Page 70 of House of Cards (The Devil’s Den #2)

Smith

Another shot goes off as I race down the stairs. I feel too exposed in just a pair of cashmere blend slacks, but there’s no time to waste. Thank fuck they’re taking their time, else everyone would already be dead, that room a slaughterhouse.

Troy is already stationed at the door of the entertainment room when I arrive.

Muffled laughter reaches us through the doors. A woman screaming.

I already checked the AR-15 I took off Miguel’s body. I raise it to shoulder height, crouching.

“Ready,” I murmur to Troy.

He nods, switching to hand signals.

YOU’RE LEFT, I’M RIGHT.

STAY BEHIND ME.

Troy slips inside, knees and elbows bent, his silenced Ruger switched out for a camo painted AK-47 he must have taken off another cartel soldier. I follow close behind, using his body as a shield.

Elonzo’s men don’t even see us coming.

They’re all facing the pool table on the left, where a guy has one of the villa’s serving women pinned.

He gets a bullet in the head courtesy of Troy’s rifle.

Several of the armed men nearby turn to the doorway, raising their guns, but it’s already too late for them.

Troy squeezes off a half-dozen head shots in short, lethal bursts.

“Everyone down!” I yell, already focusing on the right side of the room to pick out my targets.

Thankfully, many of the hostages hit the ground as soon as they saw us coming into the room. The rest fall down at my command, hands over the back of their heads. Elonzo’s men, of course, don’t.

I take down two of them before they’ve raised their weapons.

Me and Troy scramble to take cover behind a sofa. Hand signals flash between us, then we’re both peeking out from different ends of the furniture, picking out the easiest targets.

Where the fuck is Ricky? The last thing I want is to gun him down accidentally. My quick scan can’t find a glimpse of his sports jacket anywhere. But I can confirm that our security team was the first to be executed. None of them are alive.

One of Elonzo’s men decides he’s going to be spiteful and shoots the closest hostage point blank in the back of the head. I take him out with a hail of bullets that hacks out huge chunks of his skull, leaving only a bloody stump of a neck behind.

Bullets thump into our sofa in retaliation, and bits of upholstery and stuffing snow down on me as I’m forced to take cover.

Troy peeks out, shoots off a few rounds, drops back down again. Flashes me a hand signal.

Four men left, but they’ve taken cover and they’re trying to reach the door to escape.

But I’d rather die than let them leave this room alive. Not if there’s a chance they’d go upstairs and find Zoey.

Christ, Zoey.

A painful ache spreads through my chest. Grief so harsh and sudden, it’s like she’s already dead and I’m mourning her.

She might as well be.

I saw the look in her eyes. The confirmation of everything she thought true about me. That I always thought true of myself.

I’m not the man for her.

I’m not even a man.

I’m a fucking beast who kills on instinct. Selfish, brutal, irredeemable.

Unlovable.

Troy sticks out his head, squeezes off a few bursts of gunfire, falls back behind the sofa with gritted teeth. We can’t reach them from our cover, and we’d be exposing ourselves to open fire if we tried to move.

I flash a hand signal at Troy.

COVER ME

He’s barely nodded before I roll sideways over the floor, keeping my body as small a target as possible. Bullets tear into the marble where I’d been a second before, but Troy’s suppressing fire forces them back into cover.

I reach an overturned card table near the second door, breath coming hard. Not from exertion, but from fury.

Zoey, staring at me like I was the monster seconds after she stabbed Luis in the eye to save my life.

She’s not wrong.

My life choices have warped me into something lethal, efficient…and inhuman. I learned to bind, torture, kill with the same precision I cook Balmont’s books. Skills that became second nature.

Some sick and twisted part of me craved the pain I caused. To relish the sight, smell, taste of blood. The feel of it on my skin.

A part I’ve kept hidden from everyone until I met Zoey.

Why the fuck I thought she’d still accept me, I don’t know. I’m not some hopeless romantic.

But I think she is.

And that’s possibly her only flaw.

Eventually she’ll have to realize the world doesn’t give a fuck about anyone’s happily ever after, not even hers.

Especially not mine.

Maybe that’s exactly what happened when she saw me take down Miguel and Luis. Whatever romantic notions she had about me, about us, crushed.

Guess I did her a favor, then.

Again, zero fucking gratitude.

The gunfire dies down momentarily, our targets trying to figure out how to exterminate us without risking their lives. In the lull, I hear a door at the far end of the room click shut—someone calling bullshit on his odds and making a run for it.

Fuck. The door leads to the south wing. Not exactly a straight shot to the staircase leading to Zoey’s hiding spot, but I’m not about to leave anything to chance.

I don’t have a line of sight on Troy, so I have to share my plan with everyone in the room.

“Finish these assholes!”

Troy sticks his upper body out, raining down another volley of suppressing fire as I sprint across the room, heading for the door.

Bullets ping off the wall and floor behind me, one of them ricocheting into my calf like a snakebite. Wincing, I shoulder through the door and into the dark hallway.

Early morning gloom gives both sides the advantage, but fuck, what I wouldn’t give for a little sunlight right now. The man I’m chasing down could hide behind any of the massive pot plants or statues scattered through the halls.

Myles wasn’t exactly in a tactical frame of mind when he furnished this villa. Suppose he never expected there to be a gunfight in his halls.

Looks like the guy I’m chasing got hit. A streak of blood against the wall tells me which way he went, and I follow silently on bare feet, constantly scanning for sign of my prey, anticipating ambush points.

Blood splatters on the floor lead me down a side-corridor and into the villa’s enormous kitchen. Stainless steel surfaces gleam in the ambient light cast from a strip of LEDs hidden behind the lowered ceiling above a granite island.

A pot clatters to my right, drawing my eyes and the muzzle of my assault rifle. I switch direction, quads burning as I inch forward in a low crouch.

My target must be injured pretty badly to be moving so clumsily.

I round the center island, weapon held steady at shoulder height, finger already tightening on the trigger.

Only to find myself face-to-face with Tear Drop.

Christ, I knew he was young when I first spotted him, but this scrawny kid is barely old enough to drive. His back is pressed to an open shelf of the kitchen island, an array of pots and pans stacked behind him. He fumbles with his rifle, a lanky elbow catching on the shoulder strap.

I lunge forward and snatch it out of his hands, tossing it out of reach behind me as I stand.

“ ?No me mates, por favor! ”? 1 he begs, voice thickly accented. “I have family. I bring money home?—”

“Like I give a fuck,” I say, my voice flat.

He shudders, cowering as I aim the rifle at his head. No one ever cared enough to make sure he was dressed properly. His bullet-proof vest is strapped so loosely to his birdcage chest, I can see it gaping along the sides.

“?Virgencita, ayúdame!” ? 2 he whimpers, hands raised over his head like they’d stand a chance of protecting him against AR-15’s cartridges.

Movement catches my eye, my gaze flickering briefly to the puddle of urine spreading under him.

Christ.

I should have put a bullet between his eyes already. One less scumbag to worry about.

But I can’t unsee that look on Zoey’s face. The disgust. The fear. Not of what I might do to her, but of what I am .

And my hesitation gives the kid a sliver of hope.

He lunges at me with the clumsy determination of someone who’s never had proper training. I sidestep easily, and bring the butt of my AK down on the back of his head.

It’s pure instinct, and I barely pull back at the last second, transforming the lethal blow into one just violent enough to knock him unconscious.

I pi him with a knee as I search his limp body. At least they were thoughtful enough to give him zip-ties.

Automatic gunfire reaches me, muffled, sporadic. It goes on for a for a minute. Then silence.

I secure his hands behind his back, hesitate, and bind his ankles as well. Then I drag him over to a cabinet and zip tie his neck to the metal handle. He’d probably choke to death before he could rip that handle off.

I double check that he doesn’t have any other weapons on him, and leave.

It’s not mercy. It’s pragmatism. A living informant is more valuable than a dead soldier.

That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

When I return to the entertainment room, Troy is crouched beside one of Elonzo’s men, checking that he’s dead. The hostages are all clustered together in one corner, sobbing, or silent, or praying.

Someone’s turned on the overheads, lighting the scene in garish clarity.

It’s a fucking massacre, blood and gore everywhere.

Dead bodies sprawled every which way.

A haze of dry plaster and gun smoke hangs in the air, the chemical stink of it obliterating all other scents, even the blood. Bullets have churned the sofa into an unrecognizable mass of wood, leather, and stuffing. Holes gouged out of the walls. Cracks and chips all over the marble floors.

“The runner?” Troy asks as he goes to check another dead body. I pad over to the far side of the room, checking the men on that side.

Those that still have a head, of course.

“Handled.”

He glances up, possibly noting the lack of fresh blood on me. “Alive?”

I shrug. “For now. Did you see a guy in a blue windbreaker?”

“No, why?”

“Zoey’s brother.”

“Jesus, Elonzo brought him with? And I thought you were sadistic.”