ready.” Abby tossed her useless headset aside.
“No. We’re not supposed to—”
“We have at least one man down and no radio.” She slapped a vest over her shirt, and then grabbed a gun, emotion sitting heavy in her voice. No cool, calm and collected now. No, all that had gone right out the window with her last ounce of common sense, apparently. “We’re going in.”
There was some scrambling, whether to join her or stop her she didn’t know because she didn’t look back as she opened the door to the van.
LOGAN BOLTED ACROSS THE ROOF of the barn, dodging the icy spots and the shadow he’d seen. Not Gaines, but one of his paid goons, coming back from where he’d last spotted Hawk.
He sped up, high-tailing his way toward Hawk, because that’s what they did, they backed each other up. They’d been doing so for years in far tighter jams than this one. And in all that time, he’d never once felt anything but utterly invincible.
But at this moment, all he felt was terror.
Hawk was down.
Rounding a corner of the roof, Logan headed toward a vent. As he crouched down behind it to survey the situation, the air stirred, and he felt a blinding pain in the back of his neck. As he whipped around to fight, he was hit again, by a two-by-four, or so it felt, and then he was flying off the roof toward the ground.
Shit. Now both he and Hawk were down….
THIS WAS RIDICULOUS, ABBY TOLD herself as the cold, icy night slapped her face. She’d taken herself out of the field. She’d vowed that nothing could get her back to it. And yet here she was, off and running at the first sign of trouble because she couldn’t stand the thought of an agent down.
Ken caught up with her, both of them gasping in the shockingly bitter wind. They took the long, winding dirt path up toward the ranch. The place sat on a set of rolling hills that looked deceptively mild and beautiful by day. But by night the area turned almost sinister, steep, rugged and dangerously isolated. Fallen pine needles crunched beneath their feet. The patches of ice were lethal spots of menace that could send them flying, but still they ran.
The wind didn’t help. It was picking up, if that was possible, slicing through to the very bone, kicking up a dusty haze that nothing could cut through, not even the night vision goggles.
When they reached the dark farmhouse, they stopped to draw air into their burning lungs.
“Around the back,” Ken said. “The barn’s around the back.”
She was already moving that way but came to a stop at the corner of the farmhouse, where she had the vantage point of what should have been a woodsy clearing, but with the dark and the driving winds, seemed more like the wilds of Siberia.
She knew the barn lay beyond the trees, but in between there were no lights, no sign of human life. Abby went left, Ken right, both skirting the edges of the clearing, using the trees as cover.
Where was everyone?
As she came through the woods, the barn loomed up ahead, nothing but a black outline against a black sky. And then she saw him.
Hawk.
He was standing, holding his gun pointed at someone standing in the door of the barn.
Abby watched in horror as the gun flashed, and she caught a glimpse of the man he’d aimed at flying backward like a rag doll.
Gaines? Elliot Gaines? What the hell? Why was he here? Everything within her went cold. Had Hawk just shot Gaines?
3
WINNING WAS EVERYTHING. Knowing it, Gaines pushed down harder on Hawk’s windpipe, barely feeling the blood running down his arm. He’d been nicked before, a year and a half ago in Seattle as a matter of fact, while wrestling in the dark with one of his own ATF agents.
Hawk, in fact.
See, that’s what happened when one hired the best, and Hawk was the best of the best. He was a fucking pitbull, and he’d all but publicly promised to stop at nothing until the leader of the Kiddie Bombers was behind bars.
He might as well have signed his own death certificate.
And goddamn, he’d actually gotten a shot off. That was a pisser. But the explosions Gaines’s men had rigged would go off soon, and Hawk would be lost in them. Logan also, because it had become clear tonight that there was no other way.
And though it killed him, Abby, too.
No loose ends.
And there wouldn’t be. Thanks to his crew, which included Watkins working on the inside, everything had been perfectly choreographed. Already Tibbs would have received an anonymous tip that would raise enough questions about Hawk’s “role” in the theft of the rifles from the ATF to enable Tibbs to get a search warrant for Hawk’s place. There he’d find a computer memory stick with Kiddie Bombers’ information, including purchases, sales and contacts, password-protected and encrypted just enough to make it look legit.
Hawk framed, check. Hawk dead, almost check.
And then, retirement time. Good times. The only thing that would have made tonight perfect would have been if he hadn’t been forced to take out Abby. He regretted that, and he’d miss her like hell, but he couldn’t risk the rest of his life for a piece of tail, no matter how badly he wanted that piece.
He was so close now. Close enough to taste it. God, he loved to win. And tonight, he planned to win big. “Got any last-minute prayers?”
EVEN WITH HIS VEST, the after-effects of taking a slug in the chest were brutal. His muscles were spasming, his body twitching, and it was sheer agony to get his limbs to obey his mind. But Hawk managed to grab Gaines’s ankle and yank him to the ground, leveling the playing field, though not by much. Jesus, even his brain hurt, feeling as if it’d been used as a pinball within his skull. Gathering his thoughts was an exercise in futility, but he had to fight off Gaines—then he caught the flicker from within the barn. Flames. Ah, shit, the whole thing was going to—
Blow.
The explosion knocked them both backward. The barn roof blew sky high, catching the grass in the clearing on fire, as well as the trees.
Surrounded. He was surrounded by unrelenting heat, scorching him both inside and out. Gaines came up on his knees, looking like death warmed over as he staggered to his feet, pointing his gun. “You’re hard to kill.”
“So are you.” Hawk’s gaze locked on the dark spot blooming out from the shoulder of Gaines’s jacket. “Missed your black heart, unfortunately. I blame the hit to the chest. Threw me off.”
The smoke rose from behind Gaines’s head, making it look like steam was coming out of his ears.
“It’s going to get worse,” his own personal monster said.
It was true. If Gaines chose to shoot Hawk in the nuts, there was nothing he could do. His body was shit at the moment.
Gaines pointed the gun between Hawk’s eyes.
“Go to hell,” Hawk said.
Gaines grinned. “Tell you what, I’ll meet you there.”
Hawk’s life flashed before his eyes. His parents, gone now, but so proud of him when they’d been alive. Special Forces, where he’d had a good run—no, make that a great run—before moving to ATF.
Another great run.
Until now.
Maybe he should have added some more personal touches to his life’s canvas. A wife. Kids. But he’d always figured there was plenty of time for that.
Helluva time to be wrong. “Do it,” he said, coughing from the smoke. “And die.”
Gaines laughed. “You have no idea