Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 52851 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 264(@200wpm)___ 211(@250wpm)___ 176(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 52851 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 264(@200wpm)___ 211(@250wpm)___ 176(@300wpm)
The room went silent as we passed out the papers he’d thrown around. One by one, we read through the documents. It was bad, really fucking bad. I felt myself stiffen as I processed what I was seeing. More papers hit the table, Data was still finding more.
My fingers clenched around the pages as my stomach twisted. Then I saw it. The piece that locked everything into place.
“Son of a fucking bitch,” I gasped. My pulse roared in my ears. “He did it.”
Duke’s jaw tightened. “It appears,” he ground out, “that old Demingo was the head of the Diavoli cartel.”
A sick feeling settled deep in my gut.
“He worked his way to the top before joining the FBI,” Duke continued. “Once he got his badge, he used it to become El Jefe. With the combined power of the cartel and his federal authority, he had near total control over one of the major routes from Argentina to the U.S.”
Jesus Christ, that kind of power? It was unprecedented. Normally, traffickers and cartels operated separately, carefully avoiding each other unless necessary, but this was something else.
Most powerful cartels ran their own show. They had control, sure, but they still had to navigate the politics of other crime syndicates, and Demingo had bypassed all of that. With a federal badge in his pocket and cartel muscle at his back, he had built something no one had ever fucking seen before.
And the most terrifying part? No one had noticed. No one had stopped it.
“How the fuck did he pull this off?” Jagger muttered.
How the fuck did no one see it before now? Because if we didn’t stop him now, there’d be no stopping him at all.
The room was tense, the weight of everything pressing down like a goddamn anvil.
“What does this have to do with us?” Noah, one of Hunter’s guys, asked. His voice was sharp, clipped with barely restrained frustration. He wasn’t the only one struggling to keep his emotions in check. “We didn’t shop him,” Noah continued. “We never even got the chance.” His fists curled on the table as his gaze locked on the intel in front of him. “Just as we were about to fuck him up, the bastard burst into flames. So why the fuck is he doing this now?”
I wasn’t surprised by his reaction. His focus had been solely on Bo ever since we realized she was inside Demingo’s operation. His whole body was wound tight, a controlled fire burning hotter with every second that passed.
Hunter, though, well, he looked the same. “It’s not just now,” Hunter hissed. “Let’s be clear about that. With a setup like that, he’s been doing it all along, it’s just we never knew.”
“Well, nothing like this has happened before now,” Elijah, another one of Hunter’s guys, snapped. “So obviously, it is.”
I caught the look Hunter shot at Kyle just before he dropped his head into his hands. His shoulders shook with a deep, ragged breath, his whole body shuddering under the weight of what he now knew.
Then Noah read the next part of the file, and everything changed. His chair scraped violently against the floor as he shot up.
“He planned the bomb,” he snarled, disbelief warping his expression into something primal. His eyes flicked down to the paper again before his head snapped up. His entire body locked up. “He paid that fucking bitch to put her babies in the car and hit the button,” he roared.
The sound of wood splintering filled the room as he hurled his chair against the wall. No one moved. Hell, I don’t think anyone breathed.
On their final tour, Hunter and his team had been ambushed when a woman detonated a bomb with her kids still inside the car. The explosion had ripped through them, killing some, maiming others. It had ended their careers, and now we knew who had been behind it.
Dragon stood off to the side, arms crossed, his sharp eyes taking in every reaction, every shift in energy. The most astute MC President I had ever met, he knew when to interfere and when to let things play out, but right now he knew none of us would be reacting this way if it wasn’t justified. We were lucky it had just been a chair.
“He also planned that RPG attack on us a couple months before that,” Kyle said flatly.
The words barely left her mouth before Jared’s head snapped up. I narrowed my eyes at the weasel. His reaction wasn’t shock.
There was no disbelief, no outrage. Instead, his eyes narrowed slightly, and if I wasn’t mistaken the fucker was trying not to smile. Preacher and I had already had our suspicions about him, this was just confirming that I needed to get to the bottom of whatever the hell was going on with him.
“You can’t be fucking serious,” Blake, one of Valiant’s men, muttered.