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And then, it’s only the black Mercedes left in the lot.

Tick-tock. Tick-fucking-tock.

The door swings open and out he comes. Shiny gray shirt, sweat stains under his armpits. In the scope, I watch him pull a gold lighter from his pocket.

I shift my finger from the trigger, straightening it out, keeping it loose, and then carefully put it back in place.

Between the crosshairs I watch his fucking face. The man who killed my parents.

The man who made my sister live in fear.

He lights his cigarette, and takes a long unhurried drag. Then raises his face to the sky to exhale. Long, and slow, and unworried.

“You motherfucker,” I whisper. And then I tighten my trigger finger.

For Kat.

Boom.

Twenty-Three

Trent

Itook a fucking life and now the only thing I want to do is make a new one. With her.

I come back on foot, going slow, making sure I’m in the clear. I get home long after dark, after I know she’ll be asleep. I purposefully stayed away for a few hours, letting my system quiet down, making sure as fuck that nobody knew where that bullet came from.

But nobody did a thing. And I take pride in that, as I open the front door, knowing Rominovski’s dead on the ground, like the piece of shit that he was.

I lock the door behind me, lock up my rifle in the gun closet, and then quietly make my way upstairs to Kat.

She stirs when I open the door. “Is that you?” she mutters on a yawn.

I’m unbuttoning my pants before she’s even got her eyes open. “It’s me, baby girl. It’s over.”

I hear her swallow in the darkness. “Really?” she reaches out to embrace me.

Pants off, shirt off, and I take her in my arms. Home. Safety. Where I belong. “Really.”

I kiss her deeply, possessively. She tastes like fucking heaven itself. I hold her tight in my arms and roll over onto my back so she’s straddling my aching cock in her little white panties and her long-sleeved pajama top. Fuck me. I have no idea how someone can be so fucking cute and so fucking hot at the same time.

“We need to talk,” I tell her, and see her stiffen.

“About Corsicov?”

I shake my head. “No, that’s all taken care of. Something else that’s been on my mind. I saw your journal, baby. I know you didn’t do as I told you while I was deployed.”

“I…I was going to…it just.” She shakes her head on a growl. “I don’t have to justify myself to you.”

“Tick marks,” I say with disgust. “Nothing but tick marks. None of your thoughts, none of your dreams, none of your desires.”

“You want to know my desires, huh?”

I growl at her, pulling her down close, making her ass rise up as she gasps a laugh. I take my shaft in one hand and push her panties aside with the head, and then push deep into her.

I slip my other hand underneath her shirt, touching her skin lightly, so fucking slightly, and feeling the goosebumps rise up under my touch.

She comes up from the kiss for air. “But Trent. If I get pregnant…if I alreadyampregnant…have you really thought about that?”