“My father signed custody of me over to him. Said I’d be with family. I didn’t want to be with them. I didn’t want Gunner’s castoffs. Didn’t want to always be in his shadow.”
There was pain there, breaking through the fury.
“I swore I’d do anything I had to do in order to get out of that place. I wouldn’t be poor again. No one would look down on me.” His smile flashed—not the charming one, But the cold grin of a killer. “Do you have any idea how much money I have? How much power?”
“No...” Tell me.
“I am muerte. I found it on one of my runs. I knew I could take over down there. When you and Gunner came for me the first time—”
When they’d all nearly died.
“I was fighting for power then. Your entrance, your backup...it was appreciated.” The grin kept chilling her. “Of course, it would have helped more if you hadn’t abandoned me.”
“You were dead!”
“Actually, yes, I was.”
Her breath burned in her lungs as surprise rolled through her.
“But thanks to the muerte, I came back.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My men dragged a doctor to me—some relief worker they found. He brought me back, I don’t even know how...injections, luck. Hell, maybe the devil just didn’t want me. The doc even said that the muerte might have saved me, that it was working in my body, stopping the blood loss.”
“What happened to the doctor?”
“When I recovered, I slit his throat.”
Brutal. But she knew that was exactly who—what—Slade was. A brutal killer. “And you became the cartel ruler down there?”
“I am muerte.”
/> “Why?” She breathed out the word as if she was frightened. And she was. The man before her was a walking nightmare. “Why did you want the EOD to come and rescue you? You were free and clear. We thought you were dead. Why—”
“Because I was ready to expand. I knew that you’d taken out Guerrero recently....”
The Mexican arms dealer. Now everything was connecting. Her heart thudded into her chest. “He had links to the drug trade. That’s why you accessed his file at the EOD, you wanted to know—”
“I wanted to know what assets of his I could still use in Mexico, and what assets I needed to eliminate.”
“You mean kill.”
“Yes.” A shrug. “I knew it would be easy enough to get that intel from inside the EOD.”
“So you worked us all...you threatened Hal—”
Another cold laugh. “I paid him. There was no threat. Of course, I never intended for him to live long enough to collect his cash.”
“And the shooter? The man who fired at me—”
“I connected with him while in rehab.” The gun was held loosely in his hand at his side. She was tense, her gaze drifting to the gun far too often, but he acted as if he wasn’t even aware he’d pulled out the weapon. “You can meet the most useful contacts in the oddest places.”
“You hooked the guy up with muerte.”
“In return, he agreed to take a shot at you. I did tell him to miss, by the way. That was just a scare shot.”
“And at my house? The fire—”