Chapter Fifteen #2
I looked behind us where Mercy followed. I stopped and looked from Tonio to Mercy and back. The other woman wasn’t hurt and she could obviously handle herself. “My shoulder’s shit,” I said to her. “Can you…”
She held out her hand and I gave her my weapon. Mercy ejected the clip to check the rounds, then reloaded and made sure there was a round in the chamber. “I’m good.” She addressed Tonio. “You have a team?”
“I do.” Tonio lifted his chin.
“Then you don’t need a wild card. I’ll have your back but won’t engage unless you tell me.”
Tonio narrowed his gaze. “You military?”
“Was.” She held his gaze, but I could see the defiance.
“Next hall bends right, then there’s a door that used to have a keypad,” I said. “Might not anymore, way it sounded earlier.”
“Let’s go,” he said.
We hit the stairwell at a dead run, Mercy still close behind, and found it blocked. A man stood two steps up, broad through the shoulders, gray hair cropped close to his skull. I recognized the fucking bastard too.
“Rainman,” I breathed out softly, my words quivering. The man who’d stood at the edge of the room the first time I ever saw Denton work a buyer, the most dangerous person in any room he occupied. He held a pistol steady in both hands.
Carrie hit him from the side stairwell landing, moving low and mean.
Hawk came in from the other angle a half second later.
Rainman got one round off that punched into the wall a foot from my head, plaster raining down, and then Carrie opened his forearm to the bone with her knife, and his gun clattered down the steps.
Hawk finished it fast, two shots at close range to his head.
Rainman went down against the railing, gray eyes open and fixed on nothing.
Carrie wiped her blade on her thigh, glanced at me, and gave me a short nod.
The stairwell stood open above us, empty now, amber light bleeding down from the landing where the next floor waited. “Top floor,” I said, looking at Antonio. “I’ll take you.”
We didn’t encounter anyone else on our way to the office. Once we reached the door, we stopped.
“Knight says the back stair’s sealed.” Hawk glanced at Tonio. “Sealed it an hour before we ever hit the loading bay. He’s got nowhere left to go but that door. And we know for a fact he didn’t make it out.”
Antonio shrugged. “Then in we go.” He kicked the door open, his gun up and at the ready, Hawk and Carrie followed leaving me and Mercy, who had my back as solidly as I had hers.
Denton stood behind a wide desk with both hands flat on the polished surface.
He was smaller than I remembered. Ten weeks I’d carried that voice around in my skull, low and unbothered, describing me to a room like I was inventory, and here the body attached to it barely came up to Antonio’s chin, soft through the middle, sweat already darkening his collar.
I felt something in my chest settle instead of spike. My nightmare was about to end.
“Antonio.” Denton’s voice came out steady, working hard to stay that way. “We can be reasonable men about this.”
“You’re not a man,” Antonio said.
Denton’s gaze cut to me, to Mercy, and something calculating moved behind them even now, even here.
“I have names,” he said, fast, the words tumbling over each other.
“Accounts. Every route this operation’s ever run through, banks in three countries, I’ll give you the buyer list from tonight, the whole client roster going back four years.
” He reached slowly into his jacket and set a phone on the desk like an offering.
“Everything’s on there. Passwords too. I’ll write them down myself.
” Somehow, he managed to sound like a salesman offering a deal instead of a rat begging for his life.
“Who do you answer to?” Antonio asked.
“There’s a man above me who handles distribution out of Memphis. I’m not sure what his name is, but he contacts me here.” He tapped the phone he’d laid on the desk.
Antonio didn’t look at the phone. He looked at me.
“The night I pulled you out of here,” he said, and his voice had gone quiet in a way I’d only heard once before, “I told you I’d kill every man responsible.
Every buyer, every fucking bastard who ever looked the other way.
” He didn’t move his gun off Denton while he said it.
“None of this is revenge to me, Tessa. This is about me making you a promise and keeping it, no matter what. Do you see what I would do for you and our unborn child?”
“Tonio.” His name was no more than a breath on my lips.
“I don’t want that. I don’t want you to kill for me.
” I heard Denton sigh in relief. Like he thought he’d just gotten off the hook.
“I can kill anyone who needs killing myself.” Denton opened his mouth to speak, but I held out my hand to Mercy and she handed me her gun.
I demonstrated my statement by raising the weapon and shot Denton in the throat.
Antonio picked the phone up off the desk and pocketed it, along with a flash drive from an open drawer.
Then he lifted his chin at Kass. “Take him down to the vault before anything burns. His thumb’ll still work if you hurry.
Take everything to Knight tonight.” From there on out, for the next ten minutes at least, the operation was about cleanup.
Seth still kept the heat off us, but he could only do that so long before he brought the wrong sort of attention.
Outside, the loading bay had gone quiet except for the low idle of vehicles and the murmur of women being walked out in twos and threes, wrapped in emergency blankets or long T-shirts unless they still had their own clothes.
Darby helped get everyone settled while Veda went to get names and emergency contacts.
Two of Knight’s people wheeled a steel server cage out through the roll-up door on a hand truck, headed for the vans.
Mercy walked out under her own power, spine straight, and waved off every hand that reached for her elbow, including mine.
“I’ve got it,” she said, not unkindly, and kept walking toward the vehicles on her own two feet like she’d decided a long time ago she wasn’t going to be carried out of anywhere ever again.
Kass approached me, a grim look on his face. “Iron’s in the wind. Knight can’t even find when he was here.”
Antonio’s jaw worked once. “Fuck.”
“Yeah,” Kass said.
Antonio looked toward the building for a long moment. He didn’t say anything else about it. He turned to the men already moving cans of fuel through the first-floor entrance, and gave a short nod, and they got to work.
We walked out of Enclave éclipse together as the first gray light came up over the roofline, Antonio’s hand found mine somewhere in the dark between the building and the car.
Behind us the building caught fire fast, orange light climbing the frosted glass, smoke rolling black against the paling sky.
Inside the SUV as Kellen drove us back to the Kiss of Death compound, Tonio didn’t say anything.
Neither did I. As he stared out the window, his hand drifted up to where my own hand rested over my flat lower stomach.
I wrapped my other hand around his, and we both wrapped the growing life inside me in as much love as we did protection.
I didn’t know what my future held, but I knew, without a doubt, I wanted this man -- and his child -- in my life. If that meant I picked up a huge extended family along the way? So much the better.