She struggled to answer that. She was terrified to leave and be alone, and she was terrified to stay.
“Let’s go check on Wilson.”
*
Damon and Tasha pulled up outside what looked like a series of small flats. Checking the apartment number on his phone, Damon hopped out with her, and they walked across the street. He opened up his senses, knowing that again he would only get half the information and would get slammed with pain as soon as he tried to increase it by much. He opened up and checked. And frowned in surprise. “Absolutely nothing is around here.” He paused. “Almost like a deadness is here.”
“That’s not good.” Her footsteps slowed.
He grabbed her arm, dragging her closer to walk right beside him. “Not necessarily,” he noted quietly. “It feels more like they’ve been here and gone.”
“Of course they’ve been here and gone.” And then she sucked in her breath. “But been here and gone where?”
“Come on. Let’s go find out.”
They walked up and knocked on the door at Wilson’s flat number. When they got no answer, Damon turned his back on the hallway. “Keep watch.” Then he took out his tools and popped the lock.
“The fact that it’s locked, shouldn’t that be a good indication?”
As he went in, he checked the lock inside. “No, you can lock it and then still close the door from the outside.” He lifted his nose and froze. “You don’t want to be in here.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Why not?” And then she caught the smell. Her eyes widened, and she bolted from him. “Wilson,” she cried out, and she raced around the flat, heading to the bedroom. As soon as she got to the open doorway, Damon was just a hair behind her.
And she stopped in the doorway and cried out. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”
He snatched her into his arms and pulled her back, so that she wouldn’t see, while Damon studied the layout and the inside of the room. “Looks like Wilson was first.”
She started to cry in his arms, as he held her close.
He carefully analyzed the scene. Same MO as the others. Just random destruction in the living room, but the bed had been shot up, and unfortunately Wilson had been sleeping.
Damon walked her back to the living room, “Stay here. I need to take a closer look.”
She nodded and didn’t say anything, then sat down on the arm of the couch, her arms wrapped around her chest, weeping silently.
He was sorry to leave her alone, but, if ever they needed confirmation on details, it was right now. He headed back to the bedroom, pulled out his phone, and took photos. It looked like Wilson had taken three bullets, all direct hits. He probably hadn’t even known what hit him.
Damon took more photos around the place, including the living room, which had been trashed to make it look like a robbery—if anybody was stupid enough to assume the bullet holes were a part of that. To Damon, this looked like an execution.
Shaking his head, Damon stepped back out again, and, dragging her with him, they exited, got into the vehicle, and he immediately started it up and pulled away. As soon as he could, he pulled off the road into a parking lot, surrounded by lots of other vehicles, and he called Terk, who answered on the first ring.
“What did you find?” Terk asked impatiently.
“They got him first. Wilson is dead, and it has all the looks of a professional hit. He’s number one of all of us,” he murmured. “He has been terminated.”
Chapter 4
Tasha watched carefully as Damon drove through the city, sliding into back roads, taking corners in a roundabout way, as he took them to their new location. She didn’t even know what to think; she was half numb, half full of pain and sorrow, and terrified of what was coming. “I still can’t believe somebody is trying to wipe out the entire team.”
“It’s hard to think otherwise.” His voice was quiet inside the cab.
She shuddered and wrapped her arms around her chest. “It just seemed so unbelievable.”
“Remember the work we do though.” He quickly glanced in her direction.
She studied his profile. “The thing is, I always saw us as taking out bad guys. Not good guys taking us out.”
His lips quirked. “We were,” he corrected. “That’s exactly what we were doing. But we would be naive to assume that some of these bad guys wouldn’t try to get back at us for it.”
“And I would understand that long before I would think that it was our own government,” she murmured.
“And we can’t know which way this will go yet,” he argued. “We’re waiting for status changes on all the rest of the team. Only Terk and I, at the moment, are capable of doing anything.”
“And that’s how I feel right now. With Wilson gone and Mera hurt, there’s just me. And how is it that I survived?”
“I think he was either short on time, or—because it was the third one, and he’d done the first two successfully—he just assumed he’d hit his intended target, made a quick dash out of your place, and disappeared. He did three in one evening, so timing was an issue.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
He nodded. “It’s one thing to go in and kill somebody, cross your tracks to make sure you’re safe, and nobody knows it was you. It’s another thing to hit three in one night,” he stated. “That takes a pro.”
She shuddered at the thought. “Like the pros we were?”
“Like the pros we are,” he corrected. “And, no, it wasn’t any of our team.”
She frowned at that. “I never thought that,” she protested.
He shot her a hard glance. “Good, I’m glad to hear that because our team is down, and I doubt they could have done that to themselves.”
“We were supposed to get a couple new recruits before they suddenly closed the department. Do we know anything about them?”
She watched his eyebrows shoot up, as he contemplated her suggestion. “No, I don’t. When they decided abruptly to shut us down,” he murmured, “I don’t even know what happened to those two. I presume they were told not to show up. I’m not sure they were anything other than a red herring to keep us thinking everything was trucking along like normal. They didn’t arrive though.”
“No, they were due to come in two weeks, I think,” she replied. “But what do I know? It seems like everything was happening around me, and I was completely oblivious.”
“Not oblivious, just doing your job, focused on the here and now. None of us could have known this attack was coming.”
“And yet I feel like we should have,” she noted. “Who else does this kind of work without knowing something like this is coming toward them? That inside edge should have warned Terk of that upcoming danger. So why didn’t it?”
“It was very well planned,” he admitted. “We were all taken out within a twenty-four-hour period, likely within a few hours of each other.”
“And that’s scary too because it takes a pro team to coordinate something like that,” she murmured. “A team that’s skilled and has resources behind them.”