Page 220 of Sticks and Stones

He did once in a while with her.

Not every time.

Greyson was furious. It pissed him off to be played, but it also pissed him off that him bringing her to Gene and Ethan’s home had risked them. They were his friends, and he didn’t want to compromise them.

Or have Gabe pull them to leave. They were doing a damn good job inPhiladelphia.

“If he’s using her to spy…”

Ethan was to the point.

“If she burned Gene and me to Gabe, you won’t have to kick her ass. I’ll be doing it first. We invited her to our place and were nice. I won’t be nice if I lose the best partner I’ve ever had. If he ships us to different cities, I’ll be rabid,” he admitted.

Greyson was just as pissed.

“Damn it. What do we do now?” he asked, needing help to navigate this.

They all thought about it for a minute, and that’s when Ethan had a plan.

A good one.

The bottom line was that he was the mind fucker in the bunch, and he knew exactly how Gabe thought. What few peopleknew was that while Gabe was an agent when he joined the FBI, he profiled a lot for his partners.

Every one of the people Gabe had been partnered up with had been special agents, and he’d been their profiler. Yeah, he’d done the same job Ethan did.

Until he climbed the ladder.

Hell!

Ethan modeled his climb after Gabe’s career.

“I have a plan,” Ethan admitted.

They both looked over at him.

“It looks as if we need to figure out what he has on her, and then we take her down. We need to turn the tables on both of them. We should have known it was a problem when he put her at the office a little too easily when we asked for an ME here.”

Greyson agreed.

“We haveNEVERhad an ME here at this field office. We always use the city ME. I’m talkingNEVER. I’ve asked, I’ve begged, I’ve pleaded, and each time it was‘that’s not in the budget’. Now, we have a director slashing our agents and budget, and we suddenly get one? I thought he really just liked you two.”

They began laughing.

And laughing.

And laughing.

Oh, that was a false statement if they ever heard one. Gabe was not their biggest fan. In fact, he rode their asses hard since they annoyed him. The only reason he tolerated them was they were effective at their jobs when it came to solving all kinds of shit thrown at them.

Like this drug problem.

“We need to level this playing field,” Gene said. “We just have to do it in a way he doesn’t see coming.”

Ethan began formulating a plan.

“We need to dig into her past and see what he’s using to blackmail her. If Gabe sent her here, there’s a reason. No sane person willingly takes one of his assignments.”

That was accurate.