Page 72 of Faron (The Golden Team #8)

Faron

T he mission was supposed to be clean—get in, get the hostages, get out. We’d just extracted the second target, a fourteen-year-old girl with a shattered arm and eyes too old for her face.

We were resting in a half-collapsed safe house near the southern ridge when the burner buzzed again.

I almost ignored it. We were low on water, low on patience, and Raven was trying to stitch a gash in Kash’s side using nothing but whiskey and dental floss.

But the alert code was different this time.

Code Red: Immediate Eyes Only.

I tapped in the passcode and opened the file.

It was a secure stream from Tag.

Video. Audio. Timestamped ten minutes ago.

I hit play.

Blue’s voice came through first. Steady. Calm. But pissed.

“Aponi just ID’d the guy who attacked her. Name’s Caleb Knox, he was an informant.”

I froze,

Tag’s voice followed. “He’s alive, Faron. Aponi thought she killed this guy, she was wrong. And you’re not gonna like what you hear.”

There was silence for two beats. Then Aponi’s voice came in—tight, ashamed, broken in a way I’d never heard from her, but then we just got in touch with each other a few months ago.

“I thought I killed him. Five years ago. I left him in a burning building.”

The air left my lungs.

She kept talking—halting, fragmented—about the trafficking case, about the betrayal, about how she’d covered it up to protect herself. Her badge. Her sanity.

She thought it was over.

It wasn’t.

Not even close.

When the video ended, I stood up too fast and slammed my shoulder into a crumbling wall.

Cyclone looked over from the window. “Problem?”

“Yeah,” I growled. “A big one.”

I stared out at the horizon, fists clenched. Jungle heat pressed in from all sides, but I felt cold.

“Tag says they’ve got her secured,” I muttered. “But if the guy Knox, whom she thought she killed, is back, she’s in deeper shit than she realizes. Why did he show his face now?

Gideon groaned from the floor. “We getting pulled out?”

I looked toward the sky—dark, humid, thunder rolling in.

“No. We finish this. Then I’m going home. And when I get there…”

I looked down at my hands.

“…someone’s gonna answer for hunting down my sister.”