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Wanted him to do it again.
4
NOAH
They stuffed me into the back of a patrol car like I was some punk caught shoplifting, not a man who’d just painted a courtyard with a bastard’s brains.
The deputy driving—a kid barely old enough to shave—kept glancing at me in the rearview, eyes twitchy, like he thought I might kick through the partition and snap his neck. I smirked at him, leaned back against the cracked vinyl, and let the rain-soaked night blur past the window.
Didn’t bother me. I’d been in worse cages—sand-crusted Humvees in Iraq, mud-slick pits in Sudan, a rusted shipping container in the Philippines that stank of piss and diesel.
This? This was a goddamn vacation.
The station smelled like stale coffee and desperation when they hauled me in. Fluorescents buzzed overhead, casting a sickly yellow glow on the chipped linoleum.
Two uniforms led me to an interrogation room—bare concrete walls, a steel table bolted to the floor, aone-way mirror that didn’t fool anyone. One of them, a stocky guy with a buzz cut and a mustache that screamed midlife crisis, shackled my left wrist to the table. The metal bit into my skin, cold and tight. I laughed—a low, rough sound that made his jaw twitch.
“Got any coffee?” I asked, slouching back in the chair. “Cold.”
He squinted at me, like I’d spoken in tongues. “You mean iced coffee? We don’t have that shit here.”
“Nah,” I said, grinning wider. “Cold. Like it’s been sitting on the counter for an hour. Stale. Thick.”
Another funny look—his mustache practically bristled—and he muttered something under his breath before stepping out. I didn’t care if he got it or not.
Didn’t care about much, really. My mind was already drifting, pulling me back to places that made sense. Iraq—a hellhole of dust and blood, where I’d lain prone on a rooftop for three days straight, waiting for an insurgent commander to poke his head out of a mud hut.
Sudan—a shitstorm of chaos, picking off militia leaders who’d turned villages into slaughterhouses.
The Philippines—an adventure gone sideways, hunting a pirate king through jungle so thick it swallowed the sun.
Those were my places. Not here, with their stupid rules—rules that said a man pulling a gun couldn’t be shot, that talking back to a cop couldn’t get you cuffed, that a piece of shit beating his wife shouldn’t get his balls cut off and shoved down his throat.
I’d racked up a tally overseas that’d make most men piss themselves.
Afghan warlords with harems of little boys—sick fucks who’d scream for mercy right before my round punched through their skulls.
Mexican drug lords running sex slave cities, their compounds rigged with enough coke to choke a cartel—I’d dropped them from a mile out, watched their empires burn from the shadows.
Congolese medicine men who’d mutilated a camp full of girls, claiming it was some twisted ritual—I’d taken my time with those bastards, made sure they saw me coming before the lights went out.
That was my resume. My pride wasn’t in the kills; it was in the why. Scumbags who’d begged for death got it, gift-wrapped with a bullet.
But here? In America? They wanted my gun in a locker, my fists in my pockets, my rage on a leash. Fuck that.
When Byron Dane—my father—died, me and my brothers came home. Took up the surprise family billions like it was some sacred duty, scoured the globe for any sign he might still be breathing.
For a while, I’d held out hope. Thought maybe he’d faked it, gone dark, pulled a vanishing act like Mom did when I was a kid. But that hope dried up fast. Same story, different ghost.
I’d stopped looking years ago. Stopped caring, too.
Hope wasn’t real—it was a fairy tale for kids with souls still soft enough to believe in it. Mine had hardened a long time ago, forged in blood and sand and the kind of silence that follows a kill shot.
So I sat there, shackled to that table, stewing in it. Not the arrest—didn’t give a damn about that. I wanted to stew. Wanted the weight of it, the grit. Maybe they’d toss me in a cell. Part of me hoped they would.
I’d done the right thing tonight—put down a rabid dog before he tore that courtyard apart—but the law didn’t see it that way.
Fine by me. Let them lock me up. I deserved it, according to their bullshit rules. Didn’t mean I regretted a thing. I’d seen that dead man’s eyes through my scope—wild, unhinged, ready to kill. I knew the look. I’d ended it. Saved lives. Saved her.