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“Take that shit off your face,” Shawn barks. “She dies in the end anyway. Doesn’t matter if she sees your face.”

“Maybe it’s not me he’s worried about.” It’s a shot in the dark, thinking these two haven’t met before.

“Shut the fuck—” Shawn bellows, his loud voice echoing in the small, now even more cramped room, only to be cut off.

“She’s right.”

“Boom.” Out of instinct, I attempt to raise a hand to high-five my captor only to remember it’s tied to the chair. “Imaginary high five, then.”

“Shut up,” both men shout in my direction.

At the taut tension and palpable anger filling the room, I seal my lips shut. I dart my somewhat blurry gaze from one man to the other, trying to judge how this will turn out.

“You paid me to bring her to you and keep her compliant until the others come. That is what I’ve done and will do, but there is nothing in our agreement that states you get to know who I am.”

“Wait,” I say more to myself than them, forgetting their demand for my silence. “If Shawn isn’t the one who helped you secure a position on the Secret Service team, then who did? This isn’t making a whole lot of sense. I feel like we need to back this—”

His eyes narrow on me, almost like a silent command to shut the hell up. Which I do.

Shawn adjusts in his more comfortable-looking chair a few feet from where I sit tied up. His gaze rakes the mystery man up and down before zeroing in on his face. “You were on her security team.” Shawn slides his hollow gaze to me. “That’s how you pulled the abduction off. Seems an elaborate ruse for taking one woman.”

“The most protected woman on the planet,” he adds.

“Who helped you?” Shawn demands more than asks.

“Doesn’t matter,” the masked man grumbles as he leans a shoulder against the far wall. The stance makes him appear to be calm, but the tension radiating off him, the tightness in his shoulders and crossed arms, tells a different story.

“It does if it leads them back to you, to here.” Shawn stands, sliding both hands into the pockets of his dark-wash jeans. Guess he wasn’t joking earlier about having to change out of his puke-spattered slacks.

“It won’t. I tied up those loose ends earlier.”

“Except me,” Shawn bites out. “Am I a loose end after this?”

“That’s the reason for the face wrap. This is how I’ve always done contracts that request the client to be on-site during the interrogation. It stays on so you can’t identify me even though others can if they put two and two together. Do not tell me what to do or how to do it. This is my domain. This is where I excel and why you paid me. Command me again and I’ll kill you, then her.”

I shiver at the promise in his bored tone. There’s no doubt this man would withdraw the nine millimeter secured in his waistband and pop a bullet between Shawn’s brows without thinking twice.

“Does he know about the other client who wanted me dead? The one who paid you for intel and helped you finagle your way onto the Secret Service?”

If it’s possible, the man’s eyes harden more than before, that hatred zeroed in on me. Shoving off the wall, the mercenary strides to stand directly in front of my chair, the hard rubber of his boots grazing the bare tips of my toes. He pulls his fist back, readying a killing blow. I shy away, my eyes closing on instinct at the hit I know has the potential to loosen a few teeth. But instead he aims lower. That heavy fist sinks into my relaxed stomach, shoving every minuscule amount of air out of my lungs in a forceful heave.

I can’t breathe.

Eyes wide with panic, I try to suck in oxygen but can’t get anything down past the constriction in my throat. I gasp, cough, and squirm until my body responds to my desperate demands and eases the tight hold, allowing slivers of air to finally slip through.

The first full gulp of air cuts like splinters down my throat before embedding in my lungs. A pitiful whimper escapes as I breathe through the agony, knowing suffocating or passing out around these two would be worse than dealing with the pain each gulp of oxygen brings.

As the world and my surroundings come back into focus, gruff, demanding words reach my ears, but I can’t make out what’s being said through my own panting. Desperate to have a foothold on what’s going on around me, I force myself to take smaller breaths, quieting the thundering in my own ears.

“That’s what took you so long to fulfill the contract. You said it was timing.”

“It was.”

“Who was it who hired you? And how did they secure you a spot in the Secret Service?”

“Someone they hired. A mediator of sorts.”

“Who?” Shawn’s voice is clear now that my breathing has quieted. There’s no way the man who took me doesn’t hear the annoyance in his rising voice. Sounds to me like Shawn’s patience is wearing thin. Maybe it won’t be too hard to get these two to turn against each other after all. It’ll still leave me with one psychopath to deal with, but hey, one psycho holding me captive is a hell of a lot better than two.