Page 81 of The Broker

“Yeah, well. Now that I’m feeling the bullet in my gut, I’m not so sure that was the wisest choice I’ve ever made,” Ares quipped, grunting as his body shifted and pain shot through his side.

“I got this,” Elijah rushed, gently shoving Matteo aside and pulling some supplies from his tactical suit.

Isaac helped Matteo to his feet, giving Elijah some room to work on the scary gun trafficker.

Behind them, Isaac watched as two dirty and blood-soaked men gagged and bound his brother. They forced Declan onto his knees and then held a gun to the back of his head.

“Wait! No!” Isaac shouted at the executioners.

Both men glanced over at Isaac, looking like crazed serial killers on Christmas.

“Don’t kill him. I’ve got a better idea,” Isaac instructed.

All this pain. All this suffering. And it was all caused by this one man. An angry little boy who lost his father too soon and then grew up to become a hateful monster.

“Argh!” Ares growled as Elijah dug a set of pliers into Ares’s hairy belly and burrowed around for the bullet. “Fucking shit!” Ares growled as Elijah yanked out the bullet, then began flushing the open wound with antiseptic.

The last thing they needed was for the wound to get infected.

Ares’s eyes drifted over to the man who he saved. His lips pulled back into a smirk.

“Just in case you were wondering, this is how a real man takes a bullet.” Ares grinned, then grunted as Elijah applied a bit too much pressure to the wound—accidentally, of course.

“Is that how a real man handles pain as well?” Matteo chirped back, giving the man his own smirk in return.

Isaac tried not to laugh. It seemed inappropriate, considering all the blood, missing body parts, and injured men lying all around him.

“There,” Elijah huffed, slapping Ares on the chest as he stood. “You can stop your crying now.”

Ares glared at the head of his A-team death squad. “Touch me again, and they won’t find your body.”

Elijah chuckled. “I love that German humor of yours.”

German?Another clue in the mystery that was Ares, the man.

“Boss, what do you want us to do with this one? Apparently, he’s a lawyer or something?” One of Ares’s masked members asked, lifting a large knife to the man’s throat. “Should I just slit his throat and add him to the burn pile?”

So, apparently, the plan was to burn the bodies of all the men who they killed. This would destroy any DNA or fingerprints that might have been left behind on the bodies. It was one of Elijah’s safety protocols it turned out.

Matteo’s head snapped around when he heard the word lawyer.

“What’s his name?” Matteo asked.

“That’s Sawyer, the brains behind this operation,” Isaac answered.

Behind them, Declan growled, unable to speak because of his gag. Apparently, he didn’t like not being recognized as the brains in this operation.

“Don’t kill him. We’re taking him home with us. I’ve got a better way to deal with this monster,” Matteo ordered, glancing over his shoulder at Chase, who had just walked into the room with Diesel in tow. Diesel looked like he’d been sprayed with blood on the side of his face, while Chase’s jeans were covered in some sort of dark matter. Isaac was too afraid to ask what the mystery gunk was.

Wrapping his arms around Jared’s firm waist, Isaac looked up into the warmest chestnut eyes he had ever seen.

“Can we go home now, babe?”

Jared smiled and kissed his nose.

“Sounds perfect.”

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