Page 131 of Convict's Game

He froze when he saw me.

I didn’t.

With a yell, I surged forward, gun up. I didn’t pause but fired a round to his thigh. The bastard crumpled and screamed. I was on him in seconds, yanking the weapon from his limp fingers, driving a knee into his back.

Blood smeared the floor.

His voice came high and shaking. “You don’t…fucking…know who I am.”

I grabbed a handful of his greasy hair and slammed his head to the concrete. “You wish that were true.” To my crew, I reported, “Got him.”

Arran’s team piled in behind me.

He knelt at my side. “Nice work. Are you okay?”

“Fucking fine.” Why the worry about me when I’d caught the guy? I hauled Salter upright, shoving him into a limping walk while he screamed.

As we moved, my skull nearly split in two. The scar burned. Memories tried to flood in, too fast, too much.

Blood on the blade. My blood. A brand, not a scar.Convict.

And Mila. Always Mila.

Somewhere, somehow, before all of this, I’d known her. The truth danced just out of reach.

We got to the van. Manny threw the back doors open, and we dumped Salter inside. To my right, Tyler threw his mask off like it burned him.

Arran clapped my shoulder. “You did good tonight.”

But I barely heard him.

Because every beat of my pulse screamed one thing. Mila wasn’t a stranger. I’d been right about knowing her. This whole time, we’d been known to each other all along.

At an off-site nondescript trading estate, we drove into the cover of the building and offloaded Salter to an interrogation room. Safer not to take him to the warehouse when we were unsure if we’d be pursued.

The extraction operation had gone nicely to plan, thanks to the intel given up by the grunt Mila had gotten the name for.

The underground room was concrete with no windows. A bright light fell over a steel chair above a drain, and the single camera feed went to the crew who watched from outside.

Salter had been stripped to his boxers and duct taped to the seat, his wrists behind the backrest, and ankles locked to the floor bolts. Blood oozed from the gunshot wound to his thigh.

He woke to a jolt from an electrode pressed to his bare side. A muscle stimulator had been wired to a portable battery. Shade’s handiwork.

Salter hissed in pain, jerking in the seat. “What the fuck is this?”

Shade stepped back and gestured for me to proceed.

I brushed my fingers over the skeleton mask hiding my face. “Jan Salter. Answer our questions and you might live to see sunrise. Lie, and you’ll die in this room and no one will ever know how your miserable life ended.”

“Fuck you. What do you want?”

I crouched to eye level with him. “Where is Rhys Jacobs?”

Salter laughed a wheezing hack. “That piece of shit? You’re out of luck. He’s long dead.”

My stomach gutted. “How?”

He flexed on the seat, grimacing. “No idea. I was told it but I never saw the body.”