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.