Page 86 of Inez

I let go.

My breaking began a long, long time ago. Perhaps, in a way, I was never whole. Never unbroken. I was six the first time I saw my father kill someone. I was already a crack shot with an air rifle by then. I was a cold-blooded killer when most girls my age were dreaming of theirquinceañera, or their sweet sixteen. I led men twice my age in assaults against rival cartels when other kids my age were discovering sex and alcohol and weed.

While other girls learned the art of getting blood out of clothes because of periods, I learned it from executing people.

I was never whole.

And then came the day when my father told me I was going to marry Rafael Sousa. His protégé. His real heir, since of course the cartel couldn't go to a mere woman. What followed has been covered—no need to go over it again.

I lied to Rafael: Papadidbreak me. Those days chained to the cot broke me into shards and slivers.

Marrying Rafael broke me again.

Imprisonment, becoming his wife—La Víbora, the mistress, the cruel queen of his empire. That broke me.

The vile, depraved, violent things he did to me in trying to impregnate me—that broke me.

The birth. The massacre.

Shattered yet again.

But the healing?

I don’t know when that began.

When I opened my eyes and saw Jakob's face, stern and severe and brutally beautiful, jet black hair touched with silver at the temples—early graying from a hard life, he later claimed. That was probably the start. His eyes were cold and hard, but I saw kindness in them. Of a sort, at least.

He took me from the detention center and nursed me to health himself. Helped me regain my strength, my fitness. He never pushed me for my story. He just…took care of me.

I expected him to demand the obvious in return, but he never did. I remember the day I tried to give him the repayment I assumed he would expect. He was in his office working—out of a high-rise in Sacramento, back then, the offices of a shell company owned by other shells and subsidiaries, a tangled web of ownership no one could ever decipher. I stripped out of my clothes outside his office doors, knocked, received permission to enter, and went in. He didn't look up until I was at his desk and he caught sight of me in his peripheral vision.

He'd shot out of his chair and turned away. "Put your fucking clothes on, Inez."

Confused, stung by rejection even though sleeping with Jakob was the last thing I wanted to do, I'd dressed again and came back in.

"This isnotthat kind of relationship," he’d said to me, his tone hard but not unkind. "It never will be. I am your employer. Perhaps a friend. But nothing more. I do not want that from you. If I did, I would have already claimed it."

We never spoke of it again.

That healed me a little more.

Then he brought me his idea for the Broken Arrows. He didn't have the name yet, just the idea. A few men, down on their luck. Operators. warriors, men forgotten by the country they served. Good men dragged down a dead-end road by the vagaries of life. Destroyed by death and war and violence.

“We save them, Inez,” he'd told me. “Redeem them.”

“Why?” I'd asked.

He'd spent a long, long time thinking about that answer. "Because I needed redemption, once, and there was no one to give it. I had to find it for myself."

"Redemption from what?" It was the closest I've ever gotten to asking him his story.

"My many, many sins."

"Who?" I asked. "Who do we choose?"

He'd looked out at the Sacramento skyline and considered this. "I'll bring you a list and you choose."

The list he brought me, four months later, was extensive. A hundred names. SEALs, Rangers, Raiders, Green Berets, SWAT, FBI, CIA, NSA, men who worked in the shadows and belonged to no one. Each man had a tale of grief to tell in the pages of their dossiers. I spent a week poring over those dossiers. Winnowing based on feel and intuition. Unfair, perhaps, but the only way I knew how.