Total pages in book: 55
Estimated words: 51832 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 259(@200wpm)___ 207(@250wpm)___ 173(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 51832 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 259(@200wpm)___ 207(@250wpm)___ 173(@300wpm)
Ana was wrong about him being the best killer out there. Kurt never claimed to be the best. Kurt’s special skill, his nasty little skill, is his ability to extract the man from the killer and therefore create a monster. He can smell weakness and manipulate it, and manifest it into something you don’t recognize as you. I know because he did it to me. Manipulation is his ticket, and he punches with it at every human target in his path. Later, much later probably, I’m going to think about what that tells me, about everything he’s now confessed, if anything.
For now, I just want the bastard tied up and Adam appears to be of the same mindset. He steps in front of Kurt. “Hands behind your back.”
Kurt smirks, but is surprisingly compliant, doing as told, while Adam moves to his rear to get the job done.
I stand my ground, facing off with Kurt.
He smirks, appearing amused by my attention.
Everything about Kurt’s life, death, and return, screams bomb about to explode. He needs to be secured, dominated by those ropes, and our team before I’ll feel comfortable turning my back on him. Before I’ll leave him alone with Adam and Savage.
“You know I spoke the truth,” Kurt says, somehow turning his captivity into my captivity and putting his master manipulation to work. “About Kasey,” he adds. “About Ana. About you leaving her to die.”
I didn’t fucking leave her to die.
My fingers curl in my palms, a tick forming in my left jaw. He’s trying to trigger me, and he’s not a complete failure, despite me knowing exactly what he’s doing. What I don’t know is what he thinks he’s achieving right now. To stir guilt in me? My submission to that guilt and therefore him? Whatever the fuck, but that’s not what he gets.
Yes, I feel like shit for leaving Ana, years of guilt fester inside me, but I’m back with Ana, and I’m here to stay. If we believe his story, the cesspool of danger and bullshit that created my departure, and Ana’s heartache, came from his decision to leave us in the dark over Kasey. The suffering she endured could have been avoided had I simply not taken Kasey with me on that mission. And I wouldn’t have. Not if I’d known he was dirty.
Damn Kurt to hell, where he should have crawled and stayed. As if proving that point, anger explodes inside me, and I do what I would never do if I was in my right mind. I step up on an unarmed man with his hands tied behind his back and punch the hell out of him. His head snaps back. Blood gushing from the left side of his lower lip.
It was a pussy move on my part, and for what? I don’t feel better.
Fuck.
I want to do it again. I turn away from him and start walking before I do that and more.
He reads me like a book and calls out, “Feel better, son?”
I halt and turn back to him. “I wish like hell that was all it took to make me feel better, you smug prick. Had I known what I know now, Kasey might be alive and I would never have left Ana’s side.”
“Holy hell, I taught you better than this. Emotion kills so for God’s sake, stop wallowing in guilt and the blood of what can’t be changed because that shit will get you and Ana killed. As for Kasey. Kasey got Kasey killed. As for you and Ana, you chose to leave and kill what you had with her. Punch me all you want but that’s not on me.”
“Spoken like a man who never takes accountability for a problem. He just kills them off.”
“As you said, if only it was that simple, this problem would be dead right now.”
My mind jerks back in time, to the day, a long time ago, when I met Kurt, a day I told Ana about but left out details. Not because I was hiding things from her, but because it wasn’t the kind of memory any of us hold onto. I was in Saudi Arabia, of all places considering that’s where Kasey died, and I can almost feel the muggy, stifling hot night, suffocating me.
My team of six had been on a mission to protect innocents from a hostile, when Kurt and his team had landed in our path, on the same side of right versus wrong. Only right felt pretty damn wrong when Kurt had killed a kid, not more than sixteen, and did so to save my life. The kid meant to kill me, he did, and I got that, but I suffered over that kill while Kurt lost not a second of his life to regret or guilt. “Kill or be killed, son,” he’d said to me, later that night. “Keep it simple. Leave the emotion out of the kill.”