Reece.
That was where the image on the holoscreen was coming from, beamed directly from the augmetic implants in the former Merc’s eyes. He was standing directly behind Slaynnow. Fairchild watched as her friend and lover extended one muscular arm and tapped the weapons dealer on the shoulder. The man spun, a look of cold horror in his circled eyes. Lightning flashed, and in that momentary brightness, Fairchild could see that Slayn’s once perfect tan had gone a ghostly shade of pale.
He tried to fire the gun at Reece, but it was already out of ammunition. All that issued from the weapon was an impotent click as the striker fell on an empty chamber. Reece grabbed the man’s wrist and squeezed, and the bones issued a click of their own. More of a crunch, actually. Slayn’s mouth opened in a silent scream as lightning flared a second time.
After a moment, the scream stopped being silent. His shrieks of pain poured through the speakers, filling the small room where Fairchild stood watching.
“Shit,” chuckled Nash, who was standing behind her left shoulder. “Noisy little fucker, isn’t he?”
“Would you like me to turn it down?” asked Dutton. He was standing on the other side.
“No,” Fairchild answered. “I want you to turn it up.”
So he did.
As Mercs, they’d all been trained to eliminate their targets quickly and silently, but there was no one else on the planet to hear Slayn’s cries—no guards or servants—so Reece took his sweet time with it, just as Fairchild had asked him to. After a moment, Slayn’s screams went silent again as Reece wrapped his fingers around the man’s throat and started to squeeze.
Before the holoscreen, Fairchild’s own hands clenched into hard fists.
Once, she had dreamed about killing Slayn herself. There was a time when she would have accepted nothing less. But things were different now. As far as Fairchild was concerned, Reece’s hands were her hands. His eyes were her eyes. His heart was hers too. The same was true for Nash and Dutton. Over the past nine months, their four-way bond had only grown stronger, just as the child was growing stronger in Fairchild’s womb. They weren’t just teammates anymore. They were a family. A real family.
The baby was due any day now. If it was a boy, Fairchild planned to name him Dane, after her old team leader. If it was a girl, she planned to name her any damn thing but Rook.
Whatever it turned out to be, Fairchild planned to love the child with every atom of her being.
And that was going to be a lot easier now that she had finally gotten rid of the last, lingering bit of hatred in her soul. She had Reece to thank for that. He wasn’t just the one ending Slayn’s life. He’d figured out where the bastard was hiding too. Or anyway, he’d figured out how to figure it out.
The trick had been Rook’s memory implant. Every Merc had one. A small sphere of metal embedded in the brain. The device stored every piece of data that passed through a Merc’s neurons. It was also engineered to withstand a good bit of damage. Fairchild had blown Rook’s head to smithereens, but the implant had survived, and Reece had found it lying on the floor of the breeding chamber. He’d had the foresight not to include that in his debriefing report. A premonition, perhaps, of how things would go with the Guild.
It had taken a hot minute to actually crack the device’s encryption, but they’d had a bit of help from Reece’s folks.
On the holoscreen, Slayn’s face was no longer pale. It had turned a deep shade of purple. One eyeball had popped from its socket, and now it dangled on the man’s cheek, hanging by a bloody thread. The other eye was still peering out of his face with a look of abject terror. Fairchild watched with cold satisfaction as the life slowly faded from it.
When it was done, Reece dropped the dead man to the floor, the way one might drop a particularly noisome sack of garbage.
“Target eliminated,” he said.
“Copy that,” Fairchild said into the microphone on the wall, which was transmitting her voice into the earpiece Reece was wearing. “Proceeding with exfil.”
“Take your time,” Reece said calmly.
He was heading for Slayn’s wet bar, where a decanter of wine was waiting. By the flickering lightning, Fairchild could see there was just enough left for one glass.
She turned. Her other two mates were still standing right behind her—steadfast Dutton and cocksure Nash. Most of the time, they were the ones in control, but they were letting her take the lead on this mission. They waited for her to exit the door at the back of the room, then they followed her out into the corridor beyond.
The ship was big—bigger even thanthe Allura. It was so big, in fact, that it was able to hold Fairchild and her teammates’ much smaller warbird in its rear docking bay. But that wasn’t the direction Fairchild headed now. She went, instead, to the bridge.
The pilot was there waiting for her—a small, tough-looking woman with steel-gray hair and a tattooed serpent windingaround her upper arm. Her name was Rona Gideon, and she just happened to be Reece’s mother.
“Your son’s ready for a pickup,” Fairchild informed her.
“Took him long enough,” Rona said with a chuckle, but Fairchild could hear the motherly pride beneath the surface of her voice.
Fairchild had always assumed Reece’s toughness came from his three fathers, who were Mercs. But after meeting Rona, she started to think he took after his mother. The woman wasn’t an official member of the Guild, but she had grit to spare. Plus, she was a damn good pilot to boot.
Not that Reece’s dads were slouches. One of them was currently sitting in the copilot’s seat, and the other two were seated at the back of the cockpit. They were three of the meanest-looking Mercs Fairchild had ever seen, and it was obvious they were highly protective of their woman. Fairchild and her two guys joined them in the passenger seats as Rona worked the controls.
The ship—Talionis-2as it was called—was currently in submersible mode, and the view beyond the windscreen was nothing but dark, churning water. They had chosen an underwater approach as a means of avoiding the terrestrial sensors Slayn had set up around the villa. A torpedo-like swimmer delivery vehicle had gotten Reece within a few hundred meters of the shore. He had swum the rest of the way. A small but potent EMP device had been used to fry Slayn’s electronics. After that, Reece’s hands had done the rest.
