Page 87 of Silas

“Come on, babe.” He pulls me toward the SUV. “Let’s get out of here while the getting’s good.”

Minutes later, we’re on the freeway heading east once more.

“How’d they find us, Silas?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Not sure, entirely. Probably hired someone with the computer skills to track us. The car I was driving wasn’t exactly nondescript. It wouldn’t be super hard to track our path to the parking garage in Cincinnati and then send a team after it. He’d have discovered that we’re not in it, and he’d have to retrace. They’d see the SUV leave, and track that, too. Or, if he was smart, he’d send two teams, one after both.”

“It’s that easy to track people?”

He shrugs. “If you have the training and resources, and if you know what to look for, yeah. If you have the money, you can hire someone to do just about anything.”

“How will we ever get away from all the people who are after us, then?” I check behind us, but the road in our rearview mirror is empty and dark.

He points up. “They’re watching from up there, honey. Satellites.”

“Oh.” I sit back, gnawing on my lip.

Now that it’s over, the bravado has ebbed, and I worry I’ve just poked the nest.

“Do you think I made things worse?” I ask. “Maybe I should’ve just—”

He cuts over me. “No. You stood up for yourself. You sent the message you needed to send. If he’s determined to get you back at any cost, just out of stubborn pride and spite, then it doesn’t matter what you say or do. Sending that message wasn’t for him anyway, it was for you.”

I recognize the truth in his words. “Papa has a lot of men, Silas.”

“And if those guys back there are any indication of their overall skill level, then I’m not worried. They’re amateurs. Wannabes. They prance around in tactical gear and shoot at stationary targets. Some of them probably served, sure. But they’re out there trying to get back to what they probably feel like are the glory days, which are way behind them. If they’re going up against the average security guards and bodyguards, sure, the element of surprise and a little bit of training can make them feel like badasses. Going up against someone withrealtraining? They don’t stand a goddamn chance.”

“Who trained you, Silas?”

He lets out a sigh. “The Cabal isn’t your run-of-the-mill organized crime syndicate, honey. They don’t just run drugs. They service the black market with goods like drugs and guns and girls, but they also provide services like assassinations, kidnapping, and witness intimidation. Their soldiers aren’t just thugs with guns. I mean, the lowest-level guys are, yeah. But the upper echelons, like the guys they’re sending after me, those guys are all former special ops, mostly. Bad, bad, bad dudes with serious, legit skills. And they have their own private training academy. You want to level up from the grunt squads, you go through training. Which is run by a former Spetsnaz guy—Russian special forces.

“He’s the scariest human being I’ve ever met, and once you meet my brothers in the Arrows, you’ll know that’s really saying something. He’s not just highly skilled, he’s pure evil. I’ve seen him do absolutely unspeakable things to people, just to prove the most minor of points.”

“And he trained you?” I ask.

He nods. “Yup.” A shadow crosses his face. “That was the hardest, worst four weeks of my whole fucking life. I wanted to die. I almostdiddie.”

“God, Silas. What did they do to you?”

He sighs. “You know anything about BUD/S? Navy SEAL training?”

I shrug. “Not really.”

“It’s brutal. You don’t sleep, you barely eat, and you’re put through brutally rigorous training. You’re cold, you’re wet, you’re exhausted, and you have to do impossibly hard shit all day, every day. Swim, carry heavy shit, run fake ops, things like that. It’s what sets them apart, right? The guys who can survivethatare the hardest, toughest, and most determined to succeed.

“Well, the Cabal’s Elite Strike Force Team, the team I was a part of, at least up until they promoted me to what amounts to sales, was like BUD/S training, but worse. Because the Navy will push you as far as you can go, but they let you ring a bell and give up if you can’t keep going. You fail out, but you can try again. What I went through, what my brother Saxon went through with me? There was no bell to ring. There was no giving up. If you elected to go into the training academy, you were committing, life or death. You succeeded, or you died trying. If you died, no one picked you up. No one helped you if you got injured. If you tried to help someone, you died with them. It wasn’t about creating a team, it was about creating the hardest, toughest, coldest killers.

“The training itself was based on the average spec-ops training protocols: sleep deprivation, food deprivation, cold, heat, close quarters combat, accuracy, room clearing, all that shit.”

“And you went through this?”

He nods. “I did.”

“Wow.”

“I didn’t want to die.” He shrugs dismissively.

“Why’d you choose to go into it in the first place?”