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she was strong and curvy. Would she go for a guy like him? It didn’t matter. She didn’t know what kind of man he was. To her, he was a goon, working for the mob, and he couldn’t tell her anything different.
    He hadn’t been a normal guy for a long time. Things were too complicated for anything other than a casual hookup that was quickly dismissed. Hayley wouldn’t play that. Nothing was casual about her. Just eating her simple food was like a weekend in bed.
    Luckily it hadn’t come down to making the choice between her and Rolan. The two assassins were skilled, but rough around the edges and too confident. They weren’t coordinated as a team. He’d picked them apart and only had small cuts like he’d been repairing the screens in the crawl spaces under his mom’s house.
    He took another drink, sorting the night’s events and letting the tequila mingle with his slow, tired blood. Another mob had made a play on Rolan. The territory was in flux. It would ramp up the boss’s plans to pull in the other Orel Group heads for the big meeting. There was strength in numbers, and Rolan needed their help to squash out the competition in the southwestern region.
    Art would be there, undercover, running point for the operation to bust that meeting. He had a rendezvous with his strike team the next day and would relate the escalation to them. A lot of moving pieces needed to be in place before they could take Rolan and the Orel Group down. But Art and the other operators worked like the components of a machine gun. Maybe that was why the shady black ops soldiers who’d first formed the team had named it Automatik.
    Sipping his tequila, he walked back through the dark living room. The sun would be up soon. How much sleep would he get before the day burned him awake? Living a double life took all his energy.
    He sat on the bed, surrounded by the solid silence of his blackout curtains. Tonight’s threat had been neutralized. A broken bone and non-life-threatening knife wounds were easy to explain to the cops. The men had been taken away and would be released on bail as soon as their crime family came through. Art’s cover hadn’t been blown. A new civilian had arrived in the mix, and she hadn’t been hurt in the attack.
    From the way Hayley had held the spoon, she could’ve given anyone hell. He was sure she had at some point. Anyone willing to stand out alone and sell food in foreign territory had to have a huge set of radishes. And a reason. Her ferocity in the negotiations had proved that. She was fighting not to lose.
    She didn’t know it, but he was fighting for her, too. He’d seen that she knew what she was doing when she’d shaken Rolan’s hand, but there was no way she understood how spiked and twisted the web was. Would he be able to end all this before she got hurt? He’d joined Automatik to keep people safe. The undercover job with Rolan and the Orel Group had a personal meaning, too.
    Revenge.
    He was in deep and wanted to be in deeper, twisting the knife.
    * * *
    Hayley peered at normal life from a distance. Four days had passed since the incident at the Sea Weed. She’d gone over the events again and again and couldn’t find anything she’d done wrong. Still, she felt like a criminal. And something as ordinary as a farmer’s market was distorted and alien for her now.
    It was the same set of stalls in the same parking lot in the same old part of town, near brick business buildings, but anything familiar appeared too distant to touch. She walked through the rows, examined the fresh food and interacted with the farmers and sellers, yet it all rang false. Or tenuous, like she was about to slip up any second and reveal a terrible secret. The sky would go dark, and the people would turn on her like she was a monster in the village.
    But she couldn’t figure out what the secret was. She’d witnessed a real knife fight, with a violence she’d never seen. Art had been brutal and precise. Men had been