Free Code of Honor (Special Ops Book 7) by Capri Montgomery Page A

“game” would reach me. Maybe…just maybe he orchestrated this knowing he was going to die.”
    “Did he have to take me into hell with him?” She balked. Okay, the guy wanted to right past wrongs, but did he have to put her life and other people’s lives in danger just to do it?
    Rhys shrugged. “Seems to me he went into this knowing he was going to die. Seems to me if he knew that he should have, one, not involved civilians, and two, left better notes.”
    She sighed. “Yeah, and not used me.”
    “Yeah, I agree, that’s what I meant by civilians.”
    “Oh,” she nodded.
    “But it does seem he targeted you. I just don’t know why.”
    She snorted. “You’re the best in your field here and I’m one of the best in mine. I fact check, design, build, and I’m always behind the scenes and rarely noted by my real name in the credits—that’s my choice by the way. I do end up credited on games, but I go by my code name on every game I help design. Ghost Ninja, that’s my code name. My dad kind of gave me the Ninja part because he would call me his Butterfly Ninja—sweet but lethal. The Ghost part came when I was um…playing with um…hackers,” she shrugged. “Ghost Ninja because I can get in and out. I can sit there like a ghost, invisible, observing everything, and Ninja because I can destroy the competition. Fortunately I focused more on the legal side of life and not the illegal side. Fact checking became my thing, building and design was something I was good at too, but I loved the fact checking part. The fact that I could get into databases that shouldn’t have been gotten into was just another perk to the hiring process for the gaming place I landed in. My work helped keep us ahead of the game. Most of our buyers are military, want-to-be military, or prefer to handle the hard military life from the comfort of their sofa. They like facts mixed with their fiction and help us get that. Mostly it’s just checking facts legally, but I have had to dive in on some things and go a little deeper than some legal channels would permit—nothing too out of this world or anything like that, just a little deeper.”
    He shook his head. “These guys think you know more than you do and they…he shouldn’t have put you in danger like this.”
    “Why would these criminals let us get this far? If they were watching him, which I think they probably were, why let us start building the game in the first place? Why not just kill him before he made contact with us?”
    “They may not have been watching from pre-contract. The contract may have made them start paying attention to him. I need more information on him, his past, in order to figure that part out. But I think they waited because the lower level guys aren’t the ones they cared about. You must be close, or something your boy genius was about to give you was going to hit too close to home for higher level people…whatever it was they are ready to end this completely.”
    “By ending me,” she stated. “Because they think I have the end game in my head.”
    He nodded.
    She exhaled slowly. The thought occurred to her that this game really was worth killing for and unfortunately for her she was, as Rhys had said, a “marked target in a very deadly game.” She felt anger hit her hard. “Well if I’m going to hell I’m taking them with me.”
    He grabbed hold to her hand swiftly, stopping her from leaving the table. She had gotten up fast, trying to escape into her room so she could cry out her anger, but he refused to let her go.
    “You are not going to hell.”
    “I don’t believe in heaven.”
    His glare was stern and decisive. “I mean they are not ending your life. You got me?”
    She nodded. “They could end us both, Rhys.”
    “Not this time,” he nearly growled those words out. “Not this time.”
    She leaned in and kissed his lips. “Then let’s take them out before they take us out.”
    “No. Not you, not this.”
    “You can’t do