on, seeking vengeance.
Jaxson went left with his brothers and Dax went right with us, following a few paces back. Since Dax was small enough, she army crawled under the bushes as we kept going to the break in the row. A metal gate blocked our way, but seconds later, Dax was there picking the lock to let us in.
“How did you get through so fast?” Cognac questioned.
“Seems they didn’t think people would crawl and didn’t put the fencing all the way through.
Bastard is just asking for someone to break in and overthrow his whole operation.
Good thing it’s us and not someone else who would have torn the trees down,” she commented as she led the way through the backyard.
A guard turned the corner of the house and spotted us, but Dax had already pulled the trigger, hitting him right between his eyes. He dropped like a sack of bricks with only a small grunt coming out of his mouth instead of the alert he was going to give.
“Drag him away from the house and off to the side in the shrubs. The longer we can keep our presence quiet, the better,” Dax whispered.
I grabbed the man under his armpits and hauled him away to the large flowering plant of some kind and heaved him in the middle of it. In the daylight, you would be able to find him, but at night, with no lights, it was good enough.
Dax picked off two more guards, one on a balcony of the second floor that had just stepped out and another out by the pool.
Cognac took care of the one by the pool, tossing him in and letting him sink to the bottom with the help of a lawn chair.
Taking one last look around, Wes headed for the back door.
Using whatever technology wizardry he had, he got the door open with a beep and a flash of green light.
Turning the handle, he pulled it open enough to make sure it was unlatched, then signaled for us.
Oddly enough, getting into the house was the easy part of the plan.
Once inside, there were fifteen bedrooms and five other various areas for people to be using.
They had live-in staff on top of the security, so there was no telling who could be in which room and at any given time.
The answer to that problem was solved when Harper made the discovery of the panic room in the basement.
Now, all we had to do was alert them to our presence when we wanted them to know about it.
The sound of glass shattering and a gunshot had us all whipping around to find Dax in the main entrance with a mangled chandelier on the floor before her. “Oops,” she commented with a grin.
Men started to shout and feet clomped to investigate the sound.
The three of us spread out, moving through the rooms picking off the guards one by one as they put all their focus on where the sound was coming from.
We’d figured there would be five to seven guards outside and probably only three to five inside.
What we didn’t know was if he had men stationed close by in case of an emergency.
This was a calculated risk, but our hope was the other attacks would have used up those men.
“Report, what the hell is going on down there?” a voice asked from a walkie-talkie.
Reaching down, I unclipped it and responded, “There is a woman here. It seems she’s all by herself, but she’s demanding to see Diego.”
“Did she give you a name?” the voice asked.
“Don’t ask stupid questions. Just shoot the bitch,” Diego snarled. “Hold her off long enough for us to reach the panic room. We’ll take the back stairs.”
Seeing they were just handing me all the information we needed on a silver platter, I decided to go for gold. “I think we’re gonna need backup. She's already taken out the guards outside.”
There was no response, so either they didn’t have one, or they were dead.
The Wright brothers had entered on the other end of the house, figuring we could work toward the middle.
Shrugging, I tossed the radio to the side and started to search the rest of the house.
This was the one thing the FBI trained me hard on was how to process a scene and not get shot doing it.
So far, the rooms were empty until I reached what I believe was a study of sorts.
A woman sat in an upholstered chair, reading a book and drinking wine.
When I entered, she looked up at me with dead eyes, then went back to what she was reading.
“If you could shoot me in the side of the head, then I’ll still be able to have an open casket funeral,” Mariana commented.
Frowning, I lowered the gun slightly. “You want me to kill you?”
“Oh, I’ve been dead inside for so long I’m not quite sure why my body insists I keep living.
To me, this is a blessing. I will finally be able to make it all end.
I would have done it myself, but it appears I’m just not that strong of a woman,” she shared, glancing up at me set her wine down.
“Would it make it easier for you if I tried to shoot you? That way, you can say it was in self-defense.”
I wasn’t a good man, even if I was an FBI agent. Everything I’d done was for Dax to protect her, ensure that she was safe however I could make her. While I didn’t have a problem taking out this woman, there was something that held me back.
“Tell me, if we killed Diego, your children, and anyone else who would come after us in retaliation, would you be one of those people?” I asked.
Mariana let out a heavy sigh. “Pity, I thought for sure you were a man with low to no morals. Seems I won’t be free after all from this torturous life. If it’s not Diego, it will be Marco. He will want his property back now that it's not doing him any good here.”
That had my attention. “You know Marco personally enough he would have so much control over you?”
She let out a bitter laugh gulping more of her wine down. “I’m the bastard's little sister, a pawn in his game to be placed where it will best serve the Tesoro Cartel and the man who wants to be king of it all.”