Page 29 of K-9 Justice

He hit the elevator’s down button with a little too much force and stepped back. Max caught up without so much as a huff. As though she was as disappointed in him as much as he was with himself.

Movement registered in the reflective stainless steel, and he turned to find Ivy standing there. She’d changed back into her slacks and blazer, washed her hair, scrubbed the dirt and blood from her skin. The woman he’d pulled out of that warehouse was buried beneath the armor she’d built for herself over the past two years. Never to surface again as long as she could help it. “Tell me what’s going through your head.”

He didn’t want to have this conversation. Not yet. Not here. Carson hit the elevator call button a second time, but the damn thing wouldn’t speed the hell up. “You did a good job rallying the troops in there. I can see why they’ve stayed on with Socorro as long as they have. You should start working on your strategy to track down Sebastian. Every second counts.”

“And what will you be doing?” The fabric of her slacks rustled as she moved in close, and a flare of heat shot up his neck.

It spread down his spine and wrapped around his rib cage, squeezing him in some invisible vise. “There’s something I need to take care of.”

“Would it have anything to do with the two cartel soldiers Jones brought in?” she asked.

He didn’t want to lie to her. She deserved better than that. The elevator arrived, doors parting, and Carson took a step into the car. Max followed, planting her butt at his feet.

Except Ivy was right behind him. She threaded her arm between the doors and prevented them from closing. “Just tell me what’s going on, Carson. After everything we’ve been through the past few days, everything we’ve promised one another, you at least owe me that.”

She was right. Of course she was right. That same sinking feeling he’d experienced before Sebastian had betrayed him at the salvage yard took hold. He was standing on the edge of a blade. Tip too far in one direction, make one choice, and he lost the family he’d found within the cartel. Tip too far in the other, and he lost Ivy. His cartel world and his personal world were mutually exclusive. He couldn’t have one without losing the other. The idea of helping Socorro slaughter and arrest the soldiers—the people—he’d come to know and rely on surged acid into his throat. There were good people in those ranks. Not just killers. People who’d had no other choice than to join the cartel to save their families, their friends, their way of life. At the same time, these were men and women he’d only known through becoming someone he wasn’t, and choosing them over Ivy threatened to tear his heart in half. “I think you already know the answer you’re looking for.”

Color seemed to drain from her already-pale skin. Her mouth parted on a strong exhalation, but it was the only sign she’d filled in the blanks. Like always, she was trying to hold herselftogether, to keep anyone from seeing her vulnerabilities. “You’re going back. To the cartel.”

“I don’t have a choice,” he said. “There are people there who were just following orders, Ivy. They don’t have anything to do with calling the shots. They weren’t the ones who targeted Alpine Valley or retaliated for a missing fentanyl shipment. They were just trying to survive. Like me. They deserve a chance to get out while they still can.”

“If by survive you mean kidnap an eight-year-old boy to force his sister to turn herself over to their lieutenant.” Ivy’s voice lost the confused quality it had taken a minute ago, growing stronger. Puncturing him like a thousand needles. “Or when they abducted and tortured a war correspondent because she witnessed the cartel slaughter ten American soldiers in the desert. How about when they put a bounty on an innocent woman’s head because she refused to be connected to her extremist family of preppers? Was that your friends’ way of surviving? Was it yours?”

She could list a dozen more incidents. With good reason. A chill spread along his back as he realized the position he’d put himself in. If he wasn’t choosing Socorro—if he wasn’t choosing Ivy—he was choosing to become her enemy. Black and white. No going back. “That’s not the least bit fair, and you know it. I agreed to go undercover. We both knew what that would entail, what I would have to do to work my way up the ladder and gain the cartel’s trust, but I don’t expect you to understand what it means to be part of a team. All your former partners were right. You bulldoze anyone and everyone to get your way and solve a case, and I was fine with that for a long time. Because you provided justice to those who deserved it. You kept more people from getting hurt and you saved lives. But you’re so blinded by one man’s atrocities that you’re not willing to see there might bemore innocent lives involved in this investigation than the ones you found in the desert.”

Silence built between them. Heavy and thick and unrelenting.

Ivy stepped over the threshold into the elevator, her heels on the verge of getting caught in the tracks.

“I have watched the cartel tear apart people’s lives. They’ve sold girls and women for profit. They’ve spread their drugs and killed children. They punished Dr. Piel and Jocelyn for simply having a connection to this company, and they’ll continue killing my team unless I put a stop to it. Do you know what that tells me?” Ivy didn’t let him answer. “That tells me that every single soldier, contracted killer, lieutenant and supplier is complicit in the cartel’s actions. You talk about the low-level soldiers, these friends you made while undercover, as innocent? There are no innocents inside theSangre por Sangrecartel, Carson, and I will not let any of them walk away without answering for their crimes.”

“And that’s why I have to leave,” he said. “I have to give them a chance. Just one of them. Please.”

She smoothed her expression, as though he were a stranger. “From the moment I found you in my safe house four nights ago, there was a part of me that wondered where your loyalties really fell. Your insistence on hiding out in a cartel safe house was just the start, but I think it was your connection to Sebastian and your willingness to consult with a cartel soldier on this investigation that gave you away. I convinced myself I was being paranoid, that there was no way my partner could’ve been turned, but all of that paranoia was with good reason. Because you’re not my partner anymore.”

His heart shot into his throat with denial. But Carson only let her words hang between them.

She dropped her hand away from the elevator door sensors and allowed the elevator to start closing. “You have two hoursbefore Socorro comes for your organization, Dominic Rojas. I suggest you get the people you’re trying to save as far from here as possible. Before you’re caught in the fight.”

The doors sealed between them.

Carson stared into his reflection as gravity shoved his stomach higher in his torso. An emptiness he’d managed to keep a rein on grew bigger, as he added more distance between himself and Ivy.

Max moaned at his feet, echoing the hurt and the pain doubling inside his chest, but there was no going back for them. He’d made his choice, and Ivy had made hers. Neither of them was willing to consider the other’s position, and everything he’d hoped for the future—for them—stayed behind in Ivy’s office.

Second by second, the Carson Lang he’d been over these past few days slipped to the back of his mind. The elevator doors parted on the level below, and he stepped into a black-on-black corridor. Every inch the cartel soldier he’d trained himself to become. Within minutes, this building would become enemy territory. A maze meant to confuse and trap him and keep him from getting what he wanted. He had minutes to locate the two soldiers taken into custody and get out.

Carson’s fingers tingled to unholster his weapon, but any threat inside the building was sure to alert the security system and the woman behind it. He and Max moved along the corridor with an abstract idea of how the building had been laid out, according to Ivy’s and the other operatives’ descriptions.

It was enough.

They made a right at the end of the main hallway, coming face-to-face with a wall of glass. Not so much a window. One-way glass that looked into a single interrogation room. Carson recognized the woman inside. Her dark hair had been braided back tight enough to pull at the frame of her face. She paced back and forth, stripped of her weapons. She’d never liked being put in a closed-off space with no exit. Always had a knack for findingthe best way out of any given situation. It was one of the reasons he’d been able to get himself and Sebastian out of the cartel headquarters when the entire building had started coming down on them. She’d been the one to lead them out.

He went for the door and threw it open.

She turned on him. Every inch of her lean frame ready for a fight. Confusion creased her wide, heart-shaped face, and she backed off, lunging for the door. “Dominic? What the hell are you doing here?”

“Getting you out of here.” He didn’t wait for her response, moving on to the room next door. Carson threw the second door open, confronted with one of the younger recruits brought into the cartel within the past couple of months. The rookie didn’t have a lot of know-how about how things worked yet, but he’d been willing to learn from the beginning. “Come on. We don’t have a lot of time.”

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