Otherwise Unharmed

Chapter 5—Unavoidable Agreement

I wasn’t sure if I was waiting for a bullet or not, but I was a little surprised when Trent, the guy with the crazy smile, reached into his briefcase and pulled out a bunch of papers. I was not surprised by the FBI seals on both the papers and the envelopes inside the briefcase.

I was definitely on edge as he displayed the papers out on the table. Even if his first trap hadn’t managed to catch me, I was quite sure Trent wasn’t someone I could just ignore. I had the feeling talking my way out of this one wasn’t going to work either, and shooting my way out of it wasn’t an option.

Currently.

“Let’s see what we have here…” Trent let his voice trail off, cleared his throat, and then indicated a list of—appropriately enough—bullet points on the page. “Possession of unregistered firearms, public endangerment, unlawful discharge of firearms, inciting panic, and of course, the really good one—terrorism.”

I was taken aback but tried not to show it. That charge hadn’t been on the list of charges Moretti and Michael Beard had discussed when they came to see me.

“That last one is the one I find most interesting, seeing as it is a matter of federal law, not just the state of Illinois. I had to pull a couple of strings to get that officially on the list. It was even more difficult getting the timing exactly right. I had to wait until your boss and his tricky lawyer thought they had everything under control. I suppose they wanted to leave your little display under vandalism or something. Anything to appease your boss, hmm?”

I remained completely still.

“At this point, your lawyer won’t see the new charge until after we’re done here. He’ll spend half the day getting it removed, but it won’t matter—I’m already here.” Trent shuffled some papers around in the briefcase. “Did I miss anything?”

“There’s also a woman from your neighborhood who wants to press attempted murder charges against you on behalf of Glenda, her Yorkshire Terrier,” Johnson added. “I honestly don’t think the judge plans to honor that one, though.”

“Fuck the bitch,” Trent said with a smile. “Get it? Bitch? The dog is a girl.”

Johnson laughed, right on cue.

“Anyway,” Trent continued, “with the terrorism charge in place, it opened the doors up wide for me to move in and check you out like I’ve never been able to before, and I have to admit it is a bit of a pleasure for me. You know—seeing you in chains.”

He waved his hand toward me and kept up the obnoxious grin.

“I know a lot about you, Mister Arden,” Trent said, “or should I call you Evan?”

I didn’t respond. This kind of game was best played with as little talk as possible.

“Lieutenant, possibly? No, not that. You really aren’t one anymore, are you?”

I remained silent and motionless.

“So tell me something,” he said. “Were you always a murderer, and that’s why you became a sniper in the first place, or did you learn it from the insurgents? I don’t see how you were in their hands for all that time without turning traitor, personally.”

My flesh went cold and my throat seized up.

I knew exactly what the asshole was doing, but that didn’t stop the blood in my veins from running cold, nor did it stop me from forming fists out of my hands and creating mental images of pummeling Trent into the cold cement floor.

He wasn’t the first to suggest it. In fact, the CIA had spent a good week questioning me when I returned from the Middle East. I answered their questions over and over again, finally losing my shit altogether. They had their suspicions about another Marine who had been rescued—one that had given up information and ultimately gave away my unit’s position—and wanted to pull me into it as well. Yes, Al Qaeda members tried to get me to turn. They tried every fucking tactic they could dream up, but I never gave in.

I never told them a damn thing.

Loyalty.

I closed my eyes, drew in a long, slow breath, and then looked back up at him. Like the handshake, he was doing all of this on purpose—trying to goad me into reacting stupidly. I wasn’t going to be that easy to break, though. I’d dealt with a lot worse than this asshole.

“Do you have anything you’d like to add to the list?” Trent asked as he smiled at me again and waved the paper around. “There have been an extraordinary number of deaths from long-range weapons since you moved into the area. Care to confess to any of them?”

I continued to watch Trent.

“Maybe he’d like a few names and pictures,” Johnson suggested.

“I’d like to contact my lawyer,” I said.

“Nah.” Trent shook his head. “Your lawyer can go fuck himself. I don’t talk to lawyers.”

Any thoughts I had that these guys might have been on the law-abiding side of the feds went out the window. Rinaldo had dealt with the feds plenty of times, but I had always been kept out of sight. He knew any information about me would be dangerous to him, so I was removed from any and all contact. When they were in town, I went underground until they left.

Johnson took some notes down on a pad of paper from the briefcase, and Trent leaned back in his chair and kept up the creepy smile.

“I’ve spent way too much time getting this close to you, Arden,” he said. “There’s no way I’d muddy the conversation with a lot of lawyer bullshit. Your boss always did a good job of keeping you out of sight, but he can’t help you right now. Your lawyer would just be in my way. Besides, lawyers hate it when I rough up their clients.”

He laughed, and Johnson cracked a smile. Trent leaned forward and raised his eyebrows.

“Sometimes I do it just for fun and not because you won’t answer my questions. I just enjoy that shit. Especially when it comes to trumped-up mafia shits who think they’re above and beyond any kind of reckoning, you know? Well, of course you know; you enjoy a little brutality now and again, don’t you?”

I knew it was coming. I didn’t need to watch his hand curl into a fist or follow its movements to my jaw. I couldn’t have moved enough to get out of the way, and with my hands restrained, I couldn’t defend myself, so I took it in silence.

The blow cut the inside of my lip on my teeth, and I dragged my tongue across the wound as I looked back up at Trent and waited for another blow. It came quickly, this time up close to my left eye. My head jerked to the opposite side as a dull throbbing in my temple blurred my vision enough that the next blow to my jaw caught me off guard.

I took a slow breath through my nose, gathered some of the blood in my mouth with my tongue, and spit it out onto the table right in front of Trent. With narrowed eyes, I watched for his next move.

He laughed.

“I suppose you got used to that kind of shit, didn’t you? All that time with a bunch of Jihad-happy insurgents smacking you around. Probably took it up the ass, too, didn’t ya?”

I stayed still though I couldn’t help the rapid flutter of my eyelids at the remark. If I had still been without sleep, I would have been dragged right back there to the desert and probably would have lost my mind for good. Instead, I just swallowed hard, focused on his face, and waited.

“Military hero,” Trent sneered. “What kind of hero gets his entire unit killed but somehow manages to survive himself? Where’s that report, Johnson?”

“Here you are.” Johnson handed Trent a collection of papers held together with a clip.

“Recognize this?” Trent held up the first page, which contained a Marine logo at the top and a CIA stamp on the bottom.

I did recognize it, but I didn’t answer.

“This report is from your interrogation after you were brought back to the U.S. There are a lot of questions about how you managed to survive for so long. Why did they keep you alive, dickhead? Was it because you were converted? Did you lead them to your location and get your unit killed off? Give up the other base running parallel to yours?”

“There was no such evidence,” I snarled back. “There were no charges. I was found in a fucking hole, you asshole! And that was a debriefing, not an interrogation!”

“Finally got a rise out of you, huh?” he smirked.

“Fuck you. No action was taken—no charges.”

Stop it, I told myself. This is what he wants.

“Yeah, yeah,” Trent said as he waved his hand dismissively. “There haven’t been any murder charges brought up against you either, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t been on a killing rampage since you arrived in this city.”

I turned my eyes to the top of the table, refusing to be further engaged. I wasn’t planning on letting him get to me at all, and I definitely couldn’t let him get under my skin again. I had to keep myself prepared for more shit remarks about my capture or the debriefing.

He must have realized I wasn’t going to be further goaded because he finally got to the point.

“Here’s the thing,” Trent said as he leaned forward on his elbows. “I’ve been waiting a long time to actually have something I could use on you that your piece-of-shit boss couldn’t just talk or bribe his way out of it for you, and I finally have it.”

I wasn’t going to let myself be baited into asking what he meant, so I sat there and said nothing as Trent motioned to Johnson’s briefcase. Johnson opened it up and pulled out a stapled set of papers. The very first page had two boxes with images in them resembling a graphic equalizer display. There were rows of vertical bars with smaller horizontal bars going through the middle of them. Both boxes showed the exact same image.

“Do you know what that is?”

I actually had an idea—I’d seen enough crime shows on television, but I didn’t let on. With a shrug, I just looked back at him and waited.

“It’s a DNA report,” he said. “See how the two samples match?”

I shrugged again, and he pointed to one of the two images.

“This one here—this is from the swab they took from your mouth when you were booked,” he said. His finger moved over to the other image. “That’s a pretty common practice, you know. They even do it on dead bodies that are found lying around.”

He watched me, presumably looking for a reaction, but I gave him nothing.

“Guess where this one came from?” Trent pressed.

I didn’t answer. It could have come from a million places—I wasn’t overly careful about leaving shit like trace evidence behind—my kills were from afar. If this guy thought he was going to use DNA evidence to link me to a sniper shooting, he was crazy.

“This was taken from the dead lips of one Brad Ashton.”

Fuck me.

Of all the victims they could have tried to nail me with, they went after the most high-profile one they could possibly find. I’d been far more careful with him than I had with others because he was a well-known, highly paid movie actor and I was doing him up close. He also owed my boss a lot of money in gambling debts, which was all I really cared about. He knew Rinaldo was after him, and his security had made it very difficult to target him from afar, which was why I had to go a slightly less conventional route.

Using his affection for well-built guys like myself, I came on to him, encouraged him, and led him off to a hotel room to drug and kill him. In the process, he’d made it to first base and had certainly made a grab for second. As a sniper, I usually didn’t get close enough to my victims to think about leaving DNA anywhere near the scene, but Brad had been best lured with my mouth. Thankfully, I hadn’t actually had sex with him, or the DNA evidence could have been even more incriminating.

I made a point of not reacting as I watched Trent and Johnson watch me. I didn’t see any reason to respond to them since anything and everything I said wouldn’t just be used against me in a court of law but here in this room right now.

“Must have used a condom,” Trent said with a smirk. “We didn’t find any cum on him. I’d heard you were an ass man. I guess that’s true, huh?”

Johnson snickered again as Trent wriggled his eyebrows at me. I tensed my fingers on the arms of the chair but kept my silence.

“I bet your mob buddies would get a kick out of all this, wouldn’t they? Finding out you fucked one of your kills, and a dude at that. What’s that, Arden? I can’t hear ya.”

Johnson snorted and shook his head a bit. He never made eye contact with me, though. He kept all his attention on Trent, awaiting his instructions. However, Trent seemed much more interested in harassing me instead of addressing his partner. He leaned back in the chair until the front two legs came up off the floor.

“So here’s the deal,” Trent said. “With this evidence, I own your sniper-happy ass. That means I call the shots, and when you get out of here, you’re going to go right back to Rinaldo Moretti’s business, and you’re going to help me bring him in.”

I couldn’t hold back any longer—I laughed out loud.

“Did you really think that after being in a hole for eighteen months you could threaten me with prison?” I laughed again. “Fuck you. Fuck you, your DNA evidence, and whatever other shit you think you have on me. None of it makes a fucking difference.”

“Well, all right, you got me there.” Trent dropped the chair back down on the ground with a thump. “I admit I figured you weren’t too scared of the idea of being in chains again. I mean, you get used to it, don’t you? You probably learned to love it.”

I looked away from him and took a deep breath.

“I watched that vid from the other day,” Trent said. “That’s a hot little piece of ass you’ve acquired. Lia Antonio, I believe?”

I turned to him with a glare, trying to threaten him as much as I could with my eyes alone.

“Does she know?” Trent’s voice dropped down low. “Does she know all about your escapades? I bet she’d like to know.”

I continued to glare at him, but inside, my mind was racing. I couldn’t let her find out about me—not like that. Even beyond everything else, I couldn’t let her watch me go to prison with rumors flying that I had fucked the guy I killed.

“I understand her fiancé has put out a missing persons report on her,” Johnson said. His mouth turned up into a bit of a smile.

“Oh, that’s right!” Trent snapped his fingers. “Maybe we’ll just give him a call and let him know where she is.”

“Leave her alone,” I said with deadly calm.

“Don’t think so,” Trent replied. “Frankly, I’m getting tired of playing with you. You don’t want to cooperate, so maybe I’ll go question her and see what she knows.”

“She doesn’t know anything.”

Trent stood up and slammed his briefcase shut.

“I’ll just have to find that out for myself.” He turned to head to the door.

Once again, I knew exactly what he was doing. However, this time it didn’t make any difference. He had me, and we both knew it.

“Wait.” I made eye contact with him as he turned around and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Don’t waste my time,” Trent said.

“There has to be something else I can give you,” I said.

“The offer is as it stands,” Trent replied. “You give me Moretti, and I give you your freedom to go fuck up your life some more. I’ll still be riding your ass for the fun of it because I doubt it will last. You’d have a bit of time to shove your cock in Miss Antonio for a while longer, though.”

“No,” I replied, ignoring his crude remarks. “Another way.”

“I’m not having a fucking debate with you, Arden.”

“Not Moretti.” My mind raced. There had to be an alternative—something else I could do to satisfy Trent that didn’t include bringing down the one person who held my undying loyalty—the one I couldn’t betray. “It…it wouldn’t work. They’d know if I was…doing something different. Out of the ordinary.”

It was a line of bullshit. The people who worked closely with me were used to me doing the unexpected, and anything out of the ordinary would be consider yet another one of my idiosyncrasies.

“Then I’m going to go have a visit with your little lady friend and see just what all she knows about your activities.”

I took a couple of slow, deep breaths to focus myself. I had to think—what else would a man like Trent want? Nothing but a big takedown would work for him, and Moretti was it around here. Maybe if we were in New York and I knew more about the people there, I could offer to infiltrate and bring down an organization larger than Moretti’s but not around here.

But there were other organizations, other families…

“I’ll give you Gavino Greco,” I stated. My eyes met with his. “Not just him, but the Severinovs, his Russian associates. You’d get them all—two families for the price of one.”

Trent eyed me carefully, and I could practically see the little wheels in his head spinning. He didn’t care about Moretti specifically—he was probably just looking for the next big promotion, and any major crime lord bust would work for him.

“How are you going to do that?” he asked.

“That’s my problem, isn’t it?”

“If I don’t believe you can do it, it’s my problem, too.”

“I can do it,” I promised. “Greco will jump at the chance to have me on his side. He has so many enemies, his kill roll has to look like Santa’s shopping list. I can get his trust as far as I would need to.”

“You’ve taken out a few of his people.”

I wasn’t going to respond to such a direct accusation. Even though he had me, and the cameras weren’t rolling, I wasn’t going to make all this shit easy for him. In the back of my head, I was hoping to just bide enough time to figure out what I could do to get both myself and Lia out of this completely.

“He’ll buy it,” I said. “I know he will.”

He leaned over and tapped the tabletop with his finger.

“You think you can do that? Deliver them both to me?”

“Dead or alive?” I asked.

“Alive, asshole. I need a bust, not a body.”

“I can do it,” I said with conviction. “But you stay away from Lia Antonio.”

“I suppose I could agree to that.” Trent nodded. “You get me Greco and Severinov, and I’ll have that DNA evidence removed from the database.”

His nasty little smile came back. I wasn’t stupid enough to trust the asshole, but I had to ask.

“How do I know you won’t just use all that shit against me later?”

“Well, here’s the thing,” Trent said. “You really don’t. That’s not one of my problems, though. You’ll just have to go with how trustworthy I look and hope for the best. You don’t have much of a choice here.”

“You going to let me take care of two families and then continue to suck me dry?”

“If that’s what you’re into,” Trent said with a nod. “I guess we could always go back and look for more evidence farther back in Ashton’s throat. I’ll be in touch, Mister Arden.”

He and Johnson stood together and walked out the door. A minute later, I was taken back to my cell. No one asked me about my busted lip; I was just led quietly back to my cell and tossed inside to come up with what the fuck I was going to do to get out of all of this.

I was going to have to find some way to help Trent get Greco and Severinov behind bars.

I would have rather just killed him.

I was taking a chance, a huge chance. They were leaving me with very few options, though. Brad Ashton’s death wasn’t something Rinaldo could just bribe my way out of—it was far too public. Fans on Twitter and Facebook were demanding some kind of action on the case, and if it were to be discovered that I was not only his killer but also intimate with him? Even if it was only kissing, the implications were staggering.

It wasn’t a matter of reputation—I didn’t give a shit if someone thought I was gay or not. It was the fact that I had been so careless—so sloppy—as to leave evidence like that behind. Rinaldo would have a totally different opinion. He wouldn’t like the idea that his number one enforcer was in the closet, true or imagined. It wouldn’t matter to him. In his eyes, it would make me weaker, and weaker wouldn’t serve him better.

The chances of him bringing a lawyer to represent me on that case were pretty much nil.

Then there was Lia. I couldn’t bring myself to regret her coming to see me—I needed her—but it had also put her far too close to me, which made her a target as well. If Trent knew about her, others would find out soon enough if I didn’t do something to protect her. I wasn’t sure if Trent had the idea of telling her in his back pocket the whole time and played me up with the evidence and shit just to get me going, but my guess was that he probably did. Rinaldo had warned me about being attached to people on many, many occasions. He even warned me about Bridgett, though I hadn’t realized how close to her I was at the time.

“Getting close to a girl,” Rinaldo said, “can be a good thing. If you were someone else—someone less complicated—the worst that can happen is you don’t work out. You’re a complicated man, Arden, and you are in a complicated position. Bitches make it even more complicated.”

“I’m aware, sir.”

“You’re aware,” he mocked. “Will that change anything when someone finds out you give a shit? What better to hold over your head than a warm cunt, huh? You take better care not to show your affection for her. You’ve done a shit job on that front with that pup of yours.”

It didn’t matter in the end. They tried to use Bridgett against me, but whatever we had between us wasn’t more important than my loyalty to Rinaldo Moretti. It didn’t stop me from killing her for her betrayal.

But with Lia? That was another subject. If she did something like Bridgett had done, I wasn’t sure how I would react. Bridgett was a convenient fuck and useful for helping me sleep, but Lia meant something completely different—something I couldn’t put into words or even thoughts.

Regardless of the outcome, I couldn’t betray Rinaldo. Never that. It wasn’t just about a paycheck or the fact that he gave me a job and a reason to be out walking around in the world—it was a lot more than that. Like my unnamed feelings for Lia, I couldn’t express why I felt the loyalty I did, but it wasn’t something I could drop because of the threat of a prison sentence.

I wasn’t sure I could even drop it for Lia’s sake.

I shook my head and leaned against the cell wall to stare out the windows at the cars and people far below. It was too difficult to think in this place. I needed to get outside and maybe get in a little target practice to get my mind really functioning again.

I wondered if I’d ever see my Barrett again.

It was most certainly taken in as evidence and very possibly lost to me at this point. I could get another one, but that one had been with me for a long time—bought it outright when I was discharged. It had taken most of the money I had at the time, but it was the only way I could stay focused. I needed the feel of the cool metal in my hands as my finger pulled back on the trigger and the recoil pressed hard against my shoulder. Watching rounds go into a target through the scope was the only time I felt at peace.

Well, maybe peace wasn’t exactly the right word, but it stopped me from panicking.

I sighed and brought myself back to the present long enough to consider who I knew in Greco’s organization well enough to approach them and convince them my loyalties were now up for grabs. I couldn’t come up with any of the people who hadn’t had the barrel of my Beretta pointed at their faces during one intense encounter or another. I’d also killed off the cousin of Greco’s mistress once upon a time, though he didn’t know it was me.

The guard called to out to me—it was time to eat what they tried to pass off as food around here. I wasn’t hungry and would have rather stayed in my cell and plotted in silence, but skipping meals wasn’t an option. Despite the need to come up with a plan, I needed my resources in the outside world.

Nothing could be done from here, so I was just going to have to wait.