Page 44 of Steel Vengeance

“But you’re still going to get him,” she whispered.

Stitch’s face flashed demonic red in the electric light. “Fuck, yeah. He’s going down, I’m going to make sure of it.”

CHAPTER 16

He’d lied to Sloane. He had to.

Until he figured out what the hell was going on, he couldn’t give her the details about the shipment. If she reported back to Matthew, her boss would know Jeremy was involved. Hell, maybe he already knew. Maybe Matthew was in on it too.

A whole faction of the CIA could be dirty. Stitch had no idea how deep this thing went. The last thing he wanted was to put Sloane in the crosshairs. At the very least, she’d get pulled from the op and the whole thing would be shut down.

He couldn’t let that happen. Not if he wanted to find out the truth.

He left her place around midnight. They’d talked for hours out on the balcony—her, about Matthew, and him about his life as a medic in that remote Afghan village.

That was a big deal for him. She had no idea just how huge.

After the attack, he’d completely fallen apart. Went off the grid, living in the mountains, hunting to survive. For a while, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go on. The pain was... unbearable.

Living off the land was easy. SEAL training had more than prepared him for that. But as the weeks dragged into months, the grief morphed into anger, and the anger hardened into white-hot rage. That rage became his fuel—his focus. He swore he’d track down every person responsible for what happened.

That promise had brought him back. He’d crawled out of his hole, found a cheap, filthy flat in Kabul, and started working. He used every contact he had—local officials, poppy farmers, village elders to piece together the truth.

He had a list—and Omari’s name was at the top.

Tracking the Afghani drug lord to Peshawar had taken months. He was hiding, all right, but not from the U.S. for terrorism. No, it was drugs—he was a kingpin in the growing Taliban-run heroin cartel.

He’d only told Sloane part of that story, sticking to the basics. He’d kept it light, sharing enough of his life without getting too deep.

The sharing part? That felt good.

Almost... normal.

For once, he wasn’t the grieving widower fueled by grief and vengeance. He was just a man talking to a woman. A beautiful, interesting woman.

What was so wrong with that?

By the timeStitch pulled up across the street from the meat market, the sun was already blazing. The morning was barely underway, but the heat clung to the air, thick and relentless, promising another scorcher. The market was bustling—Saturday brought out the crowds. Carcasses hung from giant hooks, swaying gently as butchers moved between them, the smell of raw meat and blood hanging heavy in the air. He could already catch a whiff of it, and the busier the market got, the worse it would be. They needed to get on the road soon.

Sloane stepped out of her building, and for a moment, everything else faded. She was wearing a dark skirt, a silky blouse that caught the light just right, and a green-blue scarf wrapped loosely around her head. The color made her eyes pop, and as she waved at him, she gave him a smile that made him forget the smell of the market and the heat pressing down on him.

He found himself smiling back. He was doing that more lately—smiling, talking. Things he’d long forgotten how to do. Hell, he wasn’t even sure he remembered how to be human anymore. But with her, it was coming back.

She stepped off the curb, moving toward him, but then the butcher from the meat market called out to her. She turned to respond, her body angled away from the road.

Something shifted in Stitch’s peripheral vision—a dark figure, a motorbike weaving through the traffic. Full-face helmet, black gear, moving too fast. Warning bells went off in his head. The hair on the back of his neck stood up.

He saw it then—a weapon strapped across the rider’s chest.

Fuck.

Instinct kicked in. He didn’t think, didn’t plan. He yanked his gun from the glove box and bolted out of the vehicle.

“Sloane, get down!” he roared as the biker skidded to a stop.

She swung around, but not fast enough. Everything seemed to move in slow motion, and he couldn’t get to her in time. The motorcyclist raised the rifle and opened fire. The air exploded with the crack of gunshots, and the sidewalk shattered with concrete chips. Shoppers screamed and scattered, dropping bags and running for cover.

Stitch dropped to the ground, rolling and firing as he went.