what I was meant to with my life… it happened again. Not my patient, but her best friend, who was assaulted with her by the same person, ended her life when she wasn’t able to get help. Heroin overdose. And like clockwork, the motherfucker got away with it, the brother of the police chief. This time, something in me snapped. These girls lives were ending. Taking these sadistic fucks’ money wasn’t enough.
“So then came Plan B. We needed someone else on this team I formed with Seth. Because while I was the one who would pick our marks, and while Seth was the one who could get us in anywhere to take care of the job, we needed a very special person to actually follow through with it and would hold to the code I could live with—a life for a life. We needed someone with either a military or law enforcement background, someone who didn’t have a problem using his skillset on a civilian. We needed a vigilante,” he says, but I feel like I’m missing something.
I thought he was telling me the story of how he formed Imperium Security, his security team who went in and rescued my sister. This entire time he’s been speaking, I thought he was going to tell me he formed his team in order to keep women safer, to maybe guard victims from their attackers so they wouldn’t have to worry about it happening again, like his Shelly’s rapist had threatened. But this sounds like something else entirely.
“I used my profiling abilities to find and select a very special couple of men, each with a set of their own skills that would help form this perfect team with Seth and me. Each of us was a separate gear in this living machine, our teeth fitting together and moving in a way that nothing could possibly stop us. Next came Brian, also known as Knight,” he says low, and I picture the towering giant of a man who would be intimidating as fuck if I hadn’t witnessed he was wrapped around his tiny, sweet wife’s little finger. But I have no doubt he could kill someone stealthily and make it look like an accident.
“And after him came Corbin, aka Sarge at the club.” He pulls in a deep breath through his nose and lets it out slow, his eyes coming to mine now after having gone distant as he looked into the past. I brace myself, knowing this is it. This is when he confirms what I’ve already put together in my mind. “And together we formed Imperium Security, a cover for our mercenary team.”
Mercenary team.
They’re mercenaries.
The man I love… is a mercenary.
Hell, the man my sister married, my brother-in-law, another man I love in my own special, familial way, and the father of my future niece, is a mercenary.
The two other men I’ve been around enough to call actual friends… are mercenaries. They each have wives, and Corbin has kids, and all of them know that these men we cherish and love with our very souls… kill people—albeit very bad people—for a living. Wait… do they?
“Do… do Twyla, Vi, and Clarice know? Or is this part something you expect me to be able to keep from them?” My eyes have gone wide.
Neil reaches down and strokes my cheek, his face going soft. “They know, goddess.”
A sense of relief fills me at that, and I begin to add it all up in my head. I skim through a hundred conversations I’ve witnessed between these men that seemed to be in some sort of code, and it all clicks into place. I’d been at the hospital when the team brought my sister after they rescued her. I’d heard countless stories of security details they’d been paid to do, so Imperium Security wasn’t an all-out lie. It was just… more than what everyone was led to believe it was.
And as my mind whirls with all this knowledge I now understand to be true, one thing stands out to me, a conversation I heard at the hospital while I held Twyla’s hand and the four men talked outside her room.
“Just this once. Just this once, man, and we’ll never have to worry about him getting out of it like they always do,” Seth raged.
Neil’s voice had come next. “There are eye-witnesses. Way too much evidence this time. Combined with the restraining order and police report containing Astrid’s photos from when he beat her, he won’t get away