Page 35 of K-9 Justice

“Easy?” Sebastian wiped his bloodied hands on the shirt of another soldier on the periphery. His voice almost echoed off the open two-story cinder block that had taken too much damage over the years. “No. Those women, they fought. They begged. They made it fun. You? I just want to kill you.”

It was the same room the war correspondent had been brought into and tormented for information concerning photos she’d taken over a period of three days—evidence of the cartel working in cahoots with a state senator. Carson had been powerless to stop it, and so he’d volunteered to take the place of her abusers. Holding back his strikes without giving away his intentions. He’d at least given her the chance to regain some of her strength, to escape. Thankfully, one of Socorro’s operatives had helped her survive. “Then what’s the holdup? You know who I am. You know what I’ve been doing insideSangre por Sangreall these years. Why wait?”

Blood rushed to his head, darkening his vision. Lack of sleep. Lack of nutrients. Heartbreak. Possibly a concussion. They would all play a vital role in the next hours.

Sebastian finished cleaning his busted knuckles and turned his attention back to Carson with nothing but death in his eyes. “You know, I never married. Never had children. Building this organization took everything I had. The lieutenants I recruited became family. My soldiers, my children. We worked together tobring about change. To finally take what was stolen from us so long ago.”

Sangre por Sangre’s founder—Carson still couldn’t wrap his head around that—withdrew a blade from one of the soldiers looking on. He moved faster than Carson expected. The blade stabbed through Carson’s upper arm. His scream failed to drown out Sebastian’s words. “Every single soldier I’ve lost in the past two years was because of you. Men and women who devoted their lives to my cause, who fought for me, bled for me and died for me. You’re going to pay for their lives. Slowly. Painfully. Then I’m going to leave your body in the desert for Agent Bardot to find. Then I’m going to kill another of her operatives. Then another. Until she has nobody left, and she’ll know the pain that you two have caused me.”

Excruciating pain burned until it overrode every sense Carson owned. He lost his control to the point a laugh escaped his chest. It rolled through him, gaining strength, blocking out the pain. Blood dripped beneath his shirtsleeve and tendriled over his collarbone.

“This is funny to you?” Sebastian asked.

“This? No.” Carson tried to shake his head. “I’m just imagining what Ivy’s going to do to you. Especially if she finds out you shot her dog. You have no idea the kind of hell you’ve brought down on yourself. On the soldiers you claim to care about. You think you’re some kind of protector. You have no idea what that word means compared to her. And I can’t wait to see you fall.”

A fist rocketed into his face. Carson’s body swung away from his attacker, then back for another strike. His head snapped back. Pain unlike anything he’d experienced before kept him conscious and urged his body to shut down at the same time.

He wouldn’t be able to take much more.

But of all the ways to go, he’d choose this a thousand times more. Because he knew the end result in his bones. He knew thatIvy would finish the assignment they’d started while they’d still been partners in the FBI. Despite his betrayal, she would remain the same woman she’d always been.

Valiant. Committed. Courageous.

He’d never been any of those things. Not like her. Carson had taken the easy way out. He saw that now. How going undercover within the cartel gave him the mask of hero, but Ivy had been on the outside. Fighting. Risking her team and her reputation and her own life. She’d earned a target on her back to protect him. How hadn’t he seen it before?

Their last conversation played on repeat at the back of his mind. He’d accused her of doing it all for herself. For the glory, to keep building a wall between her and the rest of the world, but that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. She was brave. Braver than Carson. He’d believed her inability to separate herself from their investigations over the years had built her into an unyielding, closed-off partner, but that wasn’t the case at all. The hell she’d suffered as a kid had led her to use her work to distract herself from dealing with the trauma. The grief. At ten years old, she’d had to shoot a man who beat her and her mother. How could he have seen her intensity as anything more than a way to ensure she never had to suffer like that again? That all she needed was for someone to choose her? Ivy Bardot loved fiercely. The proof was right there in the two bullets still cataloged in evidence in her stepfather’s investigation box. She risked everything in pursuit of holding on to the people who meant the most to her.

And he’d done the stupid thing and turned his back on her. He’d become a coward, so different from the times he’d come home with a black eye or a bloody lip because he’d refused to back down from the bullies who made fun of his mixed race.

Because he’d just wanted Ivy to choose him, too. To love him as much as he loved her. Losing his mother had takeneverything from him, but Ivy had been there to step into that role of companion. And when he’d gone undercover and lost his constant connection to her, he’d tried to replace it with the very men and women who would kill him with a single order now. To live up to her expectations.

He’d relied on other people to love and support him without ever considering he could do it himself. That he was the one responsible for his own happiness. Not his mother. Not Ivy. Not the people he’d convinced himself could give him what he needed from within the cartel. Him. The realization hit him harder than Sebastian’s next fist. And he wanted to figure out how to fix it. To move forward without that external validation. For once, he wanted to find out what made him happy. Other people’s interests be damned.

Only that seemed impossible now. Hanging upside down in the middle of a drug cartel headquarters surrounded by soldiers ready to kill him.

“Unfortunately, I’m not the one who will be falling today, Agent Lang.” Sebastian nodded to one of the soldiers off to one side. His female companion stepped forward. “Get him ready. I expect Socorro is already on its way, and we don’t want to keep them waiting.”

Socorro. Ivy. Carson pulled at the rope binding his hands behind his back with everything he had left. Which wasn’t much. The threads didn’t even stretch as the cartel soldier waved two more companions closer to assist. “You knew who I was. All this time. You knew what I was doing.”

“Of course I knew,” Sebastian said. “How else was I supposed to keep an eye on my old friend Agent Bardot?”

Son of a bitch. Carson had served within the cartel to provide Ivy and her team a leg up in this war, but he’d only been Sebastian’s puppet. Putting Ivy and Socorro in danger. Drawing them into a trap. “You can’t win this, Sebastian. It doesn’t matterhow many soldiers you throw at them or how many guns you buy. She won’t stop until you’re behind bars or six feet under.”

Sebastian wiped blood from the blade used to stab Carson’s arm on the same rag he’d used to clean his hands. “Don’t worry about me, my friend. There’s a reason I lured those Socorro dogs here.”

“What are you talking about?” Carson struggled as three soldiers braced his shoulders and started hauling him down. The world righted itself as they held him upright. They maneuvered him toward the corridor. Three to one wasn’t good odds.

“Let’s just say my focus is no longer on keeping operations moving or making more money. I’ve moved beyond mere survival.” The cartel founder smiled, easy and relaxed, despite the monster hidden within. “It’s all about the future now. I must thank you, Agent Lang. Without you, I never would’ve learned the identities of Socorro’s operatives, their protocols, their weapons preferences. You will be the reasonSangre por Sangrelives on to fight another day. Thank you.”

Carson hadn’t provided any of that.

“You son of a bitch.” He fought the strength of three soldiers as they dragged him toward the door. He didn’t know where they were taking him. It didn’t matter. What mattered was warning Ivy.

“Get him out of here, please.” Sebastian rounded a table Carson hadn’t noticed until then, turning a laptop toward him. Surveillance footage. Of the complex. And there, on the screen, a line of operatives making their way through the building. Ivy in the lead. “It seems our guests have arrived early. Let’s give them a proper greeting, shall we?”

Gunfire punctured through Carson’s shallow breathing a split second before Socorro’s private military contractors breached the room.

Ivy took aim at the man of the hour as her team and their K-9s filed in behind her. “Who shot my dog!”

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