CHAPTER 6

I Been Facing Trouble All My Life

I bang my fist on the blue townhouse door, praying to God that he's home right now. It would be just my luck that tonight is the night Mr. Parties Are For Children chose to go out in the town. But considering he picked Manchester to settle down in, I can only assume he's still an anti-social homebody.

"I'm fucking coming! Jesus Christ in a…" His voice trails off as he begins mumbling to himself, undoing all the locks on his door. He swings it open, about ready to speak again, but he falls speechless when he realizes I'm the one standing there.

Ian Lukas looks a lot different than the last time I saw him. Gone is his spiky brown hair, clean-shaven face, and wrestler physique. Now his hair is almost at his shoulders, he has a beard that covers half his face, and his body is incredibly lean—though he is still as freakishly tall as ever at 6'5". His shirt is off, so I can see tattoos covering most of his pale skin, and my heart clenches a little when I see the one over his heart:

Non sibi sed patriae.

Not for self, but for country.

The motto of the Navy.

"What the hell are you doing here?" he asks, looking right and left of the street behind me. "Get in."

I slip past him and wait in his entryway as he relocks his door and closes all the blinds on his windows. Now he turns to me, assessing me the same way I did him before.

"You look like shit, Beast," I remark, not knowing what else to say That was his callsign, given to him because of how freakishly tall he is.

He glares, crossing his arms over his chest. "Don't call me that. You lost that privilege a long time ago."

"You know why I left." Or at least part of the reason I left.

"Yeah, and look where you are now." He walks into one room and comes out moments later wearing a tank top, with his fingers gathering up his hair into a ponytail. "You're a fucking mercenary."

I cringe at that title. "I don't go out and kill anyone I'm paid to. Money has nothing to do with it."

"You don't have the right to be judge, jury, and executioner!" Ian snarls, his usual composure shattered. He storms off, walking from the foyer into his kitchen. I follow him, coming to a stop when I reach the other side of his kitchen's swiveling doors, where I watch him aggressively start making tea in a purple kettle. "It's people like you we took down during service."

I scoff at that, leaning my hip against the doorframe. "That's a gross exaggeration. If you really think I'm just as bad as the people we hunted, then why are you standing there making tea instead of arresting me?"

His back is turned to me, so I can't see his face, but I can see the sigh he lets out, and the way his lean shoulders seem to hunch over in the process. "What do you want, Henry? Why did you come here?"

I flick my eyes to the boiling kettle, watching steam rise from its nozzle. "I need your help."

Ian laughs, but there's no humor in it. If anything, he sounds sad. "With?"

"I need to get out of the country. Tonight," I say.

He shakes his head, loose strands of his hair pulling from the hair tie. "Let me guess, public transportation is off the cards for you because karma has finally come to bite you in the ass."

Annoyance churns in my gut, but I hold my tongue. I'm not going to stand here and justify my choices to him. "I know you still own a business class jet, a small one that could slip out unnoticed. I need to get to Miami as soon as possible."

He shakes his head, his fists tightening where they grip on to the edge of the stove top. "It's obvious you were compromised, but who is coming after you that's got you in such a hurry?"

Once the names Jacob and Johnathon Harrison leave my lips, Ian shouts a string of curses. "After all this time, you come to me knowing full well that Harrison and his whole team are going to rope me into this mess the second they track the plate number of the bike you rented or look at the logbooks of the airport my plane is at. You've just made me a target by coming here!"

"That wasn't my intention," I say honestly. "I didn't have another option. The plane I had chartered to go back to the States is at the busiest airport in London; they would have checked there first. It will take them a bit to realize I drove to Manchester."

"You say that like it's justification for ruining my life. I moved here to escape that chaotic life and here you go dragging me back in." He crosses his arms, his tea kettle beginning to whistle. "Why would I help you? Give me one good reason."

I give him the only reason that matters to me, the only reason I've resorted to seeking Ian's aid. "I told my assistant to meet me there. The people after me are powerful, and once they learn about her, they'll be after her as much as me. She isn't trained like us; she can't fight them off if they capture her. She could die."

I choke on that last word, and this reaction has Ian titling his head. "She just your assistant?"

I think about lying. The less people who know about Beth and about my feelings towards her, the better. I don't want her used as leverage against me in any degree. But if I want to get Ian's help, I can't be dishonest. I have to trust that Ian hasn't changed so much that he would take advantage of her to get to me, despite our differences. "She's everything to me."

His eyes narrow, watching me. I stand there silently, my expression open and honest, and this seems to be enough for him. Ian has always been an honorable man. I know he wouldn't let an innocent woman suffer, even if it meant helping me. "Give me one hour."

The relief that hits me is palpable. "Thank you, Beast."

Ian rolls his eyes, repeating, "One hour. If you're not ready, I'm fucking leaving without you."

It was a split second ripple, a small flicker. Anyone else would have written it off as static or a glitch from the nearby storm. But something in my gut told me this was no fluke.

I told Colton to get out of the way from the monitor, and when I went into our system, I saw that someone else had been there. Someone had overridden our cameras. It took me a second to boot them out, and once I did, the camera feed for Jake's room jumped to a scene entirely different than the looped footage it was showing before.

One minute Jake was sitting at his desk like normal, bobbing his head to whatever music he listens to from his phone, then he suddenly has a syringe needle sticking out of his neck, put there by a man Jake had unmasked in his final moments. The man looks up at the camera, and I watch his eyes flare in surprise just before he makes his escape. And then he somehow manages to fuck up two of my cars and put three of my teammates in the hospital.

It only takes a few phone calls with some contacts at MI6 to figure out who this guy is. Henry Cai, Navy SEAL turned CIA, now works as a contract killer through the Dark Web. He has an office in the state of Virginia in the US that's fronted as a tree cutting company, and he has one employee working for him, a woman by the name of Bethany Reed, who is also ex-CIA. It's clear Cai and Reed were hired by someone with a vendetta against Jake, but I will deal with whoever that is in due time. If I wait to strike against Cai, he and Reed will go underground, and they'll be impossible to find. But if I start following their trail now, I can find them before they disappear off the grid, which I know they'll try to do. People like him have plans for when things go bad and they're caught, and most of the time they have a safe house somewhere they can lie low.

I just have to figure out where it is.

Going to their office in Virginia will be a starting point, but I doubt I'll find anything there. They'll have probably destroyed or cleared everything out by now. But from there any intelligence I can gather will lead me to where they lived, who they have connections to, what family they have left, and fingerprints I can use to track them down.

Cai and Reed are going to live to regret what they did to my brother, my twin . They've ripped my soul in two like it was nothing, robbing me of the only person I have ever trusted or loved. Cai made Jake's last moments ones of terror and helplessness. He died without anyone there for him, to offer him comfort. I will ensure Cai stays alive long enough to endure the torture I have planned out for him; I will make them regret ever stepping foot in this house. Then just when he's about to die, I'll do the same thing to Reed. Their last moments will be filled with terror and helplessness. They will know how my brother felt.

I swear on him, of the life robbed from him, that I will make them pay. At whatever cost.