LITMIR.BIZ

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the mission any good, and it would scatter Isaac’s pack of yes-men to new haunts.

      Killing the engine, Tate surveyed the house. Light shone from the window in the front living room, but the rest stood a dark vigil over the street.

      The hairs on the back of his neck raised. Something was going on. On Fridays at sundown, Isaac ran a party that raged until Monday morning. Those parties required some of Tate’s best acting skills. He’d avoided more pills, pipes and bottles than he cared to consider. And he’d dodged just as many scantily clad hangers-on who believed him to be the strong, silent type who needed taming. His heart broke for a couple of the girls he’d managed to talk to without having to fight them off. But rescuing them would mean jeopardizing the mission, losing his target and probably sacrificing his life. It was hard to sleep, knowing he could help, but the mission wouldn’t allow him to yield his cover. It was doubly hard to sleep knowing some of the men and women who walked through Isaac’s front doors craved this lifestyle and viewed help as a weakness.

      Yeah. Weekends were the worst on this op. Tate was fortunate the whole lot of them in the house were usually too wasted to realize he wasn’t.

      But now, as the world tinged a deep pink, no drunken revelry filtered out to the street. The place was quieter than he’d ever seen it. In the four months Tate had been hovering around this crew, they’d never missed a weekend, never taken the party anywhere else. Isaac was too jealous of his territory to risk someone out-partying him.

      To the left of the house, on the short parallel tracks of concrete that passed for a driveway, Isaac’s little souped-up Honda sat close by the side door. Five more tricked-out coupes lined the lawn, chrome dull in the faded morning light. The gang was all here, but the house was silent.

      Tate brushed the grip of Meghan’s gun, his teeth working his lower lip. He was about to walk into the unknown with a weapon he’d never fired. He slipped the revolver from the small holster and flicked it open, checking the cylinder. Five .357 rounds, so at least they had some heft. His Glock held fifteen rounds in the magazine. Meghan’s revolver gave him a third of what he’d normally carry. If things turned ugly, he’d have to be extra careful of his aim. And pray. A lot.

      The curtain in the front window shifted. Was someone watching for him? Maybe Phoenix had told Isaac to clear the house and do the dirty work.

      Tate tapped his index finger on the trigger guard. This could be an ambush, and the walk to the door would make him an easy target. And the whole world had better believe he wasn’t going down at the whim of a pack of street thugs.

      Maybe he was overreacting. There was no way for Isaac to know Tate had purposely let Meghan go. No witnesses had seen what transpired between them. It was possible the party had moved elsewhere or ended much, much earlier than usual.

      But this would be the first time, and Tate didn’t put faith in coincidences. The belief everything happened for a reason had kept him alive on more than one occasion. Reading the situation was his specialty, and this situation read like a horror novel. It didn’t seem like this could end without bloodshed.

      Tate held the pistol tighter. Inflicting pain, taking lives...these were the parts of the job Tate never got used to, the parts he tried to avoid whenever possible. If this was what it appeared to be, all of the above would probably happen within the next three minutes.

      He steeled himself for confrontation, then pulled his phone out and typed a quick text to Ethan. Target house quiet. Stand by. He had ten minutes before Ethan called law enforcement and scrapped the op to pull Tate out. Of course, not texting in ten minutes would mean Tate was probably dead.

      He slipped from the truck, shoving his phone in his pocket and tucking the gun behind his leg, acting as though he hadn’t observed anything out of the ordinary. Without streetlights and with night still hanging on, he would be a vague target. He walked along the edge of the yard rather than on the cracked sidewalk anyone waiting would expect him to use.

      At the porch steps, he took a bracing breath, all the while feeling as though invisible spies hovered in every dark shadow, and approached the door from the side. If one of the neighbors peeked out, they’d peg him as the investigator he was, but he wasn’t about to take the chance someone would shoot him through the door. He frowned at the wood siding. It didn’t offer any more protection than the door did.

      A small sliver of light filtered onto the porch. The door was cracked open, no obvious signs of tampering. There was definitely something out of whack.

      He didn’t hesitate. Lifting Meghan’s gun so it would be at the ready, he said a quick prayer, wishing he had a partner to back him up. Meghan had always been good in moments like this, each following the other in an unspoken tactical dialogue of eye contact and hand signals. If she wasn’t in danger, he might have asked Ethan to contract her onto the team as a civilian.

      But he had this. He was good at what he did, and his skills were the reason Ethan kept calling him in. Tate Walker could do the job.

      Tate eased the door open with his foot, skimming the room until the smell smacked him across the face, stinging his eyes. Metallic. Raw.

      Blood. And lots of it, if the strength of the stench was any indication.

      He followed the gun into the room, waiting for movement, but there was none.

      Six bodies lay facedown in a neat row in the center of the small living area, wrists bound, blood seeping into ever-widening puddles on the scratched hardwood.

      Someone had executed Isaac and his entire crew. The larger man lay on the end, probably the last to die.

      Because Tate had let Meghan escape.

      He swallowed. More blood. More death. Deaths he’d have to find a way to wash his hands of when this was all over.

      He could have brought Meghan in from the school, appeased whoever had ordered her kidnaping, but then it might have been her sprawled on the floor with her life drained away.

      He tightened up on the gun and focused on the moment. He had to bring whoever had done this to justice. Unless Isaac had double-crossed someone else, the brutality of the scene sent a message. Phoenix wasn’t afraid to punish anyone who crossed him, and he believed Isaac’s men had failed in their assignment.

      Tate’s mind sped into high gear. He scanned the scene, focusing on the details instead of the big picture, pulling his mind into the work and not into the fact six men were dead. They’d been criminals, yes, but no one deserved this.

      He fought not to gag, biting his lip so hard his eyes watered. He examined the bodies and noted the deep gashes at their throats, quick and clean. Isaac had apparently received special treatment, or he’d fought. The blood still flowed from his wounds. He’d only been dead a few minutes.

      The killer was still in the house.

      Tate swallowed hard against the pounding in his ears, willing his adrenaline to ebb so he could focus his senses. He needed more than sight.

      A soft sound filtered in from the small bedroom to the left. Tate hefted the gun and headed toward the door, keeping his focus on the door as he skirted the tangled maze of legs. The air felt off, disturbed, the metallic odor of fresh blood nearly overwhelming, but Tate could tell from years of experience. Someone waited behind the door.

      He took one step closer, then drove himself shoulder-first into the door, meeting resistance.

      Something heavy slammed to the floor, echoed by a string of curses that burned Tate’s ears. There was a skittering sound of metal across hardwood.

      Too light to be a gun—it had to be a knife.

      Knives were his worst enemy.

      Tate righted himself and aimed in the direction of the sound, but a body flung itself into his stomach, driving him against the wall, his shoulder slamming into the ancient Sheetrock so hard he went through it, his back catching hard on a wall stud, knocking the air from his lungs. He heaved in air and fought against both his attacker and the memory of the last time he’d lost a battle with his gun at

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