Page 73 of The Art of Dying

“If she does get in, you can’t leave. You have to watch her back.”

Kitsch seemed hurt. “I thought I had Matt’s.”

I held each side of his jaw in my hands. “You listen to me, Terrell Kitsch. You had his back. And he had yours. You didn’t let him down. That’s not what happened, and I’m not going to let you tell yourself that.”

He touched his forehead to mine. “I love you. So much. Let’s go home and hold our babies for … five or ten years.”

I breathed out a sad laugh. “Deal.”

Day 4,688.

chapter twenty.

Kitsch

“You know the protocol! You’ve worked for us for almost three years, Kitsch! For fuck’s sake!” Tiger screamed, pounding his desk with the side of his fist. The veins in his neck bulged when he spoke. His eyes were bloodshot, his face bright red.

“Yeah, but not even part-time,” I said. “Don’t forget my ass still belongs to Uncle Sam.” I sat back against Tiger’s imported, blue velvet tufted chair, still dirty from the trip, the sweat stains up the back of my shirt sure to leave a mark. Any other day he might have noticed, but that was the least of his worries.

Tiger Phillips was former teams himself, a Navy SEAL with not only a knack for business, he had flair. He was loved by celebrities, world leaders, and sheiks with more money in one account than Warren Buffet’s net worth. Between his contacts, knowledge, and charisma, he was a self-made multi-millionaire within six years of retirement from the Navy. Now, he was a major player in the private security sector. Tiger didn’t like mistakes. He personally recruited me to his contract security company, NEMESIS, but our client’s twenty-nine-year-old son, Ren Matsuda, dying over the weekend wasn’t a mistake.

It was Mason.

Candace brought in a silver tray with a bottle of Modelo, leaning down and holding the tray out to me. “I heard you were on your way back, Kitsch. I stocked your favorite.”

“Thanks, Candy,” I said, holding the bottle toward her while she used an opener to pop the top.

“Did we not just have this fuckin’ discussion, Kitsch? You’re distracted and hyper fixated at the same time. You’re taking every job in Mason’s backyard and shitting all over it, hoping he’ll show up. Believe me, I get it. If he’d come after my wife and kids, I’d feel the same. But this…” he said, rubbing his hand over his face.

Tiger was the same height Kepner had been, ten years older than Trex and in even better shape. Like Kepner, Tiger was a giant, but he was thicker and bald, his shiny head beading with sweat as he mulled over just how bad I’d fucked up this time—or so it appeared. Tiger was fully aware of how dangerous it was to work with a Japanese billionaire dick deep in human trafficking, the dark web, gang activity in not only Japan but in the States, you name it. But money was money, and as long as we kept our asses on the right side of the law, he was at peace with it.

“Run it by me again,” he said, sitting behind his fancy desk. He tugged at his tie until it loosened, and he leaned forward, glaring at me. “Don’t leave anything out. I can’t fix this if I don’t know everything.”

“You can’t fix this,” I said.

“I haven’t come across a situation I couldn’t fix. This isn’t going to be the first.”

My eyes lost focus as I recounted a split-second decision that would change my life forever. “Matsuda’s head of security, Yoshida, submitted the itinerary listing Yuri Chesnokov at his guest for the dinner meeting at eighteen-hundred hours.”

“I’m aware.”

“Remember when I said the name was eerily similar to Mason’s boss, Yuri Chenkov? Well, that’s who sat across from us at dinner, and we were joined by Mason. I could’ve mentally prepared and had a plan had I been given the correct information, but as fate would have it, what amounted to a typo cost lives. They didn’t die because Mason distracted me. They died because I was given bad intel in addition to multiple other pressing factors.”

Tiger frowned. “Matsuda’s head of security went missing. It wasn’t a typo.”

“I know. It was Mason.”

“What other pressing factors?”

“There’s a lot of moving parts.”

“I’ll try to keep up,” he deadpanned.

“Fine. What you know is that the CEO of Ukeru Enterprises, Haru Matsuda, hired us for security for his son, Ren, who was attending meetings up and down the Nile. What you don’t know is that Ukeru Enterprises has been blocked from substantial monetary gain by the South Sudanese government and loyalists, and those meetings were being held in rebel-friendly homes and restaurant basements. They’ve been working to destabilize the government there, so foreign scavengers can gain access and make a lot of rich men who are already stupid rich even more money.”

Tiger closed his eyes. He now had knowledge of a coup and how and why it was being funded, and that was a far cry from hisKeep it Cleanmantra. We worked in a business where most clients had dealings that were, at best, in the gray area of legality, but as security, we focused on who had guns and if they were willing to use them. If a client got pressed by agencies like the DOJ or Interpol, we at least had the option of plausible deniability. Now, that was out the window, too.

“Tell me this is the bad news.”

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