Glancing over his shoulder, Mason saw his friends trudging through the sand. Alex caught his gaze, her eyes wide and pleading with him to be careful.
There’d been a dull ache in his chest ever since she confessed to loving him. But seeing her now, maybe for the last time, made it grow sharp.
Someone had cut his heart in half. He feared that someone might be himself.
She wanted to know what his one do-over would be? It would be to go back in time to the moment she said the three most beautiful words in the English language. And instead of getting all bent out of shape and telling her she was too young and inexperienced to know what she was talking about, he would thank her for honoring him with such a sweet and wonderful gift. Then he would gently explain once again why she shouldn’t.
“Push the boat out and get in. Then, start the engine,” Balaclava Buttmunch commanded. “Do everything nice and slow, or your friend here gets what’s left of his head blown off.”
Mason did as instructed, pushing the dinghy into the warm, frothing surf and clambering aboard. The pull-motor took two tries, but eventually the diesel engine sputtered to life.
As soon as it was humming, the masked motherfucker unceremoniously let go of Wolf. He immediately turned to point the malevolent mouth of his pistol at Mason’s chest, and with a clenched jaw, Mason watched his friend crumple to the sand unconscious, his blood loss finally getting the better of him.
The hollow end of the Beretta never wavered as the ass clown climbed aboard the dinghy. Mason felt its sinister intent as surely as he felt the moisture in the night air.
Hitching his chin toward the horizon to the west, Masked Man said, “Head that way. Nice and easy.”
Mason engaged the engine and pointed the dinghy toward the speedboat he could see bobbing some distance out. For what seemed like a very long time, but in actuality could only have been a couple of minutes, he concentrated on piloting the little craft over the waves. Once they were past the surf, he turned back to see his friends on their knees, huddled around Wolf’s form. Doc whipped off his shirt and wound it around Wolf’s head.
Come on, Doc, Mason silently implored. Here’s where all that schooling comes in handy.
“How the hell do you sonsofbitches do it?” Masked Man broke into his thoughts.
“Do what?” Mason frowned as the dinghy plowed over a wave. When he braced himself, his foot brushed up against a towel that’d been left in the bottom of the boat.
“Come out on top every damn time,” his captor growled.
Mason lifted one shoulder. “Overabundance of training, I guess.”
“I was overabundantly trained, too, but you and yours have still bested me and mine twice now.”
Mason stared hard into the man’s icy green eyes. “Who the fuck are you?”
An oily smile stretched thin lips. With his free hand, the man peeled back his balaclava, and the face that was revealed wasn’t one Mason had ever met in person. But neither was it one he was likely to forget.
It was the face of one Rory Gellman. An Army Ranger turned high-priced mercenary. The man the FBI had discovered was partially responsible for the assault on Garden Key and the subsequent events that followed.
Gellman had been a ghost since that night, eluding the government agencies that’d been tasked with finding him. And the guys of Deep Six had all but forgotten he existed. But apparently, Gellman was the type to nurse a grudge.
Mason knew the glare he leveled at Gellman’s nose was stony. His tone was even stonier when he said, “I’ll be goddamned.”
Gellman laughed. “Oh, most certainly.”
“Why the fuck do you keep turning up like bad breath?” Mason’s grip tightened on the tiller. “Did my team do something to piss you off at some point?”
The merc snorted. “Please. I didn’t even know you cocksuckers existed before that bad business that went down on Garden Key. I was hired to do a job there. A job that ended in the deaths of my entire crew and left me without a way to earn a living.”
“So that’s why you fell in with the commodore? For greed and revenge?”
“Don’t give yourself so much credit,” Gellman scoffed. “I had no idea when I answered Bagheri’s ad on the dark web that I’d run into you dickholes again. But low and behold, the men responsible for the deaths of his sons also happened to be the men responsible for the deaths of my guys. I guess it was fate.” He shrugged. “Or dumb luck that brought us back together.”
Mason shook his head as the little dinghy continued to skip across the surface of the sea toward the waiting vessel. The closer they got to the boat, the closer he knew Gellman was to making his move.
“Fucking mercs,” he growled.
“Oh, come on,” Gellman sneered. “You’re no different. You hide behind the facade of valor and patriotism, but you were paid to kill just like I’m paid to kill. The only difference is that my employers pony up a lot more cash than old Uncle Sam.”
The merc’s words hit too close to home. Played too much into Mason’s 2 percent theory. And yet he was quick to draw a distinction between them.
“But you’re leaving out the part where you like it.”
“Big talk from a guy speeding away from an island strewn with dead bodies.”
A muscle twitched in Mason’s jaw as the dinghy hit a wave and salt water sprayed over the side. Both men wore the mist on their faces. Neither of them lifted a hand to wipe it away.
Tension pulsed in the air, making it feel electric. Mason would swear the wind around them smelled of burned ozone. The second one of them moved, it would be on.
“You tell yourself whatever story you hafta to make your life choices set right in your mind,” Mason managed despite his clenched jaw. “But I know when you get still and quiet on a cold, dark night, you think about the lines you were never supposed to cross.”
Gellman’s nostrils flared, proving Mason had scored a direct hit. Still, the merc argued, “You delude yourself by standing on imaginary principles. Nothing truly matters in this world but doing what you need to do to make your time on it as comfortable as possible. And speaking of time…” Mason saw the muscles in Gellman’s gun hand bunch. “Yours is up.”
Orange fire blinked out of the end of the merc’s pistol, but Mason was already lunging to the side. Despite his catlike reflexes, it was still a close thing. The round passed so close to his cheek that he felt the air it displaced.
Snagging the towel in the bottom of the boat with his toes, Mason kicked it into Gellman’s face at the same time he brought the hard edge of his palm down on the bundle of nerves in Gellman’s gun wrist. Involuntarily, the merc’s grip went lax. The pistol slipped from his grasp to land in the quarter inch of water wetting the bottom of the dinghy.