“Tell me again why you had a crossbow in your luggage?”
“It’s called planning for contingencies,” he said, but Alex was Alex. Nothing was ever as obvious—or as easy—as it should have been.
“But”—she made quote marks with her fingers—“crossbow contingencies. What are those, exactly?”
“Give it to me. I’ll do it.” He held a hand out, but she jerked back.
“No. I like it. I’ve never had a travel crossbow before.”
“You still don’t have a travel crossbow.Ihave a travel crossbow. And I can take it—”
But Alex was already rising to a knee, taking aim, and firing into the night. The line unfurled, disappearing into the darkness between the peak where they were currently lying and the wall of the compound that was nestled into the cliffs a hundred yards away.
“If this has all been an elaborate ruse to throw me into a volcano, then I honestly have to applaud the commitment,” she said as they both peeked over the edge of the cliff.
“That’s not a volcano. I don’t think.”
“Oh, but the fall would kill me.” She sounded almost upbeat about it.
“There is that,” he said.
The compound hadn’t changed that much in the eight years since they’d last seen it. It was still nestled into the cliffs overlooking the sea. Still isolated and angry, with its stone facade and narrow road that zigzagged up the steep incline—the only way in. Or out.
Almost.
He pointed to the helicopter that was sitting on the landing pad that jutted out from the side of the mountain. “Our guy is home this time.”
“He is.”
“So I guess we should do this... now?” King hated the uptick in his voice—the uncertainty in his gut. It had to be this way, he told himself. And he had to do it with her, but he hated that, too, and he didn’t stop and let himself think about the fact that he didn’t want to work with her and he didn’t want to work without her. He didn’t want to be there. And he didn’t want to be anywhere else.
“King?” Alex was saying. “You got weird.”
“I was just thinking...”
“I told you, you don’t need to redo the math. I checked it. The math is—”
“What if we stopped?”
“What?” Now she sounded confused.
“We’ve done a lot of bad things to a lot of bad people, Sterling. And now one of them wants us dead. So forgive me if I want to take a minute and imagine a future where we stopped looking for trouble.”
“We did that. Then trouble came looking for us, remember?” Of course he remembered. “And they don’t want usdead,” she went on. “Dead would have been over in Vegas. Dead would be done by now.”
“You’re right.”
“Someone wants usalive, which is a whole lot scarier.”
“I know.”
“Someone from our shared and terrible past wantssomething, and I intend to find out what it is from the best lead we have.”
King blew out a tired breath. “He’s theonlylead we have.”
“Exactly.” She looked triumphant. And so beautiful, it hurt. Themoon was full and the stars were bright and there was no sound but birdsong and crashing waves and the little voice in the back of King’s head, telling him he was out of other options.
“Besides, we were good at being bad. Weren’t we?” she asked over her shoulder.
