Page 26 of Risky Passion

The chains clinked behind me, and Hughes whimpered.

"I won't say anything." His voice trembled. "About the call. Or Cooper. Or any of this."

I turned slowly, my fingers itching to wrap those chains around his scrawny neck. But I couldn’t. Not yet. The sniveling accountant was worth more to me alive. For now. "No, Grant. You won’t."

Above us, more pigeons burst into the air like they'd sensed a predator swooping in for the kill. That was what I was—an eagle, sharp-eyed and deadly, crushing my enemies one by one.

Grant's gaze drifted upward to the hoist system on the pillars. His eyes lingered, narrowing. Had he noticed my trap?

I stepped close enough to him to smell his sweat.

His eyes widened, and the chains rattled against the floorboards like wind chimes.

"Please," he whispered, the word hanging in the air like smoke. "Look at me, I'm useless."

"That's where you're wrong, Grant Hughes. You're the best bait I could have asked for."

"Bait?" His eyes flew so wide the whites gleamed in the dim light.

"Aria and her fucking Alpha Tactical Ops team want you alive for interrogation."

His brows furrowed, confusion warring with terror on his face.

"You're going to bring the whole damn lot of them straight to me."

Something clicked behind his eyes.

"Okay. Yes." He nodded frantically. "I'll get them here for you. I'll do that."

I laughed, the sound echoing off the warehouse walls. "Yes. You will."

It had taken me three days and a lot of sweat to weave the fuse wire around the pillars, thread it up to the rafters, and snake it down into the floorboards to connect to the detonator. Three painstaking days to rig enough C4 to turn this warehouse and everyone in it into a smoking crater. Those Alpha Tactical bastards were not walking away this time.

They hadn’t just killed my boys. They’d done worse. They’d pumped bullets into them, and not a single one had been a kill shot. That wasn’t incompetence. It was a message. Cruel. Deliberate. Calculated. Alpha Tactical didn’t miss. Every member of that team was atrained marksman. Especially Maya. That blonde bitch could drop a man with a single shot, clean and precise.

But not with my boys.

No, Thomas and Fraser had been left to bleed out. Left to scream. The previous coroner told me they’d lived long enough to talk. Probably long enough for that sadistic fuck, Blade, to get what he wanted before their bodies gave out.

I clenched my jaw until the pain radiated through my skull. Blade wouldn’t walk out of here.

None of them will.

The detonator rested in my purse, a small, unassuming device that held the power to obliterate Blade and his team. One press of the button, and the explosion would reduce them to pulp, their bodies shredded and scattered like ash in the dirt.

This wouldn’t be clean. No, this was something far more fitting: brutal, efficient, and poetic in its destruction. It was exactly what my boys deserved.

If I had one regret, it was that I wouldn’t witness the deaths of those military bastards with my own eyes. The satisfaction of seeing their fear, their pain, until the precise moment they realized they had lost would have been exquisite. Instead, I’d made do with rigging cameras around the warehouse to capture every grisly detail.

There was a silver lining, though. I could watch their deaths over and over again. Relive the moment as many times as I needed to dull the hollow ache inside me. Or until I convinced myself it had dulled.

My gaze drifted to the tiny camera nestled above Grant’s head, hidden in plain sight. Fraser would have admired the precision of my setup. He’d always been fascinated by surveillance equipment, tinkering with wires and lenses like a boy with his first toy. If he were alive to see my handiwork, he would be impressed.

But Fraser wasn’t alive. Neither was Thomas. My two boys. I’d raised them like they were my own. Molded them, loved them. They’d been frail little orphan kids when I was first ordered to look after them. And though I’d told myself to remain detached, to keep them at arm’s length, I couldn’t.

How could I?

I’d been an orphan too. I’d been just hours old, wrapped in a tattered dog blanket, when I was abandoned on the cold, concrete steps of Angelsong Orphanage. No name. No note. No trace of who had brought me into this world, only the quiet certainty that nobody wanted me.

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