Quest
“Everybody dies,” I said.
“Even the grandmother?” Cannon asked.
I looked at him. Those blue-green eyes staring back at me, the same eyes my daughter had.
When all of this was over I was going to confirm what I already knew in my gut, that Vivica lied about my paternity.
Mehar didn’t cheat on me. She wasn’t those other bitches.
She would never do that to me or to our daughter.
I knew that. But I needed the proof about Vivica, so I could bury the doubt for good.
That was later though. Right now I had a compound to hit.
“The grandmother. The cousins. Everybody,” I said. “I don’t want a single person with that last name left alive to wake up one morning feeling vengeful. I tried playing nice. I let LaLa and Paco walk and look where that got me. I’m done leaving loose ends.”
“You cold. I like dis nigga!” Riot said, reaching over to dap me up.
“Playing nice is what got me here.” I could feel the heat building in my chest as I talked, that same pressure that hit me every time I thought about Aziza.
“Me and Mehar had the perfect pregnancy going. She was eating clean, doing her breathing exercises, working out with a trainer. We were ready. And these people sabotaged our plane, stranded us on an island for three weeks, and forced my daughter into the world two months early hooked up to machines.” I paused because if I didn’t I was gonna put my fist through the table.
“Every single person in that house is gonna feel what I’ve been feeling. ”
“I ain’t mad at that,” Creed said from behind the laptop. He tapped a few keys, zoomed into the drone footage, and turned the screen so everyone could see. “So here’s how we execute.”
He pointed at the compound layout while everybody gathered around the table.
Prime stood to my left with his arms crossed, already studying the entry points before Creed said a word.
Justice was to my right taking mental notes.
Cannon, Riot, and three of Prime’s mercenaries filled out the rest of the circle.
“Compound sits on four acres with tree cover on three sides,” Creed started.
“Main house here at the center, detached garage to the east, guard station at the front gate. One road in, one road out. They got a perimeter patrol running two-man teams on ninety-minute rotations, but based on seventy-two hours of drone surveillance, these boys are sloppy. They smoke on patrol, they sit down, they check their phones. These ain’t trained soldiers.
These are cartel employees who haven’t been paid in two weeks. ”
“Entry points?” Prime asked.
“Three. Main gate here, but that’s where they’ll expect us.
East side of the property has a section of fence that backs up to the tree line, no cameras, no motion sensors.
That’s our primary entry. West side has a drainage culvert that runs under the fence, tight but passable for one or two at a time.
That’s the secondary. We come from two directions at once and they won’t know which way to point their guns. ”
“What about the garage?” Justice asked.
“Thermal shows two vehicles inside. If Rodrigo tries to run, that’s where he goes. I want somebody on that garage before we breach the house. Cannon, that’s you.”
Cannon nodded once.
“Prime, you and the mercs take the east entry. Quiet approach through the tree line, neutralize the patrol team on that side, then breach through the back of the main house. Quest and Justice, you come through the west with Riot. The drainage ditch puts you on the south side of the property with a clear line to the front entrance. We hit both sides at the same time. Coordinated breach. Nobody inside gets time to organize.”
“Comms?” Prime asked.
“Encrypted radios. Channel four. Check in before breach, check in after. If anybody goes silent for more than two minutes, we assume the worst and adjust.”
Creed closed the laptop and looked around the room. “This needs to be surgical. The property is rural but it ain’t remote. Houses within a mile. Suppressed weapons only. No explosives. We go in clean and we come out clean. By morning this compound is empty and the Rios name is history.”
Nobody had questions because there was nothing to question. The plan was tight. The intel was solid. And every man in this room had a reason to be here that went beyond money or loyalty. This was personal for all of us in different ways.
· · ·
We geared up in silence. Prime moved through his routine with the calm efficiency of a man who’d done this more times than anyone in the room could count.
Checking the suppressor on his Sig, loading magazines with his thumb moving in a steady rhythm, adjusting his vest straps without looking down.
He’d been built for this since before any of us understood what that meant.
Justice was quieter. Slower. He loaded his weapon carefully, deliberately, like a man who was still getting used to the weight of what these tools could do.
Six months ago he would’ve been in the car running logistics while Prime and I handled the wet work.
Tonight he was strapping on a vest, checking a chamber.
I could see in his face that the man who walked out of this warehouse wasn’t gonna be the same one who walked in.
That was the cost of this life. Every door you walked through changed you and some of those doors only swung one way.
The Kings moved like a unit. Creed, Riot, and Cannon had clearly done this together before, each one occupying their own space, handling their own weapons, communicating with looks instead of words.
Riot cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders like he was warming up for a pickup game instead of a raid on a cartel compound.
Cannon was still and focused, already in whatever zone he went to before the violence started.
I checked my own vest. Tightened the straps. Loaded two magazines and slid one into the Glock. Racked the slide and felt the click travel up my arm.
I thought about Aziza. About her little fists curled up by her face while she slept in the incubator.
About the tubes, the monitors and the soft beeping that had become the soundtrack of my life.
I thought about Mehar on that island, seven months pregnant, starving, carrying our daughter through a hurricane.
I thought about the operating room I couldn’t enter and the hallway floor I sat on and the doctor who told me they took her uterus to save her life.
Every person in that compound was responsible for those moments. Maybe not directly. Maybe they never touched a wrench or climbed on a plane. But they carried the name and they benefited from the money and they slept under the same roof as the men who tried to kill my family. That was enough.
Prime looked at me from across the warehouse. “You ready?”
“Been ready.”
“Then let’s go end this.”
We moved toward the vehicles in the dark, nine men strapped and vested, engines turning over one by one. The Manassas compound was forty-five minutes south. Rodrigo and Gabriel and everyone else inside those walls had less than an hour left on this earth and they didn’t even know it.
I climbed into the passenger seat next to Justice and closed the door. He started the engine and pulled out of the warehouse lot without turning on the headlights.
Nobody spoke. There was nothing left to say.