Page 7 of Stand: Part One

It had been a long five-hour flight back to San Diego from Honduras, my desperation to return to my gravely injured wife making me a crazed animal out for blood and gore. Watching the security tape of her getting shot had been a serious mistake.

The fury igniting in my veins became a damn near uncontrollable inferno, making me want to incinerate everything in my path. But my craving to maim, murder, and avenge her could only be mitigated by tedious investigative work from the plane.

When I wasn’t pacing, raging, or threatening someone’s life over the phone, Scott and I spent the rest of the flight combing through days’ worth of security footage.

Hunting down answers as to how and why a Glock 19 equipped with live rounds made it into one of Jaden’s many training exercises was the only useful thing I could do from the plane.

“This is fucking bullshit. Why did it take him so long to call it in?!” I roared as I rewatched the footage from inside the garage. I watched every move Jaden made to remind myself that she was alive when my medical team found her. “He just fucking stood there like a dazed moron! Who the fuck recruited him?! And what the fuck is Jaden wearing on her goddamn feet?!”

Scott narrowed his eyes at the screen, tilting his head as he zoomed in on Jaden’s legs. My anger had me pacing back and forth down the aisle of the plane, no doubt destroying the new carpeting I just paid for.

“They look like bunny slip?—”

“What?” I growled as I answered my phone on the first ring, eager for answers.

“Check the file I just forwarded to Scott,” Greg said, his voice distorted through the speaker phone.

I hung up the phone as Scott pulled up the file in question, another security feed popping up, this one taking place five minutes before Jaden’s training exercise was set to begin. Brian Creston, the guard responsible, quickly came into view of the camera in Garage C2. He hurriedly pulled off the M16 hanging from his torso and the Glock from his belt holster, placed both on a nearby table, and moved out of view of the camera. He reappeared in another view, showing footage of the bathroom.

My gaze sharpened with rage. Rule number one was to always ensure your weapons were secure at all times. Leaving them out in the open and unattended like that was exactly how an amateur got killed in the field. Or by me.

About fifteen seconds went by before another person came into view wearing a black hooded jacket that concealed his face. He carried the same standard guns on his body and stopped in front of the same table, laying them right next to Brian’s. He then crouched down to tie his shoes, then stood back up and strapped himself with Brian’s guns before quickly fleeing the building.

“What the hell…” Scott murmured as he scrutinized the footage.

When Creston returned, the jackass didn’t even notice his guns had been switched as he quickly holstered them and ran out of the building. Given that they were now loaded with the actual bullets in question, he should have noticed the weight difference almost immediately.

My fists clenched in absolute fury.

We used specially modified ammunition called “simunition” for all training exercises. They were non-lethal projectiles with a detergent-based color marking compound that would show our trainees the accuracy of their aim in real time. They could be used in any of our standard weapons with a simple switch of the magazine. They were the most realistic option for training purposes, aside from the fact that they were much lighter than regular ammunition, which should have been a dead giveaway for Creston.

This would be the last fucking time a trainee would be allowed anywhere near Jaden.

Brian had clearly taken the smart way out by eating that bullet. I wanted to strangle the motherfucker until his head ripped from his neck. Had he still been alive, I would have spent days slowly breaking every single bone in his body before ripping scraps of flesh from the broken pieces.

At least he had one working braincell.

Angered that my fantasy of murder had been foiled, I turned my attention to figuring out who had switched the guns and why. Scrutinizing the hooded figure, I sneered at his carelessness, zeroing in on the very telling detail he’d neglected to conceal on his hand: a dark tattoo of a spider, bold enough to be visible in the camera.

“Alan,” Scott declared with a nod.

Fury burned a hole inside my chest.

“Have him collected. Discretely. I don’t want to spook anyone else he might have been working with.”

Nodding his head, he stepped away to make the call and within the hour Alan Yenner was rounded up and waiting for us in the shack. And he did not look well.

“Tell me the truth quickly and I might spare your family,” I ordered, more interested in getting answers before spilling blood. I needed to know why before I did anything else. Jaden had only just gotten out of surgery and was resting in our trauma unit. Five minutes of looking at her still unconscious form was all I could bear before my blood rage boiled over the edge.

“The truth,” I snapped. “Now.”

“We already know what happened,” Scott interjected. “What we don’t know is why.”

Alan’s breathing hitched as his eyes darted back and forth between us.

My gaze hardened. “Do you really want to experience my reputation firsthand?”

All he could do was stutter and shake in his seat, probably from shock.