He peered over his shoulder to find her lowering into a crouch by the window. She grabbed a gun from one of the cases on the floor and checked the weapon’s ammo. Her quick motions revealed her confidence and experience—-always sexy qualities to Beckett’s mind.
Still, despite her obvious competence with a weapon—-Nick had done a damn fine job making sure his petite little sister could take care of herself—-her being alone up here for a day--long shift didn’t sit well in Beckett’s gut. Ever since the attack on Hard Ink, everyone who had any experience with weapons had been taking shifts in one of the two lookouts they’d set up, and Katherine had more than earned the right to help with the task. More than that, they needed all hands on deck right now—-including Katherine. But the team’s enemies were expertly trained, highly lethal mercenaries who had no qualms about covering their asses, no matter what it took—-or who they took down. And where Katherine was concerned, that made Beckett . . . worry.
After all, she was Nick’s sister. And just like the rest of the team, Nick had lost enough.
And that’s all it was. Right.
Sonofabitch.
“Watch yourself,” Beckett said, voice gruff.
Katherine peered over her shoulder at him and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’s kinda the point of this whole thing,” she said, gesturing to the guns, ammo, communication devices, Army green sleeping bags, and stack of bottled water and snacks piled around the corner by the window. When Beckett didn’t reply, she shook her head and looked outside again. “You question Nick and the guys this way when you hand off your shift?”
No, he didn’t. And saying so would either make him look like a chauvinist asshole or possibly reveal too damn much about the shit she stirred up inside him. So he disappeared into the stairwell and made his way down.
Given the strength and resources of their enemies, sparring with Katherine Rixey was the last thing he needed to waste energy doing.
“THAT’S WHAT I thought,” Kat said. Looking back toward the stairs again, she realized she was alone. As big as Beckett freaking Murda was, how the hell did she not hear him leave?
Damn Special Forces guys. Her brother Nick had the same ability. Scared her half to death sometimes. Thank God for their middle brother, Jeremy. Most of the time, Jer gave off a happy vibe you could feel coming from a mile away.
Kat smiled at the thought, settled into a comfortable position, and turned her attention back to the view outside the window. The streets were eerily quiet, which wasn’t an accident. Though her brothers had bought a building in the city’s derelict and partly abandoned old industrial district, the real explanation behind the ghost town she was looking down on was a series of roadblocks a police ally of Nick’s had somehow orchestrated. Kat had tried to stay out of the specifics, because she hadn’t wanted to know the details if they potentially veered into the illegal.
Which was damn near a certainty. She had come to visit her brothers at Hard Ink five days before, and pretty much the whole time she’d been here had walked a fine line between wanting to help them with this crazy situation and freaking out about the illegal nature of what they were doing. Not that the guys weren’t justified in defending themselves and doing whatever it took to clear their names, but she had become a lawyer for a reason. Growing up, Nick was the risk taker, the guy who ditched college weeks into his senior year to join the Army. Jeremy was the artistic rule breaker. And she had been the rule follower.
Almost like checking a series of boxes, she’d gotten straight A’s all through school, served as the president of all her clubs, got into the best colleges and busted her ass to become managing editor of her law review. Even as early as high school, she’d known she wanted to go into the law. Because law represented justice and order and righ-teous-ness. Those ideals had spoken to her, drawn her to a career fighting what she thought was the good fight.
Four years into working at the Department of Justice, she still believed that was what she and the good -people she worked with tried to do. Problem was, sometimes a big gulf existed between what they tried to do and what the law allowed them to achieve. And she’d never realized just how all--consuming the career would be. Twelve--hour days at her desk were her norm.
Kat surveyed the run--down neighborhood outside the window. Baltimore might’ve only been about thirty miles from D.C., but right now she felt about a million miles away from that desk.