“Did he find his wife?”
His gaze, already locked on mine, bonded with it.
“Yeah.”
Whatever this Deacon person found was not good and I didn’t want to know.
Luckily, Raiden didn’t tell me.
Unluckily, he continued to tell me other things.
“My buddy hooked me up with Deacon. He’s a loner, but he’s also the best in the business. Lots of work, not enough of him to go around. The thing was he didn’t have anyone he respected enough to punt business to. He must have liked the feel of me ‘cause he took me on a couple jobs before he let me loose and started referring work to me. I did the jobs, established a reputation, got more work. So much I had to recruit and train a crew. I did. All the men left from my unit in the Corps who got out like me and found, also like me, they didn’t fit back into the world they left when they entered the Corps. But they fit into this other world.”
Suddenly, it came clear to me.
And it broke my heart.
“Raiden, this sounds like—”
“Save it,” he bit off, interrupting me. “They don’t know all this I’m tellin’ you, but they know me and I figure they can guess. Not the specifics, but enough to tweak them, so I got that shit from Mom. Got it from Rache. Didn’t listen to it from them either. I live it, Hanna. I get it and I know my place, where I’m comfortable, where I fit and this is it.”
“I’m not sure you’re right,” I told him carefully.
“You watch a friend you thought would be a friend for life—who’d stand up at your wedding, who you’d name your kid after, who you’d watch go gray while listenin’ to him bitch for the next forty years about his wife spending too much money—get blown to fuckin’ bits by a landmine, babe, you’ll be in a place to say. Since that shit will thankfully never happen to you, you aren’t.”
My heart broke more, but after that I stayed silent.
“You know all that, I’ll give you the rest,” he declared. “All of this is sorted. Knight’s a buddy because Knight’s connected to Deacon, Deacon connected me with Knight and Knight did me a favor. I get paid cash. None of that is on any books, but Knight’s got a business and he cleans my money. I use a bogus partnership with him, which means I use his accounts to pay myself, my boys, make investments and pay taxes. It’s all above board and legal as far as the government knows. We do legitimate jobs that have no results in a way no one will ever cotton on that the jobs we do are not legitimate. IRS takes their cut, turns the other way. I got an address. I vote. I got a license. Plates on my car. An honorable discharge from the Corps. As far as anyone’s concerned I’m a respectable citizen, a veteran and a small business owner and the shit me and my crew do is buried so deep under that respectability, it’ll never be dug out.”
“Paul Moyer said you were off the grid,” I blurted, and his eyes got scary sharp before he appeared to relax.
“Paul Moyer talks smack because he wants to sound cool. For all intents and purposes, I operate off the grid, but I’m not off the grid. You meet Deacon, you’ll understand off the grid. That is not me. I come home for a few days at Christmas, but don’t reestablish life in Willow after gettin’ out, he knows what went down with my unit, Moyer thinks he knows his shit and runs his mouth. He doesn’t know his shit. He doesn’t know anything.”
“You said this was unsafe,” I reminded him.
“Men who want men hunted and are willin’ to pay tens of thousands of dollars to have them delivered, and the men who are runnin’ from them tend not to be people you wanna ask to dinner,” Raiden remarked.
This was very, very true.
God.
“This scares me,” I admitted.
“Yeah, but you’ll get used to it.”
He seemed very sure.
I was not.
“I don’t think I like this,” I told him, my voice small. “Any of it.”
Raiden didn’t move.
But he did speak.
“Then you need to understand why I do it.”
This meant there was more, and I really did not want more.
He gave it to me.
“Everything, every living thing on this earth, from plants to animals to humans, has a natural order. It’s absolutely crucial to keep that order, Hanna. I’ve been in the thick of chaos and it is not a fun place to be.”
Raiden went quiet and I nodded for him to go on, my heart clenching and the pizza in my belly sitting there in a nauseating lump.
He went on.
“The men who hire me keep order in their worlds. Each one of them rules their own empire. If something breaks free of their rule, chaos can result. In the worlds those men rule, if they keep control, it is very rare there’s collateral damage. But someone steals from them, someone conspires to overthrow them, hell can break loose. And when those fires burn, baby, they take out anyone in their path.”