24. Chapter 21 - Kellan
" I have another update, and you're not going to like it."
Trish, to her credit, stared down her angular nose at me and didn't even blink. My updates were usually a breakdown of Antonio's latest drug shipments, or information on a new weapon supplier. She had long since been desensitized to the depths of my father's depravity.
She knew about the gang war and Alvarez's determination to take down Antonio's territory, and the retaliation efforts we’d led to wage bloody war against the crews on the ground. My brothers had taken out four more sites in the last several weeks, decimating Alvarez’s gang presence in Sequoia. We couldn’t do anything about his locations in other states, but Antonio didn’t care about those operations, anyway.
If Alvarez was no longer encroaching on his business, the leader of the Carlos Cartel would let him live—until he made my brothers make an example of him when the timing was right. The two rivals had maintained their separate operations for decades. This was the year Alvarez had started pissing in our backyard.
Where my father didn’t care, we’d taken up the mantle; Lauchlan and Blackbird had successfully hacked into all of Alvarez’s major systems—bank accounts, private chat links with evidence of his underground behavior—the whole gambit. That information would be leaking to the world in the next hour. Alvarez was about to have one hell of a lawsuit on his hands, with his fortune dismantled in minutes.
The worm or spoof or rootkit—fuck, hell if I knew, I wasn’t a hacker—would siphon most of his accessible holdings to private accounts worldwide, before being rerouted as anonymous donations to over a thousand women and children's organizations internationally; Killer’s directions, and now that I knew the history behind her hurt, I didn’t blame her. Blackbird had already parsed through some of the incriminating encrypted text messages and would upload them to national news channels at the same time.
Today, Alvarez was royally fucked. And Trish-the-Fish was going to be royally pissed I'd waited this long to tell her. The last thing I needed right now was to be the next victim on her chopping block.
"And?" she prompted when I failed to speak up.
We were back in the makeshift office again, seated on dented metal chairs around the dinged-up coffee table in the center of the room. Maverick, my number two, was following up on another lead for the international theft ring. I'd le t that ball drop these past few weeks; my attention tuned into the other massive shitstorm on my docket.
Now Alvarez had been taken care of, my sights were quickly shifting to my other family obligation. We were in the last week of January. My debt to my father—the one I’d accumulated by simply being born into this fucked up family—was about to be called in.
“Marco Alvarez is about to be exposed to the world,” I said, then laid out the stakes in tidy piles for her to sift through. “You’re going to want some agents on standby in the next couple of hours.”
Slivered, severe brows rose at that statement. I summarized everything for her; leaving out names and accomplices, and spun the story to look like the Carlos Cartel had arranged the cyber hit. It wasn’t a stretch of the imagination, and I was determined to leave Hillary’s involvement entirely out of it. Blackbird would remain anonymous too—she was a useful card to play, and I planned to keep her in my back pocket.
“And you didn’t think I deserved a head’s up on any of this?” Trish barked when I finished. Her face had collapsed into a disapproving frown. She didn’t wait for me to answer, choosing instead to grab her phone and deliver orders for several of my colleagues to return to base.
“I made a judgment call.” I shrugged unapologetically as I faced her ire head on. “I need to be several steps removed from this, and the media shit storm is going to be a frenzy. It won’t matter how the information came out—he’s guilty, and the evidence shows that.”
“You know damn well it matters!” she hissed, her eyes flashing with a healthy dose of anger, tempered with a slip of fear. “They committed a hundred felonies to get that information!”
“So, what!?” My voice rose, hovering on shouting; I took a calming breath and tried again. “Antonio doesn’t give a fuck if he committed a thousand felonies. You’re telling me that o ur justice system is going to care more about the method than the madness? Human trafficking is one of the worst crimes on earth. That’s what we should talk about!”
Years of polished frown lines forced her face into a heavy scowl.
“What sort of justice system gives a sixteen-year-old child soldier an ultimatum to work for them, Kellan? Are we talking about that justice system right now?”
I scrubbed my palms down my cheeks and through the scruff of my beard, not liking where this conversation was going. Sagging into the creaking chair, I released a long sigh and met her eyes. All colour leached from them the longer we stared at each other.
“I don’t know, Trish. That ultimatum gave a young man the possibility of a conscience and an entire world outside of gang doctrine. Sometimes, evil deeds have good consequences.”
She remained silent and stared through me, as if searching for the answers to life’s secrets under the surface of my skin.
“Do you remember what I said to you the day I found you, Kellan?”
The day she found me. The day my father had sent me to kill her as my initiation into the position of my birthright. She’d been a junior agent back then; a fierce fighter who’d thwarted my advantage by punching me in the temple and whipping out the second gun at her ankle—the illegal weapon agents weren’t supposed to carry.
We’d been caught in a stand-off—my handgun to her head, her tiny pocket pistol trained on my crotch. Perhaps the most terrifying threat to a teenage kid who’d recently discovered his cock was to permanently mangle his dick.
Maybe she saw the war within me; I wasn’t thirsty to take her life like some of the younger gangbangers in Antonio’s training ranks. I hadn’t wanted this life at all.
She took a chance that day, lowering her gun while quoting a phrase, her eyes never leaving mine as she dropped it to the ground. It was the day she’d saved me from a completely scorched heart, but she hadn’t been quick enough to remove its discolored tarnish.
Some days, I didn’t know whether to be grateful or to curse her interference to the high heavens—those days I ached to carry out my father’s bidding without the burden of a heart to feel.
“ The greatest good is often born of the greatest evil ,” I quoted, rolling my eyes up to the drop-tile ceiling. “You quoted King Lear to a teenage Cartel hit man.”
“I did,” she agreed, and the tiniest shadow of a smile traced her lips. “And that teenage hit man knew the quote. So what does that tell you?”
“My father valued an English education?” I snarked.
“We only remember quotes that resonate ,” she emphasized, her stern gaze that of an annoyed parent. “Why would a shit-for-brains gun-slinging teenager know and remember that quote? I had a choice to offer you something outside of a bullet to the brain, and I fought for you. You had to choose to fight for yourself.”
That assertion sat like a stone in my gut. I didn’t feel like I’d fought for myself. My entire existence was purgatory; torn between two worlds where ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ often got confused, where one step forward was always two steps back.
I fought to be redeemed when I was irredeemable.
“And what are we fighting for now, Trish?” I challenged, the pain of those memories creeping up my spine like the icy fingertips of death. “Who are we fighting for? I play so many sides of the fence; I don’t even know anymore.”
Her weighted stare held a thousand words she wanted to say, but wouldn’t. Trish wasn’t big on platitudes or reassurances. She practiced tough love and trial by fire. Even though I knew she would have my back in every circum stance, she wouldn’t be doling out warm praise or pats on the back.
“Trust me when I tell you that your presence here has saved a hell of a lot more lives than you would have killed as Antonio’s puppet.”
She stood and walked to the dingy window to look down.
I followed her over, taking in the gray carpet of cars and the dots of people, none of them even aware their world and everyone in it could collapse at any moment.
“He’s ready to hand over the flesh trade,” I admitted, finally coming to terms with the inevitable ask; I wouldn’t be able to follow through with it, I realized I didn’t have enough protection on either side of my fence to walk away from Antonio’s desires.
I didn’t want to disappear from the world like Rodriguez, or have Hillary try to jump in to save me from a world I couldn’t be saved from. But I wasn’t seeing another option—that didn’t end with my head on a spike—so I’d serve as the proper example to anyone else that dared to defy Antonio Carlos.
Her reply was quiet, but a challenging question, as if I somehow had the answer and just hadn’t said it out loud yet.
“And what do you suggest we do about that?”
Before I could respond, Maverick strode through the glass doors, a cocky grin on his face.
“I think I found our perp!” he exclaimed, waving a paper printout in the air. “Well, one of them, anyway. This organization is huge . Their primary base is out of Europe, but they have separate operations across four continents.”
I guessed he was reviewing all of this for Trish’s benefit, since yes, I knew full well how big The Six was, given it was my file. Still, I hadn’t figured out who the perp was, so I should be more grateful my chief agent had found a lead we could actually use.
“ We identified a liaison out of London,” he continued excitedly, holding the piece of paper up as if it was the holy grail. “A Bellamy Graves. Hacked his phone calls and traced the phone numbers back to several sites across Greater Europe and North America, but this one was local. Got a picture of the perp off a sat using his GPS location.”
He handed me the grainy gray-scale picture and my heart crystallized to ice in my chest.
The man was dressed in a tight, tailored jacket, holding a cell phone up to his ear while he checked his watch outside of a popular coffee shop in the downtown core.
Fucking Lauchlan O’Donnell was the perp? He was the one playing my Killer as the patsy all this time?
The sneaky, lying, dead mother fucker.
I forced the anger out of my voice and swallowed down the heat in my blood. “I’ve never seen him before. But this is great work, Mav. See what else you can find out about it.”
Trish cocked her head in question. She would know me well enough she could probably see I was hiding something. But now wasn’t the time to admit the man I’d been forced to spend time with—a man I’d fucked more than once—was the very reason I’d been called to Carlisle in the first place.
“I need to get moving.” I shot Trish a meaningful look. “The feeds go live at three—you’ll want to be ready.”
“Yeah, thanks for the”—she glanced at her watch–“one hour’s notice.” Her tone was sharp, as if remembering she was pissed at me for withholding the information. “Maverick, I need you on another assignment for the rest of the day. You”—she pointed at me with a blunt nail—“go take care of your shit, and we’ll talk later.”
Nodding respectfully, I brusquely stalked out of the office and down to my car, ready to set things right. I knew where the fucker was holed up today—the three of them were working from Hillary’s condo, waiting for the metaphorical shoe to drop on Alvarez’s ass.
I s eethed the entire way there. The anger in my veins bubbled to a fiery rage as I considered every fucking moment since I’d met the man masquerading as a Skittle-loving jokester when he was actually casing Hillary for all she was worth. He knew her deepest secrets. He’d watched her kill someone.
He'd wormed his way under all our skins with his irritating positivity and charming fucking smiles, and now he had exactly the leverage to threaten Hillary.
I slammed my palm against the steering wheel, the rage spilling out in ravenous waves. Mother fucker .
I stormed into the building, vibrating with vicious energy, jiggling my leg as I waited impatiently for the elevator up to her penthouse. I had started to consider taking the stairs up the thirty flights to work out a fraction of my wrath when the doors opened up with a ding.
Suddenly, every little quirk and ability of Lauchlan made sense. How he could resist my torture session, the way he noticed the tiniest of details, his connections all over a state he’d never been to before… micro details I missed because I hadn’t connected them together.
Either he was very good at his job, or I was seriously fucking stupid. I had a feeling it was a combination of the two.
“Hey, Viking,” Hillary greeted with an anxious smile as I stalked into the living room. Her smile faltered at the no doubt thunderous look on my face. “What’s wro—”
I yanked the sniveling fuck of an Irishman from his lazy perch on the couch and punched him in the face. My fist crunched against bone as his nose broke into smaller, less-smug pieces.
“Whart du farck!”
Blood poured down his face and into his shirt. I glared at him through slitted eyes, nowhere near done with defending my Killer’s hono r.
“Kellan!” Hillary shrieked, her tiny hands tearing at my biceps to pull me away from punching him again. Aaron was at my other side, hovering, waiting to see if he needed to assist Hillary, or assist me.
“He’s playing you,” I growled, not bothering to turn to her with the explanation. “He’s fucking playing you, and playing us. Do you know what happens to liars, O’Donnell?”
I stepped back into his personal space, overpowering him with my bulk easily. He stepped back to get away and fell into the couch cushion behind him, completely trapped and perfectly positioned to take another punch to the face.
“Me!” Lucky exclaimed, his hands cradling his mangled nose. “Yurf a fraghen FBI!”
I stilled, my clenched fist halfway in the air at that accusation.
“And how did you fucking know that ?” I spat, ready to pummel his pretty pout into a mess of bloodied mashed potatoes.
“Kellan!” Hillary repeated forcefully, catching my arm with a tight hold of her own. “I know. I’ve always known. Lucky and I have been playing a little game.”
My furious stare turned to her, disbelief briefly softening the rage coursing through my muscles. “Someone explain before I kill him.”
“I’ve known Lucky’s been trying to con me from the beginning.” She shrugged, as if playing footsies with criminals was a part of her daily routine. “But he didn’t know that I knew, and when I found out what he was after, I gave him the chance to walk away, or stay on board. He stayed.”
“And why wasn’t I aware of this?” I demanded through gritted teeth, the need to punch something still rioting through me.
“Hasn’t been a whole lot of time for a debrief, Viking,” she explained cautiously, another hand coming up to my back in an attempt at a soothing stroke. “He was the lesser demon of all our demons right now. And he’s the cutest of the bunch, though his face might not be as pretty anymore.”
She swung her head around to examine my victim’s face, scrunching her nose up at the swelling already filling out his shattered nose and cheeks.
“Yeah, you’re no longer the prettiest, Lucky.” She tsked, as if this revelation was a joke to her. “Guess you should have fessed up to Kellan before now.”
“Me?” Lauchlan exclaimed, his voice a little less muffled as he pinched his nose to stop the bleeding. “Yourf a fecking double agent. Did youf tell this lot that?” He swung a hand up toward Aaron and Hillary.
“We knew this, Irishman,” Aaron stoically announced. “You are the last to know.”
“Well, I guess we’re all in the know now.” His slitted green eyes fell on Hillary. “Am I actually a part of the club now, or is Conan going to punch me again?”
“I’m going to punch you again,” I answered with a sucker punch to the diaphragm, knocking the breath from his lungs. He wheezed and clutched his stomach, causing more blood to rush down his face and soak into his shirt.
I uncurled my fists and crossed my arms against my chest in satisfaction. I wasn’t done with the fucker, not nearly. But knowing he hadn’t actually hurt my Killer and she’d been aware of his motives this entire time made me hate him a little less.
Rodriguez left the room and returned with a warm cloth, handing it to the bleeding sap, who accepted it with a grateful grimace. I got comfortable on the opposite couch and turned the television on; we all settled in for the news.
Hillary sat next to me, with Aaron on her opposite side. Lauchlan stayed as far away from me as possible on the far side of the room, nursing his wounds as if he was near death.
Good fucking riddance.
Rod riguez caught my eye over Hillary’s nestled head as we waited in stilted silence for the broadcast, his expression one of quiet solidarity.
The threesome we’d shared the other evening had caught me by surprise; Rodriguez wasn’t a man I’d ever pictured myself with, let alone with Killer writhing between us, and yet, the chemistry had been fucking explosive. With everything else on our plate, I hadn’t stopped to consider what it actually meant, but the heated, appraising stare he was shooting at me told me it was a moment that might bear repeating.
“Breaking news,” the Channel 9 announcer declared, forcing me to face the screen. “Marco Alvarez, President and CEO of Alvarez International, a subsidiary of Predrolas Oil I’d have preferred a takedown by bloody force, but this was the best we’d get given the circumstances.
Squeezing Hillary’s shoulder, I turned to look at my cohorts in the room—even the fucker with the Rudolf nose. “This isn’t even close to being over. We need to be prepared for any retaliation.”
“We’ll be ready,” my Killer assured me, a grim smile and steely resolve creeping across her features. “Alvarez is tumbling down.”
Her blue eyes shone at me, a cocktail of determination and malice.
“Next stop, Antonio.”