Page 116 of Passion and Payback

“Yearly?”

“Each.”

“Each?”

“Tax-free.”

Hunter’s eyes bugged from his head, and he turned, taking a drink from his coffee to stare at me. “Jesus. What the fuck do your normal assets and agents make?”

“It varies,” Stitch told him with a shrug. “Now, do you have any other questions, or would you like to start deliberating together on what you’ll do?”

“I have two things to ask or add,” I said.

“By all means.”

“Two requirements.”

“If I haven’t already accounted for what you require, then we’ll have to negotiate.”

“Fine, whatever.”

“Then shoot.”

I pointed toward Hunter and then myself. “Whatever one of us does, the other willalwaysbe included. We work together, deal with problems and threats together, and never have to keep secrets from one another.”

“And the other?”

“I imagine we’ll be given rather intense, one-on-one training for whatever they have in mind.”

“You’ll be trained by a handler assigned to you, yes.”

“I want that to be you. I need someone I can trust.”

“I see,” Stitch said and then shrugged. “Done and done.”

“I…seriously?” I asked, taken aback by the ease with which he accepted my new demands without so much as a fight or a moment of hesitation.

“As I said, if you asked for something I hadn’t accounted for, we would have to return to the negotiation table. It makes more sense to train you together, which means you’ll learn to work together. We have dedicated teams. Not all are lone wolves like I am,” he said with a knowing smile. “And Hunter will trust your judgment where he doesn’t trust me. And you won’t trust someone you haven’t fought alongside or seen in action, whichis normal former military behavior. I volunteered myself for the task of being your handler and trainer.”

“Damn, he just read us like a book,” Hunter said with a rueful smile.

“It turns out I have an eye for recruitment,” Stitch said with a shrug. “After Alpha contacted me for information, I was curious about what was happening. Imagine my surprise when I did some digging into the person he was asking about and found out a childhood friend of his had died just over a week before. And then the man in question had died, and despite everything, the police had only two names that stood out as people of interest.”

“Not our finest moment,” I admitted with a grimace. “They were bound to keep an eye on us for a while after that, especially with Callum riding their ass.”

“Yes, and then Mitchell died, and it wasn’t hard to put the pieces together,” Stitch said. “And I found myself even more curious and looked into you. Alpha, of course, I could picture you, but Hunter? That surprised me. That was until I found an older file, buried in the system so deep you would have to look for something hidden to find it.”

Hunter’s jaw tightened. “The report I placed with the cops after they...after Lucas and I.”

“Indeed. And there was the answer. Still curious that you’d end up on this path two years later,” Stitch’s eyes flashed to me. “And after the return of your childhood best friend.”

“He was dragged along, not the mastermind,” Hunter told him quickly.

“I was a volunteer,” I corrected with a frown. “But not the mastermind.”

“Even more curious,” Stitch said with a chuckle. “Then it seems I was more right than I knew. Even with everything you’ve gone through, your average person would not have gone to the lengths you did to bring these three men...I’m sorry, four. Yourreport mentioned a dealer who happened to fit the description of a man who died a month ago. Curiously, he was stabbed, and it was theorized with his own knife, considering he was wearing a sheathe, but there was no blade.”

“Information gatherers, huh?” Hunter said, sounding torn between impressed and annoyed. “What a shame you guys don’t work for the cops.”

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