Page 5 of Heart of a Villain

Look him in the eye,

oh, my friend, you will die,

and your body will never be found…

CHAPTER

ONE

No one ever mentioned that heartbreak was like a purge. There was no guidebook to explain that even when a man had made peace with the love he’d lost, the pain would linger, bulldozing through his quietest moments.

It was that part of the tragedy Adrían Delgano disliked the most—realizing that Ayesha Lattimore would have never been the true love of his life each time she looked at her husband. Whenever he watched them with their two boys and infant daughter, he saw that “meant to be” was never meant to be with him.

As happy as he was for her, it hurt.

His heart had kissed something it wanted to kiss again, but he could barely promise it ten more years to beat, never mind someone else to beat for. In the last few months, he’d felt the shadow of the Grim Reaper almost daily. And, every morning, he found himself not worried enough that it could be his last sunrise.

He walked over to where Ayesha stood watching the clean-up crew break down the equipment from her youngest son, Theo’s fifth birthday party. She yawned, and he had to stop himself from pulling her against him to give her a spot to rest her head. In his mind, her exhaustion was a form of discomfort, and for a long time, alleviating her discomfort had been his sole purpose in life.

“What happens after this?” he asked.

“Bedtime, my friend,” she said. “I already know that Theo and Josiah are going to fall asleep immediately, but Joel and I aren’t sure what Tiare will do.” She looked up at him. “What about you? Are you leaving?”

“I have nowhere to go.”

“Well, what are Lee and Trevor doing?”

For ten years, his primary role in life had been serving as part of a ghost unit whose focus centered around neutralizing global threats.

They’d started as a team of six.

Now, he, the North Korean Lee Jeong-Hyeok, and the Aussie Trevor Mason were all that remained. However, he didn’t know whether that meant their team, Omega, was officially disbanded or if they were unofficially looking to recruit new members. Perhaps he could convince Lee and Trevor to do what he was thinking about doing—joining a different unit.

The elite Alpha.

A few times, he’d heard Ayesha refer to Alpha as The Lethal Six: Gage Wolfe, Dez Harding, Julien Hunter, Giorgio Pozza, Mike Huang, and Joel Lattimore. To his knowledge, there were four teams in total—Alpha, Delta, Gamma, and Omega—and all had been recruited by a faceless entity who went by the name of Central.

Over the years, the teams eventually learned that Central had played each group like a game of chess, baiting them against one another, which had resulted in the death of Ayesha’s first husband, Curtis Savea. So, the plan was to go to the source and cut off its head.

Adrían took a small step closer to Ayesha’s side. “Trevor is staying in Sweden because his wife is here, but I’m not sure what Lee will do,” he said. “In any case, we’ll be working with Alpha to try to recruit the other teams before we go after Central. That also gives us time to track Central’s movements to determine whether they’re mobilizing.”

“Because mobilization would mean they know something’s coming?” Ayesha asked.

“Yes, exactly.”

Joel glanced their way, but never would he disrespect Joel and Ayesha’s relationship any more than he already did, at night, in dreams where Ayesha came to him without a stitch of clothing covering her body.

For the most part.

In his dreams, she wore a veil draped across her face with only her eyes visible, reawakening the most painful remnants of his hidden past. Life, compelled to take him all the way to the summit of grief, had essentially made it so that he’d fallen for the same woman twice. Then, he’d lost them both, one to death and the other to, admittedly, a better man for Ayesha than he would have ever been.

“It wouldn’t hurt to ask them,” she said.

To stop himself from touching her, he folded his arms across his chest. When that didn’t work, he shoved his hands into his pockets.

“Ask them what?”

“To stay. You can bring up the subject with Gage. Technically, Gage is El Capitan. The leader. The big man in charge. But I wouldn’t bring up joining Alpha just yet because those six are very…outsider-adverse.”