Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 37793 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 189(@200wpm)___ 151(@250wpm)___ 126(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 37793 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 189(@200wpm)___ 151(@250wpm)___ 126(@300wpm)
This wasn’t helping anything.
“We don’t know that he’s after me,” Dante chimed in. “Besides, we have no idea if he’s one of Ortiz’s guys.”
But we really did. To point that out, I tipped my head at the tattoo on the left side of the guy’s neck.
“Okay, fine,” Dante amended. “He does in fact belong to the Jalisco cartel.”
“Which means this has nothing to do with me,” Chris averred, pointing at Dante. “He’s the one who sent his boy Garland into Mexico after his asset.”
“I did not. That wasn’t my op. That was the company, not me,” Dante said, then to me, “Why are you looking at me like that?”
My focused regard was because I was supposed to be getting married in three hours, and I did not need a sicario from the Jalisco cartel crashing my wedding. But also, I found myself looking at Dante Cerreto because everything was different now, and that had been a huge paradigm shift for me.
Last year, when I had originally been loaned by my boss, Miguel Romero, as a favor to Darius Hawthorne, to aid Colonel Jared Colter on a clandestine op in Thailand, I was in awe. It was my first contact with Dante Cerreto and Colonel Colter, and as they were legends in the counterintelligence community, to be doing anything with them had been both a privilege and an honor. Added to that was being asked for personally by Darius Hawthorne, which was overwhelming as well. Not only did the man now run the Vault, an organization that spanned every continent, but he had also been a top CIA operative and had forgotten more secrets than most agents knew to begin with.
The thing was, once you spent time with people, talked with them, watched them, and most importantly, had to save them, perceptions changed. Mine had been completely altered. I realized that my skill level and theirs were really not that far apart. What I had accepted as superhuman feats, a lot of times boiled down to the same expertise as mine: observational clarity, hair-trigger reflexes, and speed. Being a sniper, marksmanship was crucial, but so was the ability to remain calm under pressure. Also, the more times you accompanied others on missions, the more opportunities to experience the epiphany of everyone needing the same steely nerves, belief in the reason for the op, and intent to do the best job possible and not let anyone down. And none of this was to say I was better than them, but at the end of the day, they were all as fallible as me. That had been eye-opening. I tended to place people up on pedestals, thinking myself as less than. But the longer I worked special ops, the more I understood that I too could be counted on to perform as well as the others.
All this meant that the buffer of hero worship had thinned. There was this familiarity now, which was great nearly a hundred percent of the time, except at this very moment. Because I really needed my wedding to not go off the rails. Marrying Kurt was the most important thing I could do to make my life complete.
Finally, for the first time in my life, I had actually let another person all the way in. I had allowed Hannah to be close to me, but I never let her see everything. That might scare her off. It had many others in the past.
The difference with Kurt was that at some point in the last two years, I had come to think of him as my other half. It was both exciting and terrifying. I couldn’t have anything happen to him, and he certainly couldn’t leave me because I had allowed our wedding to be ruined by someone out to kill one of our guests.
People always asked me when the bullets started flying and we were not in the middle of a combat zone, how could I know that I myself was not the target? But that was easy. I was nameless, faceless, utterly lost in the crowd unless we were friends. No one knew who I was, unlike Dante Cerreto or Jared Colter or Darius Hawthorne or even my mentor, Chris.
“So,” Chris prodded Dante, “will you be conducting an interrogation anytime soon? We’re burnin’ daylight here.”
I liked that he tapped his watch for emphasis.
“If this guy is a sicario for one of the cartels, you think he’d cop to it?”
“Why not?” Chris shrugged.
“Fine. Ask him, then,” Dante suggested.
Chris squatted beside the man, looking him dead in the eyes as he removed his gag. “Who are you here to kill?”
“Are you Christopher Mancuso?”
“I told you,” Dante said with an aha! tone.
“I am,” Chris answered, ignoring his friend.
“You need to stay out of our way, or you’ll be sent video of your wife choking on her own blood.”