Page 55 of Shadow Secrets
Sebastian pulled out his phone and hit CB’s name. One ring. “Yep.”
Sebastian lowered his voice. “Iron Rose, now. Armed hostile inside with Sutton. Both doors are locked. Mack, Garrett, full response. No sirens—this guy will kill her if he hears them.”
“Oh, hell. On our way.”
Sebastian pocketed the phone and ran the tactical math. The back door was reinforced—another upgrade Sebastian had recommended. He’d have to shoot the lock. Doing that or kicking it in was loud and slow, which meant the shooter would kill Sutton the moment he heard the impact.
The alley-side window into the office was single-pane but narrow. Sebastian couldn’t fit through it cleanly.
He went to the back door anyway. He had to try something. He stepped back, planted his foot, and hit the door with his shoulder at full weight.
The frame cracked. A splinter of wood near the lock plate. The door shuddered but held.
Through the tiny window, he saw the shooter pivot. The man’s head snapped toward the back door, the pistol swinging in the same direction. Sebastian jerked back to the side of the frame a half-second before the round punched through the door at shoulder height.
Wood splintered. Sutton screamed again—his name this time, high and panicked.
“Try that again and I’ll kill her!” The shooter’s voice was muffled through the door. Angry. Wound tight.
Sebastian pressed his back against the exterior wall. Breathed.
He moved to the long, narrow window again. The clear portion above the frost line gave him a view of the parlor interior—he could see the back of the shooter’s head, the muzzle of his weapon, and most of Sutton with her hands still raised. He couldn’t hear perfectly through the glass, but he could hear enough.
“You don’t understand what you’ve done,” the shooter said.
Sutton’s voice came back thin but controlled. Sebastian had to give her credit—she was scared out of her mind and still holding it together. “I don’t even know who you are.”
“You don’t know who I am. That’s perfect. That’s just perfect.” The shooter laughed—short, bitter, nothing like humor. “I’ll tell you who I am. I’m the reason your brother killed himself.”
Sebastian went still. What?
“I recruited Penn. I spent a year at his shop getting ink from him, bringing him clients, feeding him enough work that he started to trust me. I watched him, read him. And when my bosses said he was the one—the artist we needed—I went to him with the proposition.”
“The Network tattoo,” Sutton’s voice was barely audible.
He went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “Design for us, join us. Be part of something that matters, I told him. He said no. Over and over, he said no. The leadership said break him or lose him, and breaking him was my assignment.”
Sebastian’s hands had gone cold.
“I did my research,” the shooter continued. “Your parents were useless. He had no girlfriend, no close friends. He only had one weak spot. Just one.”
Sutton’s wide eyes grew wider. “Me.”
“You.” He planted his feet wider, nodded his head as Sutton blanched. “I told him that if he didn’t take the assignment, just this one assignment, I’d have you killed. Your address, schedule, class times at Corcoran—I had all of it. I showed him photographs. He understood. That’s how we do leverage. You find the thing they love and you put it on the table.”
A long beat. Sebastian could hear his own pulse in his ears.
“He took the assignment. We needed the Galbraith girl dead. We needed her daddy out of the race.” The shooter paced a few steps to his right, then back. “But Penn—what a screwup. He took the assignment to save you, then showed up at that fundraiser intent on failing. He was never going to pull the shot off clean. He wanted it to end with him in a body bag. He couldn’t kill her, and if he didn’t, he knew we’d kill you. But if he ended up dead…” The man shrugged and snorted. “He wouldn’t be forced to do anything for us again.”
Sutton’s hands came down from the raised position. She braced them against the edge of her station, knuckles white. “What?”
“Your Secret Service boyfriend killed him, giving him his only way out. My bosses were furious. I was put on watch for three years—three years—because Penn fucked up the assignment, and I was the one who’d recruited him. Everything I’ve built since then has been about rehabilitating my standing. Cleaning up his mess. Hunting down the loose ends.”
His voice was climbing, the sound of a man who’d been holding something inside for a long time. “Ginger got too close. I sent Booker, he was my asset. But the idiot got caught. Another failure on my record. The Network is done with me. My handler went silent two days ago. There’s a contract on me and the only way I walk out of this with my life is if I end the problem myself. The one thread still connecting everything back to the organization through Penn’s work.”
He raised the pistol. “You.”
Sebastian understood, then, what he was listening to. This was a man who’d already been written off by his organization and was trying to earn his own survival with one final kill.
