“Deserve what?”
“What I have to give.”
“How can you be so sure?” I know who you are, she wanted to say. I know about the Sultans. I know you’ve done bad things, but so have I. Maybe we both deserve a second chance.
“I…gotta go,” he said, putting down his bottle with a final thunk, footsteps pounding down her hall and out the front door with depressing finality.
George considered getting up, considered running after him. But she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, because he had to want to stay.
Her gaze landed on Leonard, who, offended, licked his paws on Andrew’s recently evacuated seat cushion. You couldn’t force an animal to stick around when he didn’t want to—she knew that. Some creatures, like Leonard, you couldn’t even cajole.
She knew it, but she didn’t like it.
In the distance, a vehicle started up and rumbled off down the road toward town, echoed by the hum of thunder from over the mountains. Would it just effing storm already? George looked down at her plate, where half of an unappetizing fish sat congealed in the hardened butter sauce she’d restarted three times. On the table beside her elbow, the buzzer sounded, a perfect end to this ridiculous parody of a date she should never have embarked on to begin with.
OceanofPDF.com
10
By the time the sun came up, Clay needed to run, to feel the pain in his thigh, the ache in his back, the rough burn of his knuckles and eyelids, the sharper torment of his blistering chest. Distraction was what he needed.
So, up and out, ignoring the gaudy sunrise, the moist air and dry ground, and onto Blackwood’s sleepy streets, pounding the pavement, breathing, aching, wanting.
I want.
What the fuck did he want?
It wasn’t about what he wanted, was it? It was about need. Necessity.
Get rid of the ink. Go to court. End of story.
He pushed himself harder as he approached the bottom of the slope he’d only driven up thus far, then cranked the pace and forced himself to jog the steep drive. Up, up, up, above all the shit, the morass of his life, the memories.
He made it to the top of the mountain, fueled by self-recrimination, and collapsed on the outcropping of rock overlooking Blackwood and the foothills beyond—all the way to Charlottesville, which was nothing but a pinkish haze on the horizon.
He should go. Find someplace else to hide out—because he couldn’t even trust his own team anymore. Because this case was huge—weapons, drugs, prostitution, racketeering. With every possible state and federal agency involved now, it was so much bigger than he was. But Clay had been the one to break it wide open—mostly due to his fearlessness in the face of odds that had seemed truly impossible. He’d cared more about taking them down than his personal safety; his very existence was just that.
He closed his eyes, remembering how he’d felt the day he’d finally been patched in to the Sultans, the way Handles had thrown that heavy arm around his shoulders. It’d been so good, on so many levels. Being accepted, after so many months of groveling, brought in, loved…a fucking brother.
“One of us now, kid,” Handles had said, his voice full of pride. And fuck if Clay hadn’t felt it.
And how messed up was that? To be an agent, to be undercover, to believe in what you were doing in the deepest, darkest part of your soul, but in order to get there—Jesus, he’d become one of them at heart.
He’d loved those dudes. His brothers.
And now, Bread was dead.
Bread, who’d been somewhere on the compound the day all the shit had gone down. Bread, finally, had saved his life, once all hell broke loose. Jesus, Bread had risked it all that night when he’d bludgeoned Handles over the head and hauled Clay from the room, out the back door, and away from the firefight.
And me, a chunk of my leg shot out and two little, round scars in my back. Put there by Handles himself. Dear old Dad.
Get your goddamned story straight. He kept hearing the lawyer’s words. Straight? What the hell was straight?
The confusion of rights and wrongs, friends, enemies…that was what made Hecker’s directive so difficult to follow.
Stay alive was not an order he’d been given. Not directly by Hecker or McGovern or anyone else, but with Bread dead, he was all they had left. They needed him to make this case, to make the charges stick, because without him, all they had were random accusations of murder, torture, and gun and drug offenses with a few recordings to back them up.
He’d gotten into the Sultans, had managed to get a colleague in after him, and now…now Bread was gone and Clay was alone and he wasn’t safe anywhere.
