Page 27 of Stryker
“I will,” she said solemnly.
The leader spoke up. “It’s not that simple.”
Of course it wasn’t. I didn’t know the ins and outs of everything well enough to not make mistakes. Not that that was any excuse. I’d knowingly broken the rules and I was fine accepting any punishment for myself. But I wanted to spare her.
“So take my life. Make an example out of me. Relocate her somewhere no one will know her and let her be.”
Still, the leader shook his head.
Kat’s fingers tightened around mine. “No,” she said in a low voice that broke my heart. She didn’t get it.
“So what now?” We’d obviously reached an impasse.
The leader stepped forward and I bared my teeth at him. “Now we take her into our custody. You’ll be dealt with later.”
I scanned the crowd. Draco was nowhere to be found. Had he been hurt? Was he locked up somewhere for being my mentor? Were they punishing him for my mistakes? My heart squeezed, but even now, I couldn’t think of a single thing I’d do differently.
“I joined because I thought we were good men. Now I see I was wrong.”
Her fingers tightened between mine as if she was silently offering me strength. The leader adopted a look like I’d struck him. His brows shot up, his eyes narrowed, and he gritted his teeth, making his jaw flex.
“I thought an innocent life was the most important one to save. Now I see we’re all just worried about our own hides and selling our skills.” I glared around the group and saw the hardest members begin to move uncomfortably.
“You’re all scared. She’s a tiny woman. You all know that if she spoke out, the media would label her as crazy. She’d be locked up and pumped full of drugs. So what’s the real reason?” All night, this had bothered me. There was literally nothing she could do that was really all that threatening. Unless she recorded us—hard to do without a cell phone or some kind of camera—there was nothing.Nothing.
Anger tightened features of nearly every man around us.
All except the leader. He laughed. “I like you.” He gestured toward me. “You’ve got balls.”
“Not balls. Brains.” Didn’t they realize they were blind? They weren’t thinking.
“I take it your mentor didn’t mention all the rules?” He seemed less entertained.
“I’m alearn as I gokind of guy.”
“Ah.” He tilted his head back and stared up into the trees as the sun began to peek over the edge of the horizon, igniting the sky in hues of orange and hot pink. “Well, I hate to break it to you, Stryker.” He arched an eyebrow.
I nodded.
“We’ve got rules. And if we break the rules, our punishments are all in the guidebook. We follow it to the letter because if we didn’t things would be in chaos.” He studied me, pity in his eyes as he tapped his temple. “See, if people watch someone get away with something, they know they might also be able to get away with things. Pretty soon the whole system breaks down and things go to shit. I’ve helped keep this organization running for years. I’m not about to watch it fall because some new blood doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.” He turned to his right-hand man. “And the good book says…”
“That she must be destroyed.”
Anger filled me. The fact that they were so calmly talking about putting her down like she was some dangerous animal threat fucking pissed me off. But I also knew that acting in anger never yielded good results.
Still, I could feel her trembling behind me. I could smell her fear, acrid and sooty on my tongue and I hated how terrified she was. They weren’t just talking about putting her down; they were doing it in front of her. She could hear them. They weretorturingher. And they did it like she wasn’t even there. Like she couldn’t hear every fucking word out of their mouths.
I wanted todestroyevery single one of them.
“So that’s what we must do.” The leader glanced at me, his narrowed eyes hard and bitter. “Now, will you step aside and let us take her?”
Something in me whispered to do it.
Fuck that. “You want her, come get her.” I tightened my grip on her hand even as she tried to pull away.
The leader’s expression tightened. “So you’re not going to cooperate?”
Clearly the guy was a genius.
