My breath stops when Christina’s face fills the screen. It’s a surveillance photo of her walking around town. Her hair is pulled back, and sunglasses cover half of her face. She’s holding Katie on her hip. Only, my daughter is a lot younger in this picture. Both of them look tired. Christina looks haunted.
The second image shows Christina alone, walking through a parking lot with a grocery bag. The third shows her car. The fourth shows a blown-up view of her license plate. This is clearly his documentation of his stalking.
Striker clicks into another folder and opens the document inside. His eyes lift to glare at Neal. “You have a contract with REACH. It authorizes you to be paid for field operations under a discretionary budget. It includes payout tiers, completion clauses, and travel compensation. At the bottom is a sealed directive. It says ‘secure the stolen flash drive and deliver the subject alive’. You wanna tell me about that?”
“How much did this bastard stand to make from abducting my old lady for REACH?” I mutter.
“Her bounty was close to a million dollars if he got the flash drive and brought her in alive.”
Mica whistles, “That’s high enough to keep him engaged for several years.”
Onyx adds, “Men kill for far less.”
Neal speaks up for himself. “I’m a bounty hunter, not a contract killer.”
Striker scrolls down and mumbles, “That’s not quite true, now is it, Neal?”
“What else did you find, Striker?” I ask, needing to know it all.
“Christina isn’t the only job he’s done for REACH. He’s contracted with them for coming up on ten years. There’s a file on each employee. Would you like to know what Neal’s file says?”
“Spill it,” I tell him.
“Neal has performed twenty-seven jobs for REACH. Seven of them were hits. So, it looks like he is in fact a contract killer.”
Suddenly, everything makes complete sense. “It’s not just the money. Christina accidentally took personnel files listing everyone’s dirty deeds and what they got paid to do for each of them.”
Neal glances away before murmuring, “REACH keeps meticulous records because they use them to blackmail employees into doing what they want.”
I look at Neal and take one step closer. He flinches so hard the chair jerks under him.
“You hunted a woman with a child.” My voice sounds calm, but I can hear a hard, deadly edge to it. “You had her looking over her shoulder every day. You followed her into every state she tried to hide in.”
He tries to speak but his lips barely move.
I lean in, my hands braced on the arms of his chair. “You will tell me everything. Every name. Every directive. Every contact. Because I’m going to rip those fuckers apart.”
Onyx steadies himself beside me. Mica stands at the door with arms crossed. There is no doubt about what’s going to happen. We won’t hesitate to give this fucker a dirt nap.
I straighten and look back at the image of Christina on Striker’s laptop. The ache in my chest is so raw and deep.
Onyx knots a strip of black cloth around Neal’s mouth, tightening it at the base of his skull until the man lets out a strained breath. Then he pulls the baggy hood of his hoodie over his head to make it less obvious that we’ve gagged him. Onyx zip-ties Neal’s hands together in front of him and throws a jacket over his hands so no one can see he’s bound. We haul him out of the chair and drag him down the narrow stairs.
The prospects already have the van door open. One of them grips Neal’s shoulder while the other positions himself inside, ready to manage the bastard during the ride if he gets rowdy. I don’t speak because there is nothing left to say at this point. We are all kind of lost in our own thoughts.
I climb onto my bike, and the others follow suit. Our engines fire to life one after another.
The images on Neal’s screen play on an endless loop in my head. Christina with Katie on her hip, the astronomical bounty amount, the casual way an international corporation put a bounty on her head, like they had a right to. It all stokes my anger to biblical proportions.
The knowledge that she ran from all of that alone for years. When I think about how hard Christina fought these last few years to survive and keep my daughter safe, my fury and fear wrap around each other until I can no longer tell one from the other. They could have been captured or killed so easily.
***
The ride is several hours long and it’s late afternoon when we get home. By the time the clubhouse comes into view, I need to see Christina, to tell her I understand what she went through, why it was hard to trust even me and that I love her. I need to hold my daughter close and thank God that she survived.
When we reach the gate, two prospects slide it open and wave us through.
Once the gate closes, I park in my spot right in front of the clubhouse and head straight for the family suites. I take the stairs two at a time. I hear brothers moving behind me as they haul Neal towards the basement holding room. Their voices fade when I turn the corner into the hallway.
