Bloody Heart (Brutal Birthright #4) - Sophie Lark Page 0,106

slap his back.

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this,” I say.

Raylan shrugs it off like it’s nothing for him to have flown halfway across the world to help me out.

“It’s been too long, Deuce,” he says.

It’s funny seeing Raylan with his same old duffle slung over his shoulder, his torn-up cargo pants and a battered pair of boots that I hope to god aren’t the same ones we were issued in the field. His country-boy drawl is the same, and the grin that flashes across his face.

He looks a little older, though. He was just a kid when he worked as my spotter, freshly enlisted, barely over twenty. Now he’s got the lines at the corners of his eyes that you only get from squinting in bright desert sun, and he’s deeply tanned under the dirt. He’s got a lot more tattoos, too. More than the military would have allowed.

He’s not in the army anymore. He works for a mercenary group called the Black Knights. Sometimes they’re employed by the army as Private Military Contractors. Other times he disappears for months at a time on murkier missions that skirt the line between legal and illegal operations.

I don’t give a fuck what he’s been doing. All I care about is that he looks as sharp as ever—fit and practiced. I need a trained soldier at my side for this. My brothers always have my back, no matter what. But they don’t know battlefield tactics. That’s what I’ll be facing in Christian Du Pont—not a gangster. A tactician. A soldier.

“You got your rifle in there?” I ask, nodding toward his duffle.

“Of course,” Raylan says. “A couple other goodies for us, too.”

He throws his bag in the back of my SUV and climbs in the passenger seat.

“Goddamn,” he says, sinking into the soft leather. “I haven’t sat on anything but canvas or steel in a month.”

“Probably haven’t had any AC either,” I say, turning up the air.

“You got that right,” he sighs, tilting up the vent to hit his face.

“So,” I say, once we’re back on the road. “Tell me what you know about Du Pont.”

“He got transferred into my unit about eight months after you went home,” Raylan says. “He seemed alright at first. He wasn’t exactly popular, but nobody disliked him. He was quiet. Read a lot. Didn’t drink, so some of the other guys thought he was a bit of a stick. He knew his shit, though. He was accurate as hell—and hungry. He wanted to go out early and stay out late. Wanted to rack up his numbers. It was obvious he was competitive. And after a while, I could tell he was competitive with you, specifically. ‘Cause he’d ask about you. Ask how many hits you’d gotten in a week, or a month. What was the most you’d done in a day. You were kind of a legend by then. You know how army time is—six months is like six years, and stories get crazier every time they’re told.”

I nod, uncomfortable. I never liked any of that shit. I didn’t like the attention, and I didn’t want to be treated like some kind of hero. To me it was a job.

“Anyway, it started to get weird. If we hit all our targets, he’d start looking for someone else to shoot. He’d say, ‘What do you think about those men down in the market. You think that one has a gun under his clothes?’ Plus, he didn’t like the Iraqi police or their ERD teams. We were supposed to be working with them, driving the militants out of Mosul. Each team had a segment of the Old City to clear. We were supposed to create escape routes for civilians to get out.

“Once we started closing in on the insurgents, we had them cornered by the al-Nuri mosque. They were using some of the civilians as shields. So the snipers were supposed to pick them off, out of the crowd. Du Pont shot four of the ones we knew were ISIS. But he hit six civilians too. And I knew how accurate he was. There was no fucking way that all six were an accident. One was a pregnant woman, not even standing close to anybody else.

“Then when the civilians started to run, we tried to guide them out through a gate on the west side. All of a sudden the gate just fucking exploded. Whole thing collapsed, burying a dozen people, including a bunch of the ERD

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