Page 4 of Fallen Hero

Are you safe?

Define safe.

Give me five minutes to get the team together. Answer me when I call.

Do women always bend to your orders?

I felt my lips tighten.

And just like in Mexico, I had an overwhelming urge to kiss the fuck out of her to shut her up. Unfortunately, she was on the other side of the world.

That’s a show not tell, sweetheart. And I’m happy to show you when I get there.

What the fuck was wrong with me? I’d never in my life had the urge to kiss a woman to shut her up. Moreover, I was never happy to show a woman anything.

The feisty blonde with gemstone eyes and a death wish was a temptation I didn’t need. A temptation that stirred something inside of me that was better left dead. A temptation that would test my control in ways I wasn’t sure I could best.

Fuck.

I stood and shoved my phone back in my pocket.

“Yo, Pete, we need everyone at the big house. ASAP.”

My best friend looked over at me, read my tone, and pulled out his phone to gather the rest of the team.

Looked like we were headed to Abu Dhabi.

Chapter One

“Don’t be mad.”

My gaze slid from the mirror, where I was watching myself unclasp my earrings, to the video call on my phone.

“That’s never a good way to start a conversation,” I told my . . . what was Atlanta? Not my assistant, not exactly my intel specialist, not my friend in the sense we shared secrets over cosmos and scheduled manis and pedis at the same time so we could gab and gossip.

Though she was a friend in the sense she helped me hide the bodies. That was, the bodies that needed to be disposed of. Sometimes it was better to leave the dead where they were, as a warning.

To say Atlanta was displeased I didn’t call her after the DC situation was an understatement. She would’ve had the crime scene cleaned, and I wouldn’t be on the hook for three men’s deaths.

The authorities would and did call it manslaughter. I called it consequences. It would’ve been a lesson in ‘no means no’ if I’d left them breathing. Seeing as I didn’t, and they earned their punishment by ignoring my friend’s pleas for them to stop, in the end, their deaths were nothing more than justice. A savings for the taxpayers. The police should’ve been thanking me for taking three raping, low-life scumbags off the streets.

News flash, they weren’t. And to further their ungratefulness, I now had a warrant—or warrants, as it were—out for my arrest.

I watched Atlanta pinch her lips before she rubbed them together. Something she did when she was trying to come up with the best way to spin news she didn’t want to share but knew she had to.

“Just spit it out,” I said and went back to my earrings.

“I texted Mason Hughes.”

At her declaration, my eyes sliced back to my phone. “You did what now?”

With a long, heavy sigh, Atlanta attempted damage control. “I talked to Tom—”

“That was your first mistake,” I interrupted her.

Atlanta rolled her eyes. Not because she didn’t know I was correct. Speaking to Tom was always a mistake. He was a snake. And not just any snake. Tom was at the top of the deadly snakes we dealt with. The Black Mamba, if you will. I had no doubt he’d eat his young if it meant saving himself, and, seeing as that was the case, one day when the time was right for him and it served his purpose, he’d throw me under the bus.

Which meant he wouldn’t think twice about throwing Atlanta into rush-hour traffic, nor would he blink at leaving her bloody, mangled body on the side of the road.