looks that passed as Hispanic and my streetwise Spanish lingo, my MC history, and my ability to blend into any scenario.
And I had. I’d gotten tight with the club. I’d merged with them, risen through the ranks, become badass numero dos right behind the Prez, Vicente Valderas. Gotten in so deep I’d finally been trusted enough to go on gun runs and meet shipments, the coke for weapons trades. I had the location and intel necessary to bury the Outlaws in a rubble of their own making.
The five-foot-high stacks of crates had stood empty when cracked open with crowbars. We’d been surrounded by Outlaws, Vicente at the helm. High-powered Tech-9s pointed at us from all directions, four Cuban illegals to every one operative on my team. I’d raised my hands in defeat. Vicente had grinned harder, like a dark leather-faced alligator with his jaws about to snap shut. It was hopeless. Walker may have been a crack sniper, but no way he could take out the entire tribe before some of us got gunned down.
I’d been made.
“Don’t know how you do eet in Okefenokee, mijo, but we have a rule of honor. And you just took a dump all over la fraternidad .” He snapped his mouth shut with a clack of teeth, black oily eyes on mine as he signaled silently to his homegrown army.
Their weapons raised, the Cuban brotherhood took aim.
“Noooo!” I roared, dodging the spray of bullets, leaping toward Vicente.
My uppercut split his lip. We grappled to the ground. His snaky fist drove into my stomach over and over again. The gunshots distracted me. I watched, I listened , sickened at the sound of bodies hitting the floor all around us.
Vicente raised his weapon above my face. I looked down the barrel, flooded with true fear for the first time in my life. He swiveled it around with a malicious smile.
“Lights out, jefe .”
I felt my flesh pop and break open as the gun butt made contact. The smell of fresh blood spilled filled the air, more than my own, huge quantities shed. The second time his gun slammed into my cheekbone, I blacked out.
Salty air, summery sweet, warm, sand. Death. Above all death. The remembered sounds of my team being slaughtered assaulted me at once, and I came to, struggling to retch and stand and wrestle away from oncoming death as I was dragged across white sandy dunes too pure in the glowing moonlight to fit with what had gone down earlier.
Vicente made sure I knew, stopping long enough to pull me to my bound feet. “ Keeled them all, jefe. Stinking pendejos .”
That little speech made him sound completely fucking loco , but I knew differently. He was one of the sanest men I’d met, which was what made him so successful and so completely dangerous.
His double-barreled shotgun prodded between my shoulder blades as I walked down a long lonely stretch of St. Pete’s Beach in the midnight hours.
Everyone was dead because of me.
“ Cazador Saucedo —Hunter Sexton—are you ready to die?” He pushed me to my knees.
“I’ll die honorably, not with a bullet in the back.”
Gripping my long dirty hair, he pulled me around to face him. “Right between the eyes. Si .”
In that moment before my certain death, I saw Jack, my baby boy. I never wanted him tied to me—Hunter the Ghost—or to know how his dad went down, shot in the face from point-blank range.
I kept my eyes open, willing an honorable death to find me.
Behind Vicente, Walker rose from the dunes like a phantom. Covered in seaweed and sea-slime, he slipped across the silent sand, quiet as a harbinger of death. He slammed into Vicente’s back, taking him down.
They rolled in the dunes while I chewed through the tension-tight rope tying my wrists together. Blood dripped to my fingertips, but finally I was free with a quick slip of the knot around my ankles. Outlaws was going down.
Vicente slashed at Walker with a blade he’d drawn from inside his boot. Crimson blood saturated white crystals of sand. He held the knife above Walker’s
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