REAPER
SIX MONTHS LATER
“ J esus Christ,” I mutter, looking over the impenetrable compound that Harriet Wicker has built herself while Shadow and Kienna get into position. It’s been a long time coming, but if anyone is going to do this, it’s going to be us.
I’m sure another version of War Games will pop up in the coming years, and at some point, someone will put together the pieces and realize that Kienna and I aren’t exactly as dead as we’re supposed to be. But as long as Harriet Wicker goes down, there’s no one else with enough motivation or skin in the game to put up the money for a bounty.
Once she’s eliminated like the hundreds of deaths she’s been responsible for over the years, we’ll be as free as birds. Well, sort of. In our line of work, there’s only a certain amount of free a person can truly be. Our identities need to be kept under wraps, considering Shadow had no choice but to hand over our IDs at the end of the game. The FBI believes us to be dead, and we need to keep it that way, but if they happen to catch onto us, we have new identities ready to go with multiple exit strategies, something I’ve never really had to think about, but now that I’ve found my family, I won’t allow a damn soul to take it away from me.
“Ready?” Mila questions in my ear.
“Ready,” I confirm. “Shadow?”
“Ready.”
“Kienna?” I ask.
Kienna’s familiar groan sounds through my earpiece, and my back stiffens for just a moment before her whispered voice comes through. “Fuck, I really need to pee.”
Fucking hell. This is why I’ve never been a fan of working in a team. When I’m out on my own, it’s only me I have to cater to. But these three women . . . fuck. They drive me crazy, but it’s the kind of crazy I wouldn’t give up for the world. They don’t need to know that though.
Either way, we can’t afford to fuck this up. Our lives are literally riding on this. We have one shot to get it right, and if we’re even a second too late, it could be detrimental to our survival.
Mila spent four and a half months searching for this bitch, and the moment she found her, we started working out a plan—You know, after getting over the fact that this wasn’t some loser with back acne, jerking off in his mother’s basement to snuff films.
“I told you not to drink that whole fucking soda in the car,” I scold, shaking my head. “Can you figure yourself out, because it’s go time in less than twenty seconds? Either hold it or piss in your pants, but we’re not waiting for you to find a bathroom. We’re in the middle of the fucking desert.”
“Damn it,” Kienna groans. “I can hold it, but if you even think about coming near me with that attitude, I’ll have no choice but to pin you down and give you the worst kind of golden shower.”
I roll my eyes as Shadow’s voice sounds in my ear. “What’s a golden shower?”
Fuck me.
“It’s a—”
“It’s nothing,” I say, cutting off Kienna’s explanation. “We need to focus.”
“Power out in seven seconds,” Mila says, thankfully forcing Shadow and Kienna to cut the bullshit and get in the zone. “Five . . . Three. Two. One.”
The compound falls into complete darkness, and without another word, I throw myself over the high gates, dropping down to the ground as I hear Kienna and Shadow doing the same. We have twenty seconds before the backup generators come on, and even less time to take out the four armed guards patrolling the compound and get inside the main building before reaching Harriet’s den undetected.
The moment I hit the ground, I switch my lenses over to night mode, getting the perfect view of the compound, and without hesitation, I make a break for it. My feet slam against the ground, pushing me toward the entrance of the main building as I spot one of the armed guards with his back to me as he talks into his earpiece, frantically trying to work out the reason for the blackout.
“Night Hawk One, are we under attack? I repeat, are we under—”
My blade slices across the front of his throat, and he goes down without me skipping a beat. As I glance at my watch, I realize we still have thirteen seconds. I hear Shadow, both in the distance and through my earpiece, as she takes out a guard, and not a second later, I hear the same from Kienna.
“Three down. One to go,” I murmur.
“Go,” Kienna grunts. “I’ve got the fourth.”
Trusting her to handle it, I race to the entrance of the building, getting there at the same time as Shadow. “Time?” I question, punching my gloved knuckles straight into the security panel for the massive sliding door.
“Eight seconds,” Mila says in my earpiece just as a pained grunt comes from Kienna.
“Baby?”
“Not your baby ,” she mutters before I hear the familiar sound of a blade plunging deep inside a body. “The fucker got me with a knee to the vag. Almost pissed my pants.”
I roll my eyes as I grab all the electrical cords and tear them out, completely disabling the security door before getting my fingers around the edge of the door and pulling it back with everything I’ve got.
“Five seconds,” Mila says.
I get the door open just enough, and before I can even glance back to search for Kienna, she tears past me, breaking through the threshold into Harriet’s den as Shadow dives in after her.
“Four.”
I follow suit, picking up speed, ready to have Kienna’s back as my gaze locks onto Harriet at her desk. There are screens and monitors surrounding her, and she is madly pressing the keys, desperate for them to power up again, but as long as we have Mila on our side, she won’t be getting back online . . . at least not in the next four seconds.
“Three.”
Hearing the sound of Kienna’s feet pounding against the linoleum, Harriet whips around, and taking all of a heartbeat to realize who the fuck we are, her eyes widen in horror, but it’s too late for her. She was dead the second we got through that door.
“Two.”
Coming in with raging speed, Kienna launches herself off the ground, and as Harriet rears back in her seat, preparing to whip around and do whatever the fuck she thinks she can do on a dead computer, Kienna crashes into her, her boot slamming against her temple and sending her sprawling across the ground.
The chair goes with her, the wheels catching and dropping the frame right on top of Harriet before bouncing and slamming into the wall of monitors behind her.
“One.”
The backup generator kicks in and the room is lit with clinical light. The screens flicker back to life as Kienna gets to her feet.
“Woah. Fuck,” Mila says, getting a bird’s eye view into Harriet’s den. “Bring me back all of that shit.”
“All of it?” I grunt, all too aware of just how far away we parked and how many monitors and screens are here. I’m going to be hauling this shit back and forth for hours, but considering the four armed guards are dead, I suppose it doesn’t matter if I were to drive the SUV right up inside this very room. It’s not as though there’s a working security door to keep us out anymore.
“All of it,” Mila confirms.
Shit.
Harriet begins to get up, and I watch as her gaze flicks between me, Shadow, and Kienna. Then when Kienna moves around the back of the computer screens, stealing the coffee cup off Harriet’s desk, she makes her move, darting toward her computer.
My heart lurches, knowing she could ruin our whole fucking world with a single push of a button, and without hesitation, my hand sweeps down past my hip, collecting my blade and launching it toward her in one fluid motion.
Harriet gets one foot to the ground before my blade sinks through the back of her neck, severing her spine. She gurgles, and in the same motion, falls heavily to the ground as blood quickly pools around her.
“Yeah, not today bitch,” I mutter, walking toward her and making sure she’s well and truly dead. Only as my gaze sails over her limp body, I realize that my blade isn’t the only one protruding from her neck. There’s an identical one directly beside it and considering the angle Shadow is standing at, it came from her.
Lifting my gaze, I arch a brow, more than impressed, only the little brat smirks back at me. “For the record,” she says in a tone that suggests I’m not going to like what’s about to come out of her mouth. “I beat you to it. You might have severed her spinal cord, but I made the kill.”
“Bullshit,” I say, glancing over Harriet’s throat again.
“You got playback, Mila?” Shadow questions.
“Sure do,” she says. “Hold please. Just need to slow it down.”
I clench my jaw and narrow my gaze at Shadow, certain she’s talking shit when Mila’s voice comes through the earpiece again. “You know I’m actually terrified of you, Reaper, so the thought of giving you bad news is actually making me break out in hives right now, but the kid is right. She beat you to the drop.”
Kienna chuckles to herself across the room, and I glance up to find my woman with her pants down around her ankles and an empty coffee cup wedged between her thighs, desperately relieving herself. “The fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Kienna’s head whips up. “I told you I was desperate,” she argues back, not an ounce of shame in her tone. “Now if you wish to keep the romance alive in this little relationship of ours, then I highly suggest you stop being a creepy swamp turd and look away. Let a girl pee in peace.”
“Fucking hell,” I mutter, making a point of turning around despite having seen this woman do a shitload worse than that.
I shake my head as the only noise filling the room is the sound of the monitors whirring mixed with the sound of Kienna’s piss hitting the bottom of the coffee cup, and honestly, how is she still going? Does she have the bladder of a fucking elephant? “Babe, you’re going to need a second coffee cup at this rate.”
“COVER YOUR EARS!” she roars at me, and in order to save myself from being drenched in the contents of that very coffee cup, I do exactly as she asks and make a point of covering my ears. Only, I can still hear everything through my earpiece.
Kienna quickly wraps it up, and with Harriet out of the way and no sign of any bounties on our heads, we’re officially free to fall back into our normal lives. Only, instead of settling back in the Big Apple, I’ll be making Seattle my new home with my girls, and I can’t fucking wait.
“So, what now?” Shadow asks an hour later after we finished retrieving the car and start making a move loading every piece of top-grade equipment into the back of the SUV.
“Well,” I start, quickly glancing at Kienna and only continuing after she nods, confirming my thoughts. “We were going to let you make that call.”
Shadow pauses and glances up at me, her brows furrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Kienna moves to my side, meeting Shadow’s confused stare. “It means that we want to go after the organization that raised you,” she explains. “I can’t bear the thought of babies being stolen from their mothers and forced into this life. Then spending their childhood in training camps. It’s not a life I would ever want for my own child, and because of that, I think it’s time we step in and officially put an end to it. However, it’s your call. Despite my feelings about this organization, it was still your home, and the monsters who raised you were somewhat your parents. If you’re not comfortable with it, we’ll put the idea on the back burner for a while, but if you are, then I say we go for it.”
“You want to take them out?” she questions.
I shake my head. “I don’t just want to take them out, Shadow. I want to destroy them and tear their training camp to pieces until there isn’t even a shred of it left. I want to return those babies back to their families and offer them the childhood that you should have had, and as for the older kids . . . I don’t know. I suppose they should be given a choice of what they want. Either way, I want these assholes to pay for what they’ve done, and if you’re on board, I want you to be the one who calls the shots.”
Tears well in her eyes and panic soars through my chest, thinking that maybe Kienna and I were out of line to even bring this up. A soft smile pulls at the corners of her lips, and she races into us, throwing her arms around us at the same time.
“Thank you,” she breathes before wiping snot across my chest. “I’m in.”
“Thank fuck,” Kienna breathes, wrapping her arm around Shadow’s back. “Then the second we get home and settled in Seattle, we’ll start working out a plan. It’s not going to happen overnight. Might even take us years before we have all the information we need to track down every last bastard involved in this organization, but I promise you, Shadow. We’re going to get every last one of them.”
“Yeah, we are,” she agrees before pulling away and scooping up another monitor to load in the back of the SUV, and I can’t help but notice the skip in her step or the massive smile resting on her lips.
Feeling my heart swell in my chest, I go to get back to work when Kienna pulls me back, throwing her arms around my neck and pushing up onto her tippy toes to kiss me. “We’re free, Nick,” she says. “We’re the family we were always meant to be. We can have a home. We can go back to work, do all the things we love, and check in on Eagle’s sister like I promised. We can even get one of those stupid picket-fence houses and a golden retriever puppy and call her Tinkerbell. We can have it all. Just you, me, and Shadow.”
A throat clears in our ears and Kienna rolls her eyes. “You, too, Mila.”
“Thank you. A little recognition every now and then would go a long way,” she murmurs as I lock my arms tighter around Kienna, unable to look away from those gorgeous green eyes as the idea of the life we’re about to have truly sinks in. I could marry her. It’d have to be under a false name, but I could give her that if she wanted. I could give her a baby, or seven, but for now, I’ll stick with simply giving her my everything just as she’s given me.
“Do you mind?” Kienna says to her best friend. “I’m trying to have a romantic moment with my man.”
“Ugh. Gross,” Shadow mutters from behind us.
“Yeah, I’m with Shadow,” Mila says. “You two are gross. But I can take the hint. I’m logging out before I catch whatever disease came and turned you both into the romantic type. See your asses back in Seattle.”
There’s a soft beep in the earpiece, letting me know it’s offline, and I pull it out of my ear before slipping the tiny piece of tech into my pocket and getting back to my girl. “Where were we?” I murmur, a grin playing on my lips.
“You were about to start making out like horny teenagers like you always do,” Shadow mutters.
“Damn straight we were,” Kienna says as a wide smile cuts across her face, and not a second later, I scoop her up into my arms and bring my lips down on hers.