Hard to Let Go

  Ha.

  So much for that.

  But at least she knew Cole wasn’t going to be a problem here. She’d received a message yesterday that the judge had granted the order, and once the authorities served Cole with the papers putting the order into effect, he’d keep his distance. He was too damn smart and appearance-conscious not to. And, as an attorney, he’d obviously realize that getting caught violating a protective order would create problems with the bar in addition to problems with the police.

  Kat couldn’t wait for the order to be served. Not only would it give her peace of mind that he’d stay away, but the no-contact provision should also cut off the stream of demanding and accusatory texts and voice mails she’d received since she pulled a no-show for their talk Friday night. Couldn’t happen soon enough.

  Given everything that was going on with her brothers, the knowledge that the order would diffuse the Cole situation allowed Kat to breathe a sigh of relief. Because they really couldn’t handle even one more complication.

  Chapter 2

  The Hard Ink building was in total pandemonium.

  At least, that’s how it seemed to Beckett as he stepped into the second floor’s cavernous gym, which had been serving as their war room and communications hub in the mission to clear their names. Despite the early hour, the bass beat of a rock song filled the air. Beckett paused inside the door and took in the scene. Groups of people sat and stood here and there. One group was chowing down an early breakfast around the big twelve-seater table. Guys were working out with the free weights, and others were spotting a big guy who appeared to be bench pressing at least two hundred pounds. Marz sat alone at his computer desk, working away. Didn’t seem like the guy ever slept anymore.

  As if there hadn’t already been enough of them, between the team and their women living in Hard Ink’s second- and third-floor apartments, now there were a dozen members of the Raven Riders Motorcycle Club racking out wherever they could. Some of their sleeping bags and packs still covered the floor in the back corner. All of the activity made a room that big seem small and overcrowded. Or maybe that was because Beckett preferred his solitude. Always had.

  The Ravens had initially gotten involved when the team paid for their assistance several weeks ago. But when a rocket launcher caved in part of the building on Sunday morning, two of their guys had died in the collapse. Now they were pissed, armed, and fully on board of their own free will.

  And, really, thank fuck for that. Because between their muscle and the number of boots they could put on the ground, the Ravens helped Beckett and his four SF buddies even the playing field against their enemies. By a lot.

  Beckett started across the gym toward Marz and came to an abrupt halt when an orange-striped cat with white paws came curling out from behind a piece of equipment, planted itself in his path, and stared at him with its one good eye. Which was how he’d earned the name Cy. Short for Cyclops.

  Beckett stared back. “What?” he finally asked the animal, peering around to see if anyone was watching.

  The cat blinked its right eye in silent answer.

  Nick’s brother Jeremy, who ran the tattoo shop on the first floor, had saved the stray from the wreckage of the other half of the building, where it’d apparently been living. The cat wasn’t mean, but he wasn’t friendly either, and seemed to avoid everyone except for his savior . . . and Beckett.

  Sighing, Beckett slowly crouched down and held out one hand.

  Cy bolted, ultimately finding a hiding place behind a metal shelving unit against the wall.

  No surprise. Beckett was big and intimidating, Or so he’d been told. Hardly the warm, nurturing type. The real surprise was that the cat gave him the time of day at all.

  You think being big makes you such hot shit, but you’re every bit as dumb and ugly . . .

  The memory of his father’s voice—from the night his high school football team had won the game that would send them to the state championships—came so far out of the deep, distant past that Beckett nearly stumbled as he rose to his full height. What the fuck was that? Since when did he let anything slip around the ancient barriers he’d erected against all the bullshit his old man had thrown at him?

  “You okay, man?”

  Beckett blinked to find Marz standing right in front of him. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Marz shrugged, his eyes narrowing on Beckett’s face. “No reason. You got a minute? Or would you rather catch some sleep first?”

  “Got nothing but time,” Beckett said, glad for something else to think about. Something besides figuring out why his father’s voice was echoing inside his head. He followed Marz across the room. The number of computer terminals had expanded in recent days, as Marz had made it possible for more of the team to help comb through the huge number of files they’d discovered on a microchip from their deceased commander. The commander they all believed had betrayed them, sold them out.

  The commander who’d actually died in a deniable undercover operation—meaning he hadn’t been able to say word one to them.

  The fact that they’d all believed Frank Merritt had been dirty felt a lot like having a few badly cracked ribs. It hurt with every breath, but there wasn’t a damn thing you could do to make it better. Beckett would know. He’d had more than a few broken ribs in his time.

  Except, there was something they could do. They could bring Frank’s killers to justice and clear their own names. Beckett glanced to the big white board on the wall by Marz’s desk where they kept a running list of what they knew and questions they’d yet to answer. In Nick’s scrawling handwriting, the crux of their mission was spelled out in red marker:

  Bad guys:

  Church Gang

  “WCE”/“GW”

  Seneka Worldwide Security?

  But what/who are WCE/GW?

  And are they related to Seneka? If so, how?

  All Beckett’s team knew about WCE was that it had paid their commander twelve million dollars in dirty money during his undercover investigation into counternarcotics corruption in Afghanistan, and all they knew about GW was that their commander had noted those initials as belonging to his WCE contact, who’d had a now-disconnected Seneka phone number. Beyond that . . . asking who WCE and GW were was a seemingly simple question. But it was proving damn hard to answer.

  “I finished piecing together the shipping research that you started yesterday,” Marz said as he dropped into a metal folding chair at his desk. Beckett followed suit. With one hand, Marz fished through a mass of papers—an impressive example of disorganization that only made sense to him. With the other, he kneaded his right thigh.

  Beckett frowned and braced against a wave of gut-punching guilt. His best friend in the world was hurting—had been critically wounded, in fact—because of him. Most of the time, Marz acted like he was totally cool with the below-the-knee amputation that required his use of a prosthetic limb. But for the past week or so, it was clear from the guy’s more noticeable limp that his leg was bothering him. No doubt from the round-the-clock schedule he’d been keeping, not to mention getting beaned with a baseball bat a few days before.

  “Ah. Here we go,” Marz said as he arranged some documents in front of him.

  “You okay?” Beckett managed.

  “What? Oh.” He pulled his hand away from his leg. “Yeah, no biggie.”

  Typical Marz. He didn’t want anyone to think him weak. Beckett totally got that. But in his resilience and his positivity and his expertise, Marz was one of the strongest of them all. That shit was just fact. Beckett shook his head as Marz dived into an explanation of his research. “Don’t do that,” Beckett said, interrupting.

  Eyebrow arched, Marz’s expression was almost comical. “Don’t do what?”

  “Don’t downplay shit with me.” He nailed the guy with a stare, wishing he could repair all the damage he’d done to their friendship. It was just hard to pretend that everything was copasetic when his best friend—a far fucking better huma
n being than himself—had nearly died to save him. An act of selflessness so pure, so stunningly undeserved, that it stole Beckett’s breath every time he thought of it . . . or when Marz’s prosthetic reminded him of it. Which was every fucking day.

  Beckett raked his hand through his hair. “Just . . . be real with me. Like before. I know I haven’t always . . .” He shrugged. “But I, uh, want . . . things back.” He scrubbed his hands over his face, glad that the early hour meant the rest of the team wasn’t around to witness this embarrassing string of verbal diarrhea. “Fuck,” he said into his hands.

  “Beckett?” Marz said.

  He didn’t know why this guy put up with him. He never really had. Marz had always been lightness next to his own deep, deep dark. He lifted his head and met his friend’s gaze.

  “Fair enough,” Marz said. “But I’m not the only one who’s taken a beating through this whole thing, that’s all. Not trying to hide it. It’s just that we have more important things to worry about right now, you know?” He shrugged.

  “How’s Emilie?” Beckett asked, referring to the sister of one of their enemies. Turned out she hadn’t known a thing about her now-deceased brother’s illegal activities, and in the process of finding that out, Marz had fallen hard. And so had she. Beckett was glad for the both of them. Really, he was.

  Her name brought an immediate spark to Marz’s eyes, though his expression remained serious. “Considering she found her brother’s body lying in a gutter with a bullet hole through his head just a few days ago, she’s doing as good as can be expected.” He shook his head. That day had been bad for every single one of them. Emilie had lost her brother, the Ravens had lost two of their members, the Hard Ink building had been partially demolished, and all of them had lost an ally when their enemies had gunned down Miguel Olivero, a P.I. who’d been helping their investigation. “His body’s gonna be released from the coroner’s office today or tomorrow, so that’s bound to stir things up for her.”

  “Yeah,” Beckett said. “You’ll help her through it, though. You’re good at . . . that kinda thing.” And he was not. Obviously.

  Marz smiled, his expression both pleased and surprised, like Beckett giving him a compliment was so damn unusual. Maybe it was. “Yeah?”

  Nodding, Beckett pointed to the papers in front of Marz. “So, what did you find on the microchip?”

  “What I was hoping we would,” Marz said, waking up the monitor. He tapped the screen. “This is a list of containers leaving Afghanistan via one of Seneka’s subsidiary transportation lines.”

  Seneka Worldwide Security. Seneka, for short. A defense contractor founded by John Seneka that operated in Afghanistan. Back in the day, the man had become something of a legend in the SpecOps community for leading a series of cross-border covert ops against high-value targets that the public would never know to thank him for. So when he started Seneka Worldwide Security, retired elite operatives flocked to Seneka in droves for the opportunity to work with him. Still did.

  They now suspected he had been behind the ambush back in Afghanistan that killed their friends and ended their careers, and the attack on Hard Ink last weekend. But their team needed hard proof.

  “And this printout of arriving containers at Baltimore’s pier thirteen . . .” Marz said, indicating a sheaf of paper in a beat-up accordion folder they’d received with the assistance of Baltimore Police detective Kyler Vance—Miguel’s godson and their new ally. “ . . . shows all the arriving Seneka containers highlighted in yellow. Matching container numbers prove that Seneka definitely shipped product out of Afghanistan to Baltimore. On almost all of them, Emilie’s brother is listed as the receiving agent.”

  “Which means they were probably full of drugs for the Church Gang,” Beckett said. Their investigation had already revealed that Seneka and Church, now largely destroyed by a series of gangland assassinations and embarrassing losses, had been in partnership with one another to trade contraband drugs stolen from Afghanistan. And the fact that the gang had kidnapped Merritt’s son Charlie—the incident that had first reunited Beckett’s team almost three weeks ago—and demanded information from the son about their commander’s double-dealing in Afghanistan, was more proof that Seneka was at the bottom of all their troubles. What a fucking complicated mess. “Anything else?”

  “Not yet,” Marz said, tossing the sheets to the desktop.

  Beckett sighed. “So that’s another connection. More proof that Seneka is likely at the bottom of all of this, and therefore that they’re also whatever WCE is.”

  “Likely,” Marz said. “Problem is, what we’re finding so far is all circumstantial evidence. These containers, Emilie’s brother Manny working for both Seneka and the Church Gang, the Seneka knight logo tattoo on the one attacker’s arm that we saw on the security footage, and the documents suggesting some relationship between Seneka and WCE, but not the nature of that relationship. Nothing that definitively says Seneka is WCE.”

  “Right,” Beckett said. “And we might never find something that definitive. We might just have to go with the preponderance of the evidence.”

  “Which is something for the whole team to decide,” Marz said.

  “Roger that,” Beckett said. Because no way did they want to poke a sleeping giant without a damn good reason and a whole lotta proof. They’d already lost efuckingnough.

  BY LUNCHTIME KAT knew what she had to do.

  In the contests between loyalty and duty, family and career, there was only one choice she could make.

  She had to help Nick any way she could. And that meant spilling.

  She sighed. After three years of law school, a string of prestigious clerkships, and almost four years pulling twelve-hour days at Justice, the decision didn’t sit comfortably in her gut. Because she had a helluva lot to lose. An ethics violation—or worse, losing her license and being disbarred—were not things from which a lawyer bounced back.

  Then again, she’d lost her parents four years before in a car accident. So Nick and Jeremy were all the family she had left in the world. If she lost them—

  No, she refused to even consider it, which meant she really didn’t have a choice at all.

  The minute she’d settled her mind on the matter, her shift in the sniper’s roost turned into possibly the slowest hours of her life. The clock had to be marching backward.

  And then the skies opened up, the low, heavy clouds making the mid-afternoon look like evening. Which gave her an idea . . .

  Maybe someone could relieve her early while the downpour provided a cover. She radioed Hard Ink to see if there was someone free who could come.

  Unless they were part of the perimeter defense team guarding the roadblocks their detective ally had set up, they were supposed to keep off the streets during the daytime as much as possible, just to be on the safe side. But the storm would give her some cover. She’d never been happier for rain in her life.

  Ten minutes later someone blurred across the street down below, a dark hood and the rain obscuring their identity. Feet pounded up the stairs. Too heavy to be Beckett.

  The thought had her rolling her eyes. The fact that she was thinking about the big lug at all was annoying. Let alone the man himself.

  Finally, her replacement stepped through the doorway into the empty room behind her and shrugged out of his drenched hooded sweat jacket. “Hey,” he said, running a hand through his brown hair. A scar ran jagged from the corner of one eye into his hairline.

  “Hey. Phoenix, right?” Kat said, stowing her weapon in one of the gun cases near the window. Phoenix Creed was one of the leaders of the Ravens. Kat hadn’t had much chance to get to know these guys, but she knew they weren’t all on the up and up. The Raven Riders was an outlaw motorcycle club, which meant they lived life—and made a living—by their own rules. But they were putting their lives on the line for her brothers and their friends, and that was pretty much all she needed to know right now.

  The crooked grin he gave her was pure sex.
“Yeah, that’s right.”

  She rose and offered her hand. “I’m Kat. Thanks for the relief. I realized I need to do something that can’t wait.”

  He shook and gave her an appraising up and down glance. “You’re Nick’s sister?”

  She drained her bottle of water, hoping she didn’t have to fend off an advance. ’Cause that wouldn’t be awkward at all. A lawyer and an outlaw. “Yep,” she said, tossing the bottle in the trash.

  He gave a single nod. “Any blood of Nick’s is a friend of mine.”

  Oh. That wasn’t what she was expecting at all. “Yeah? Thanks. And thanks for everything you and the club are doing.”

  All the humor bled out of his expression. “One of the guys who died when that building went down was my cousin. I owe it to him to be here.”

  Guilt crept into Kat’s belly for thinking he was going to hit on her when his purpose for being a part of this was every bit as honorable as Nick’s. Stupid Cole had her looking for creeps everywhere. “I didn’t realize. I’m sorry for your loss, Phoenix.”

  Nodding, he glanced around the room. “Yeah. Okay, well.” He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his faded jeans. “You’re free to fly.”

  Out in the stairwell, a cool, damp wind whipped up from below, tossing Kat’s long hair around her face. When she reached the bottom, she stood in the doorway and frowned out at the deluge. Fly, hell. Swim was more like it. But there was no help for it. “Here goes nothing,” she said.

  As she bolted diagonally across the street, she just resisted shrieking as the unexpectedly cold rain immediately soaked through her clothes and matted her hair to her face. At the curb, water puddled so deep that she sank in to mid-calf. And then she was tearing around the Hard Ink building to the rear door, where she had to pause long enough to punch a code into a key box. The minute the door clicked, she yanked it open and nearly dove inside the cement-and-metal stairwell.