Tat. Tat.Tat.
Hope flew to the ground in front of him, her unicorn landing feet away, her dark brown eyes wide open. King reached for her, but his arms wouldn’t move. His legs wouldn’t cooperate. Searing agony burned through hischest.
He reached his arm out as far as he could and his fingers brushed hers. “Hope.”
His vision dulled as helpless, he watched as his Hope faded from theworld.
Chapter 2
The blazing hotJuly sun beat down on King’s shoulders through the thin material of his black T-shirt. His black tactical pants were set low and even on his lean hips as he braced his feet shoulder-width apart in the packed dirt of the gun range located in the back of their compound. With quick, precise movements, he raised his arms to eye level, thumbed off the safety on his Beretta, and fired off three rounds insuccession.
“Better, brother, but still hitting about two inches to the right.” Diggs, just the same, stood two feet to King’s left. He did that so he’d stay in King’s line of vision, a new habit his teammate had formed while helping King retrain to shootleftie.
As if on cue, a sharp, migraine-like pain stabbed through his right temple, an acute reminder of the reason for his retraining in the first place. John Dawson. His own teammate had shot him at close range, taking out King’s right eye and nearly his life. Absentmindedly he reached up and adjusted his eye patch. “I’m going to kill thatbastard.”
King caught Diggs’s slightwince.
“He was put through the same torture we were, hell, even worse. He died, they overdosed him on theserum.”
Last year, Team Mayhem had all volunteered to go through the secret government project of DNA enhancement, hoping to hone and sharpen their abilities to further assist the country on impossible missions. What they hadn’t signed up for was the life-altering requirement to continually take the doses or die. That and the side effects. Side effects they were still learning to cope with, but with the help of Dr. Melissa Avery, who they’d rescued from the man responsible for the secret project, they were slowly and steadily reining incontrol.
“We all suffered, but we all managed to keep our shit together. Dawson didn’t.” King turned his attention back to the torso-shaped target fifty meters away and blasted off three more rounds, this time purposefully shifting his aim an inch to theleft.
He’d been training daily, hours upon hours, trying to teach his brain to compensate for the loss of vision in his right eye. He’d been born right hand dominant, and never bothered training with his left. The experience was a pain in the ass. Dr. Avery insisted he learn to eat with his left hand, attempt to write with his left hand, do all of his dominant tasks with his left fuckinghand.
And all because his teammate had betrayedhim.
Diggs turned to face him, arms crossed, squared stubborn jaw raised. “He deserves the chance to try to get back to normal. If you’ll remember, the colonel didn’t want to giveusthat chance, but Reaper, our team leader, fought for it because we deserved it. We learned to control our minds and our bodies. He’s one of us, King. A part of ourfamily.”
King lowered his Beretta to his side, unconsciously clicking on the safety as he holstered his weapon and turned to face Diggs. He’d become as good a friend as King would consider anyone, which meant he actually talked to Diggs every now and then. For some reason that King couldn’t fathom, Diggs seemed to have taken him on as his own personal pet project, determined to help him overcome the newly gained disability and return to fully functional, just like he’d been before his blindness. “Dawson stopped being part of the team the minute he tried to killme.”
Diggs’s eyes skated to the left. “I think if he really wanted to kill you, you’d bedead.”
King took a hard step forward, his black boot grinding into the packed dirt. He jerked a finger up to the black eye patch covering his right eye. “If it wasn’t for our enhanced healing capabilities thanks to the serum, Iwouldbe fucking dead.” And sometimes he wished he was. He was self-aware enough to know that his driving force for recovery was pure, unadulteratedrevenge.
Diggs shrugged, turning to face King once more, resignation etched in the deep grooves around his teammate’s eyes. “I understand youranger.”
“Anger?” King saidsoftly.
Diggs continued, ignoring the warning in King’s tone. “And I get that you feel betrayed, but we were all there. We all feelbetrayed.”
King shook his head, fighting the tension winding its way up his spine. “You didn’t see his eyes, Diggs. Dawson. Isn’t. In. There. The man that shot me is not our teammate anymore. He’s a machine, a ruthless, cold killer. And that fucking bastard, General Rainier, has unleashed him on us. And once he’s through with us, Rainier won’t hesitate to use him against anyone who stands in his way. He has to be put down like the rabid dog that he is. And I intend to be the one to put him in theground.”
Diggs blew out a long, harsh breath, shifting his stance to face the target once more. “You might be right, Dawson might be unsalvageable, but I’m not ready to give up on him yet. He wouldn’t give up on us.” The muscles beneath Diggs’s shoulders pulled back and up, so straight that he could lay a board across. “You never give up on family,” Diggs whispered just loud enough for King tohear.
Cold, seething fury settled firmly in King. “He’s notfamily.”
He pivoted to the target, ripped his Beretta from his holster, kicked off the safety, and fired off three rounds. They hit their target, one in the forehead and two in the chest. He holstered his weapon and turned his back on hissuccess.
King didn’t have a family. He had a team, and he’d be willing to lay down his life in the line of fire to protect his brothers, but they weren’t his family. A family was a liability he didn’t want orneed.
* * *
King easedhis truck into a parallel parking spot a couple blocks behind Diggs. He’d been careful to keep his distance as he followed his teammate, not surprised in the least when he’d turned in the direction of Dawson’s sister’s town. Diggs had left the reservation without warning after their target practice, and he’d had a hunch that he was looking for Dawson. Probably hoping to pull some John Wayne move and try to save the fucker before King could find him first. Why Diggs thought he needed to ride in on a white horse with a white hat and try to save the unsaveable, King couldn’t fathom. And why the rest of the team felt the same way was beyond hisgrasp.
King sat in his truck, leaning back in his seat with this visor lowered, watching as Diggs slowly walked down the sidewalk in front of a handful of mom-and-pop shops. Dawson’s sister’s little brick house sat in the middle of the street. It was definitely not the kind of place anyone would go looking for a cold-blooded killer. A population of 500, with one small school, a library, a grocery store, and a gas station making up its main employment, this was the kind of place people went to retire or they just neverleft.
The perfect place to hideout.
