Page 8 of K-9 Confidential

“So why didn’t you?” Dirt kicked up alongside the SUV as he maneuvered onto a one-way unpaved road that would take them straight into the heart of Vaughn. He had to tell himself to press against the accelerator to keep himself from letting the vehicle roll to a stop. To give them more time. “Why didn’t you stick to the plan?”

“Because I was afraid.” She hadn’t shied away from him this time, the weight of her attention solid and vulnerable. “We started out needing something from each other. You needed me to help you take down my father, and I needed you to get me and my sisters out of Vaughn safely, but then it became something more than that. We became something more. I was in love with you, Granger.”

That final statement gutted him more efficiently than a blade.

“I was willing to give up everything we were working for if you had just asked. To the point I actually hoped you would, but those words never came. You wanted me to go through with my end of the deal, and I needed you to hold up yours,” she said. “The night of the pipeline attack, Sage confronted me. She knew about us. I don’t know how, but she was ready to expose me to our father. Tell him everything I’d done. That was what we were arguing about before the charges went off. She accused me of destroying our family, when all I’d wanted to do was save it. And she told me you were just using me to get to Dad. That the moment I was done being useful, you would throw me behind bars with the rest of Acker’s Army.”

Hell. An ache swelled along his jaw from the pressure on his back teeth. Granger kept his attention forward, but his entire nervous system had honed on Charlie. On the pain in her voice, in her words. “You believed her.”

“Yeah, Granger. I believed her.” She settled back into staring out the passenger side window. “So I did what I thought I had to do to protect myself, and I never looked back.”

Silence cut through the SUV, apart from the crunch of dirt and rock beneath the vehicle’s tires. A barbed wire fence came into view along the right side of the road, signaling Vaughn’s western border. Granger took his foot off the accelerator, and the SUV slid to a stop mere feet from crossing that sacred, invisible line.

Charlie moved to get out of the vehicle.

“I was in love with you too.” Granger needed to make that clear. That what’d happened between them hadn’t been part of some grand scheme to get inside Acker’s Army and her pants. There were rules against relationships between agents and their confidential informants, but he hadn’t been able to keep himself in check. Not when it came to her. In a sense, the forbidden nature of their relationship had made it all the more exciting, but those initial feelings of lust had quickly dissolved and left something more real behind. “Your sister was wrong. Whatever she convinced you of was a lie, Charlie, and when I got word you were involved in the attack, I wasn’t angry you hadn’t held up your end of the deal. I was worried I’d lost you.”

Zeus’s stomach growled in the silence and seemed to knock Charlie back into the present.

Her attention cut out the windshield, and the tension she’d managed to lose over the past few minutes returned. “They’re here.”

Granger diverted his senses to the threat coming down the road. Dirt puffed around three trucks charging straight for them. For a militaristic operation, Henry Acker could use some new wheels. His training took over then, and Granger whistled low to wake Zeus. The bull terrier launched himself out of the vehicle and followed on Granger’s heels.

He and Charlie moved as one toward the SUV’s front bumper. Ready for anything. They met as a team for the first time in over a decade. “You armed?”

“Don’t worry about me.” Long brown hair blew back over her shoulders as she faced the oncoming storm. Just as he remembered. “My father isn’t going to let anyone but himself kill me, if that’s how he chooses to end this. He’d consider it the coward’s way out, and Henry Acker is no coward.”

Granger fought the urge to unholster his weapon. Acker owned the entire town, the land, the buildings, the people who resided here. This was all private property that’d been incorporated through political pressure and a whole lot of personal funds. One wrong move and he’d lose any chance of figuring outSangre por Sangre’s intentions for Charlie.

Zeus’s growl vibrated into Granger’s leg.

“Steady. You won’t be flattening anyone today, mutt,” he said.

“You really need to put that dog on a diet.” Charlie took a clear step forward, crossing the demarcation line, raising her hands in surrender as the lead truck skidded to a stop. The two vehicles behind it each veered off to both sides, one right, the other left. Driver’s side doors fell open, and a handful of pretend soldiers splayed into formation, taking aim.

“Hold it right there! You’re trespassing on private property.”

“Get down on your knees and put your hands behind your heads.”

Charlie cut her gaze back over her shoulder, locking Granger in her sights. A single nod preceded her agreement. She’d warned him of the ways in which Henry Acker would exert his dominance over them. This was just the beginning. She dropped onto one knee, then the other, and interlaced her hands behind her head.

One of the soldiers centered his weapon on Granger. “I said on your knees! Or can’t you hear?”

Granger had faced all kinds of danger in his pursuit of terrorists like these men. The ones who followed orders blindly for a cause that had nothing to do with them. The masterminds who disregarded the lives devoted to them as nothing more than ants under their boots. Like theSangre por Sangrelieutenants he and his team had taken on. These men weren’t more than thirty, some even younger. They had their entire lives ahead of them, and yet Henry Acker had somehow convinced them to fight against the very country that’d been born into.

“Granger. It’s the only way to get to my father.” Charlie’s voice carried to him. They had one shot at this. They had to play their cards right.

He lowered to his knees.

The soldier who’d ordered Granger down rushed forward.

Charlie reached for him with one hand. “No!”

The butt of the soldier’s rifle connected with Granger’s temple.

And the world went black.

CHAPTER FOUR

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