Page 13 of K-9 Guardians

It was all she could think to say. And she meant it. With every cell in her body, she was sorry she couldn’t make the hurt controlling him go away. But they weren’t partners. They weren’t friends. They were barely acquaintances. He was using her and Socorro to legitimize an off-the-books operation that’d led to the death of his partner and the kidnapping of his son. That was all she was. A resource.

Just as she’d been to the man who almost killed her.

But there was something about King that wanted to convince her she was more. In the way he thought about her needs in the middle of a scene where his partner and best friend had been murdered. The way he made every conversation lighter and pulled out the laugh she’d forgotten the sound of with sarcasm and banter. It’d been a long time since she’d felt this comfortable with a partner. And she almost wished she could hold on to that a little longer.

But she couldn’t. This investigation would end. Sooner or later, they’d find Julien. King would go back to the DEA, and she’d return to Socorro. They couldn’t make time stop. No matter how much she wanted to live in quiet moments like this. There was no point in trying.

Scarlett thumbed water beads off the bottle gripped between both hands. “What did Agent Roday have on the cartel?”

“What?” He cut his gaze to her.

“You said your partner was targeted to send you a message, and from what I’m seeing here, I’m inclined to believe Sangre por Sangre was using Adam to get to you or at least to learn what you had on them.” Her brain frantically scrambled to connect the dots. When a piece of circuitry failed in the security system she’d hardwired into Socorro’s headquarters, the whole system was compromised. It was her job to make sure her team was safe. She couldn’t do that with gaping holes. “But Julien’s mother was killed two months ago. You hadn’t spoken in years. You didn’t even know about your son, and it was her murder that triggered your investigation into Muñoz. There must’ve been a reason the cartel considered her a threat.”

“I reached out to the supervisory special agent over Eva’s unit a couple days after the social worker brought me Julien.” King directed his attention back to the officers working the scene, taking any prints that might’ve been left behind and marking areas safe to walk through the restaurant. “He claimed whatever Eva was working on before she died was above my pay grade. Classified. He couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me if the job was what got her killed, but I know for a fact Eva had looked into Muñoz in the past.”

“How can you be so sure?” she asked.

“That case we worked together, the one before we...”

The idea of him and the mother of his child together shouldn’t hit her nervous system as hard as it did.

King leveraged one arm against the shiny, lacquered table. “The DEA asked her to consult on a device we uncovered during one of our operations. We’d gotten intel from an informant that Sangre por Sangre and the head of the Marquez cartel out of Mexico were meeting in a warehouse outside the city. But by the time my team got there, we were just recovering pieces of the device after it did its job tearing through a good chunk of the Marquez cartel. Turned out, Sangre por Sangre was on a mission to consolidate power.”

“You said Adam had been with you from the beginning,” she said. “Was he there for that operation?”

“Of course. We...” King sat up a bit straighter. “We’ve been partners for over ten years. That was one of the first assignments we took on together.”

The answer was right there in front of them. A time and place where both victims had come together against the Sangre por Sangre cartel. A connection. The first real lead they’d had so far. “Then they knew each other, at least peripherally. Is there any chance Agent Dunkeld and Agent Roday have been in contact since that operation?”

King scrubbed a hand down his face. “I don’t know. Adam never said anything if he was, and police didn’t find anything in Eva’s phone records or emails to come to that conclusion.”

There was another explanation. Because the odds of two federal agents being stabbed to death in the span of two months—both of which landed in King’s orbit—were too great to ignore. “Unless your partner didn’t want you to know.”

“What are you saying?” He turned that internal intensity that could start a wild fire given enough space on her, and Scarlett’s defenses spiked. He shoved free of the booth and circled until he cut off her view of his face. “You think Adam and Eva were working on something together? There’s no way. He was my partner. We told each other everything, and he was a shit liar. Did everything by the book. I would’ve known if he was keeping something from me.”

“What if he couldn’t tell you?” Scarlett got to her feet, closing the distance between them. “Think about it. If Eva was investigating Sangre por Sangre and Muñoz after all these years, she would’ve needed a contact in the DEA. Someone who was there during that operation, but she couldn’t come to you. Not without telling you about Julien, and she obviously didn’t want that seeing as how she kept his existence a secret from you for ten years. So is it possible she reached out to Adam to get what she needed?”

His shoulders slowly relaxed away from his ears as King faced her. “It’s possible, but I don’t see how going through a ten-year-old operation gets her Muñoz or helps bring my son home now.”

Scarlett latched on to his forearm as the potential for answers heated through her. “Then let’s go find out.”

HECOULDSTILLfeel her.

That single touch that had somehow released the pressure valve behind his sternum.

The scene at the restaurant would take hours, if not days, to process. Time he and Scarlett didn’t have. Because if she was right, if a decade-old DEA operation was the reason Adam and Eva had been killed all these years later, and was why his son had been taken, they couldn’t wait for answers.

But he hadn’t wanted to find them here.

“You sure you want to start here?” Scarlett met him at the end of the driveway as Hans and Gruber sniffed their way down the sidewalk.

It probably didn’t seem like much from her end, but having her here meant something. It meant she was going to keep her word, that in a world where he couldn’t even trust the man he’d partnered with all these years, she was going to come through.

“I’ve been putting it off long enough.” Well-maintained bushes hid the initial view of the house he’d been to every morning for the past ten years. It wasn’t anything spectacular, but the clean rockscaping punctuated with bright purple cactus flowers told him the place was loved.

King hiked up the oil-spotted driveway toward the two-car garage hiding the view of the front door. A large bay window on the other side provided the homeowner with a view that guaranteed she saw them coming, and nervous energy shocked through him.

It wasn’t every day you had to tell your partner’s wife he wasn’t coming home.

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