The fourth one of us. The one who was killed. The first of us to be betrayed.
I open the door for Tag. He comes in. He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He knows why we’re here. This is serious shit. We didn’t dick around on our missions. We took out terrorists. We neutralized threats. We took lives. We assassinated leaders. But for the right reasons. On orders from our government. Not like what happened to Reid. He was targeted. Betrayed. Sold out.
“Don’t you shower anymore, brother?” Tag asks.
I take in his expensive shirt and slacks. “You afraid I’ll wrinkle you, ya *?”
We hug and then he and Jasper shake hands before we all three head for the study.
When the door is closed, I lean up against one side of the desk, Tag against the other, and we both face Jasper. He wastes no time. “The Colonel got a name. He found out who’s behind Operation Napalm.”
A name. Finally. The person responsible for the death of Reid. The person responsible for the death of Jasper’s mother. The person responsible for putting our team in the crosshairs.
That’s why I couldn’t reach the Colonel. Seems he was busy uncovering a dirtbag.
“Who? Who is it?”
Jasper glances at Tag and then looks long and hard at me. “Senator Sims.”
Holy. Hell.
No one says anything for a few seconds. We all know who he is. And I guess it makes sense. He knew us. Knew all about us. He would be one of the few people who could manipulate us fairly easily. Mislead us. Set us up.
His committee is the only one that knew about us, the one that authorized our missions. Black Ops shit. High risk. Highly classified. Ugly business. Things that had to be done, things no one else wanted to do.
I’m probably the only one who knows what he’s like in real life, though, Senator Sims. The only one who knows how much of his cutthroat politics bleed into his personal life.
“But why?” Tag asks. His gray eyes are stormy. I remember that look. With Tag, much like with the rest of us, you’re asking for trouble when you mess with the unit. Or anyone he cares about.
“He’s making a run for the White House. Turns out he has skeletons. Several of them. That job we did in Syria, taking out Assad’s second-in-command . . . it wasn’t government sanctioned like the Colonel thought. Sims was just covering his tracks. He’d been brokering arms deals for that asshole for his own personal gain. Made millions. I guess presidential campaigns are expensive. But he had us take him out. Now we’re the only loose threads. We are his last remaining skeletons.”
Tag’s jaw is tight. “So he’s taking us out. Cleaning up the mess.”
“He’s trying.”
“He’s taking out everyone he thinks can be a threat, right down to people we might’ve told. Like family. To someone like him, no one is off limits, but to us . . . to us that’s sacred ground. You don’t go after family. You just don’t. We knew what we were signing up for, but not them. Not them,” Jasper says somberly, his mother having been killed already. Caught in the crossfire and blown up by a mercenary wannabe who knew about Jasper’s past.
The wheels of my stunned brain come to a screeching halt.
Family.
Loved ones.
Cleaning up messes.
Skeletons.
An image of Katie pops into my mind, the one of her face when she saw the Simses at the fight. She knows what they’re capable of. I know what they’re capable of. And after the way I reacted to her at the fight, they now know what she is to me.
“What is it, man? And who’s Katie?” Jasper asks. I didn’t even realize that I’d said her name aloud.
“I think she’s one of his messes, too.”
I know they won’t understand. They don’t know about Katie. They don’t know about what little Sims did to her. Or how that might look for a father if it came out during a bid for the presidency.
My palms start to sweat. It all makes sense now. How could I not have seen it? How could I not have known?
Mother of God.