Page 37 of Forgiving His Past (Eagle’s Nest Securities #5)

Until now, Van and the others had all thought Ms. Dawari was an unfortunate casualty of her country’s too-common violence. But now…

The jagged pieces of their horrifying puzzle were all finally starting to come together.

“Who’d you hire to take her out?” Van had to know.

McDowell didn’t speak, but simply glanced over to his left, toward the spot where the two men who’d been by the SUVs both laid dead.

“So you killed my dad during the Gulf War,” Logan reviewed the facts as they knew them. “Then you arranged for Kam’s mom to be ‘accidentally’ shot to keep her from telling the world about a decades-old affair because you were afraid of the ramifications it would cause to your marriage and career?”

Picking up where the angry and heartsick man left off, Van finished summarizing the rest of what they knew.

“And you were so fucking paranoid that we’d somehow eventually put all this shit together, so that you used dirty contacts and assets to arrange for the ambush that killed Hunter and nearly took out our entire team. ”

“We did what we did for the sake of our country,” McDowell all but admitted to every single one of the incredible accusations.

“Not that it matters. You can’t possibly think anyone will believe you.

A group of disgraced Navy SEAL has-beens?

” The asshole chuckled. “I’m the fucking vice president, you idiots.

No one’s going to believe you over me. Besides that, Mike and I are patriots.

We’ve sacrificed everything to ensure our country…

your country…didn’t dissolve under the weight of a major political scandal that would make us look weak to the enemy.

You boys all know what happens when a country is seen as weak.

That’s when the enemies start coming out of the woodwork.

That’s when they start planning their attacks.

We couldn’t let that happen. We did what we did because we were trying to protect this great nation.

And if you let this all come out into the open, you may as well be sending those who hate us an open invitation to?—”

“Would you just shut up, already?” Van looked at the man he probably would have voted for in a couple of years, and he felt sick to his very core. “You aren’t a patriot any more than the Taliban assholes you sent after our team.”

“I love this country.”

“You love what this country has provided you,” Van seethed. “That doesn’t make you a patriot. What you’ve done makes you nothing more than a fucking psychopath with a taste for blood.”

“H-He was the one who sent the files to K-Kaamisha, t-too,” Webb sputtered. “T-told him it was…mistake. Wouldn’t…listen.”

“Why?” Logan immediately asked.

It was their one and only question that still remained unanswered. Why involve Kam in any of this at all?

“She’d started asking q-questions.” Webb was starting to sound even weaker. “J-John was afraid she’d f-figure it out, s-so he thought he could m-make it so she’d want to…k-kill…you.”

“It would have worked, too, if you’d followed the intel instead of playing kissy face on that ridiculous houseboat.

” McDowell gave a sarcastic roll of his eyes and then laughed.

“I mean, what are the chances, right? I hand you and your team the perfect target with all the trimmings, and instead of killing her and being done with it, you had to go off and fuck the little whore.”

Van walked over to McDowell, raised his pistol in the air, and slammed the side of it against the man’s head. The V.P. grunted and fell over onto his side. Fresh blood began to ooze from the nice-sized gash in the asshole’s scalp.

“Next time it will be a bullet,” he warned.

He was really beginning to hope there was a next time. If for no other reason than to be the one to rid the world of this piece of garbage once and for all.

Chase joined them next, and it was obvious the man had been listening from wherever he’d been hiding out. “My question is how in the hell does someone like that”—he pointed to McDowell—“get away with doing all this crazy shit and no one in Washington knows?”

“Really?” Lucky chimed in from a few feet away. “It’s D.C., Boyer. Nothing should surprise you when it comes to that place.”

“It’s called having money,” Logan growled. “And power. And neither of these men should have been blessed with either one.”

“Yeah, well…” Archer stood over McDowell, making sure the man didn’t try to get up. “Now they’ll get to spend the rest of their miserable lives behind bars, where they can sit and think about the shitstorm they’ve caused.”

It was more likely they’d end up getting the needle.

“You have no proof,” McDowell grunted from where he lay. “It’s your word against ours. And before you say it, if you don’t think I can explain all this away”—he motioned toward the dead men scattered on the ground around them—“you’ve learned nothing at all. ”

“Yeah, about that proof we don’t have…” Lucky held up his phone. He pushed the small screen and began playing a recording of everything the two men had just said.

That was it. It was over. Hunter’s killers had been found. It was a story so fantastical, it didn’t seem real. And Van knew he and the others would be chewing over it all, probably for years to come.

“Watch him.” Van motioned for the other man to keep an eye on McDowell before racing over to where Kam was beginning to stir. “Kam?” He carefully lifted her lowered head.

A murderous rage threatened to consume him when he saw the damage to her face.

Her left eye was already starting to bruise and was nearly swollen shut. There was a cut to her lip that was no longer bleeding, and a trail of dried blood ran from one nostril of her perfect nose.

Her left cheek was swelling and turning an ugly shade of purple, and there was a cut at the side of her scalp, near her hairline.

If Felix James wasn’t already a dead man, and there’d been a way to make it happen, Van would have killed the son of a bitch a thousand times over. But, as it turned out, the bastard was already burning in Hell.

“Van?” Kam’s sweet voice came to him in a whisper.

Tears pricked the corners of his eyes from the sudden rush of relief. “Yeah, baby. It’s me.”

“Is it…over?”

“It’s over.”

But there was still one more thing he needed to do.

Van leaned in, pressed his lips oh-so-carefully to the uninjured corner of her swollen lips, and then he said, “I love you.”

He didn’t care that it was fast. Hell, he and Jenny were married within months after having just met.

Maybe that was just him. When Van knew, he knew. And while he may always feel guilt over what happened to his first wife and unborn son, he was finally able to accept that their deaths didn’t automatically sentence him to a life of solitude and misery.

He’d been given another chance. At love. Happiness. Even possibly a family, if that’s what she wanted.

And as he worked to get Kam free from that godforsaken chair, Van knew deep within his soul that this woman was his.

Forever.