“Like you hung the moon and stars in the sky.”
“What if I’m not strong enough to deal with what he does?”
“Vaughn is more than his job. He’s the man who hunted Bellamy down because he’s the one who found the body of a dead girl left in an alley. He isn’t here for money. He’s here to get justice for a girl who has nobody else looking out for her.”
I turned towards Sera in stunned surprise. “He never told me. I thought he was going after him because he was being paid to do it. Why did he let me think the worst about him?”
“Because he’s a dumb shit whose pride wanted you to accept him at his worst?”
That sounded exactly like the way male logic would work. “But he’s my dumb shit.”
“And also because he really does get paid to kill people sometimes,” she added wryly.
“Yeah, I’m gonna need some more time to wrap my brain around that one.”
“One thing I’ve learned in this life, we never have as much time as we think we do. Especially, not in Vaughn’s line of work.”
Thinking about the danger he was in at that very moment put things in perspective for me. I’d already fallen in love with Vaughn Westbrook. I just needed him to come back so I could tell him.
11
VAUGHN
“The guards are sticking to their schedule like clockwork. No deviations so far.” Gaige’s voice came through the wireless comms unit in my ear. He’d busted ass to get into town so he could have my back while I took Bellamy down.
Not only was it one of our rules, but it allowed me to leave Whit and Devon—the third member of the team Brecken sent—on Carissa’s parents. I’d kept them under surveillance to ensure I was aware of their every move. Although I’d disabled her phone as soon as I’d discovered they’d blocked my number, I wasn’t willing to risk them discovering where she was and trying to take her from me. Or worse, giving Bellamy her location. But he wasn’t going to be a problem much longer.
Bellamy’s security was good, I’d give him that. The walls surrounding his estate were ten feet tall and closely monitored by guards. At night, attack dogs roamed the property. A direct approach from any direction would be swiftly detected. But there was one major oversight—they hadn’t planned for a sniper attack. Or, at least, not from a distance at which I could take a shot.
I’d found the perfect firing position fifteen hundred meters from the property. It was a tough distance to shoot from, but my MK21 Precision Sniper Rifle chambered for .338 Lapua Magnum rounds was more than up for the task. My longest recorded kill with it was a full hundred yards farther out than I was from where I expected Bellamy to be within the next hour.
A hilltop on a nearby secluded property offered me an elevated vantage point that gave me a broad view of my surroundings. It also provided me with the opportunity to eliminate Bellamy from the farthest distance possible, which improved the odds of me getting the shot off without being discovered.
Waiting for him to step out onto the balcony off his bedroom to smoke his cigar, just like he did every night, was harder than it should have been. I’d been trained to be patient, to stalk my target for days on end if need be. But it was damn difficult to keep my mind on the task at hand when I kept thinking about how Carissa had reacted when I’d told her what I planned to do to Bellamy tonight.
She’d flinched away from me, as though I’d punched her in the stomach. I’d seen the tears filling her eyes before she’d shifted away from me. Her whispered plea to stay safe was more than I expected, but the way she’d sat there—curled into a tight ball, looking devastated—was what stuck with me. If I’d have been able to keep the truth of myself from her forever, I would have done it, just so I never had to hurt her the way I had. But when Bellamy turned up dead, she would have figured it out anyway. So I had no choice but to let her know the kind of man I really was, and run the risk that she’d decide she couldn’t live with it.
“Eyes on the prize,” Gaige breathed out. “The guards are moving into position for Bellamy’s exit.”
Shoving all thoughts of Carissa and the future out of my mind, I ran through the details of the shot in my head. Distance, trajectory, power and direction of the wind—I went through it all. Step-by-step as I adjusted my breathing rhythm and waited for my heartbeat to slow. I was in my shooting stance, lying prone on the hill, with my finger hovering over the trigger when the French doors leading from Bellamy’s bedroom to the balcony opened. I waited for the flash of his lighter, the center of my scope aligned right between his eyes. When his hand started to pull away, the tip of his cigar burning, I held my breath and gently placed the pad of my finger on the trigger. Then I pulled the trigger back with equal force until the shot broke, careful not to move my perfect scope picture.
Exhaling my breath, I stayed on target for a few seconds before placing the safety back on again. Using the spotting scope, I assessed the accuracy of my hit and found Bellamy on the floor of his balcony with a quickly widening pool of blood under his head.
“Target is down. Time to get out of here.”
After Gaige’s confirmation, I removed the magazine from my rifle and opened the bolt to verify it was empty. Then I packed it up and headed out, stopping to survey my surroundings to make sure I wasn’t leaving any traces of myself behind. Once I knew I was in the clear, I headed down the hill and to the car Gaige had waiting for me.
“Nice shot,” he congratulated me as I slid into the passenger seat after placing my rifle case in the trunk. “It looks like our work here is done since the trafficking ring is dead, right along with Bellamy. You ready to pack up the house and head out of town tonight?”
A quick exit was our usual modus operandi, but the teasing tone in Gaige’s voice let me know he was fucking with me.
“Head to the Hastings’ estate.”
“Hastings, eh?” he chuckled. “As in Carissa Hastings? The girl you paid a quarter of a million dollars to take out on a date?”
“Shit!” I muttered. “You guys are worse than a bunch of gossiping school girls.”
“I had to get my information somewhere, especially when you were being so damn closemouthed about the girl,” he defended himself.
