Current day

I absently ran the blade of my knife under my nails, scraping away some of the blood that had collected there before sighing in frustration. I was sitting on a small leather ottoman in front of a chair talking to a man with the name of Usatov, a Russian national in the country illegally. Well, talking might be a little misleading, since he was tied to the chair he was sitting in and had a ball gag in his mouth. But he could still nod and shake his head.

I leaned towards Usatov, taking his left hand in mine, and slipping the tip of the knife under the nail on his middle finger. "Are you really going to make me ask again? You're running out of nails, and I'm pretty sure you don't want me to move on to your other extremities. Last time, are you going to answer my question?"

Blood was running down his face from a cut on his scalp, dripping down through his eyes and pooling on top of the gag in his mouth, no doubt leaving a coppery taste in his mouth. He shook his head rapidly, his eyes wide with fear, and I quickly shoved with the knife, hearing the high pitched scream around the gag as he tried to jerk in the chair. He didn't get far, and I pried the nail right up and off the finger.

"Damn. You only have 2 nails left. Tell me Usatov, are you circumcised?" I asked while dragging the tip of the knife along the zipper to his shorts. It was a warm night in Mobile, Alabama, and shorts were a good choice. Probably a better choice than my leather pants, but they were still my favorite, and they were much easier to get blood off of.

He was squealing now, and it was a delightful sound since I needed answers fast. I was sick of the stench in the room since he'd already released a steady stream of waste products from every orifice imaginable until a little swamp of urine, vomit and feces gathered around the chair. Have you ever seen a man vomit with a ball gag in his mouth? It wasn't a pleasant sight, as most of it was forced out of his nose. Yes, that was quite disgusting.

I walked around behind him, thankful for the plastic baggies over my heels, and undid the ball gag. "Seriously, Usatov, do you like the pain? I just need a name. Give me the name of the boat that is bringing the stuff in, and I let you go. Hell, I'll be too busy chasing the boat to fuck with you. Make the smart choice." I knew he was nothing but a middleman, but I really wanted the source for the drugs that he was the conduit for, because then I could keep backtracking and make the whole network go away.

"Okay!" he gasped in a thick accent. "No more! The boat is called Whistling Dixie! I know nothing else!"

That matched up with what I knew. I had a list of 7 boats that were possible smugglers, and the Whistling Dixie was one of those. It gave me my next stop on my quest to rub out another drug ring! "Thanks, Usatov. I'm going to cut you loose, okay? You get a 24 house head start, and then I'll be looking for you." He nodded rapidly, no doubt thinking he could make it with that head start. I brought the knife down to cut the rope at his wrist when one of my phones rang, making my eyes fly open in panic. Getting a phone call in the middle of the job wasn't the issue, but it was the fact that it was my second phone that made me worry.

I walked across the room, holding my finger up to shush Usatov while I answered the phone. He was wisely quiet. "Hey, Lexie, are you okay?" Lexie was the only number in the contacts for that phone, and she was only supposed to call it in an emergency, but I had to hope that she had broken that rule.

"Jesse! They're here!" she replied frantically. "I think it's Zac, but he's not alone!"

I ran over to the sink behind Usatov, rinsing my knife off in the sink. "You're at home?" I confirmed. "Willow too?"

"Yes! We're both here!" I could hear the panic in her voice, and I was determined to not let anything happen to her. She'd already gone through too much when Lessa died, and I couldn't let that happen to her too.

"Okay, use the bracelet, I'll be there as soon as I can! I'll be there, I promise!"

"I believe in you, Jesse. I know you'll come!"

"Use the bracelet now! No more talking!" I disconnected the call and pulled a chef's knife from the knife block on the counter. Walking back towards my conversation companion, I stopped behind him, then gripped his head, pulled it to the side, and stabbed him through the neck. "Sorry Usatov, change of plans." I couldn't give him his head start, though truthfully, I never really did. Maybe twice in the last 5 years or so had I kept that promise, and in both cases, they were dead as soon as the 24 hours was up.

I made sure I was out of the vomit swamp and picked up the little suitcase that was full of cash from whatever Usatov intended to buy. I leaned down and slipped off the plastic booties, leaving them on the floor before I walked out the front door. I never worried about fingerprints, since mine were tied to a fictitious blonde Russian assassin if anyone ever ran them through the system. She'd be high on any most wanted list if she truly existed, since I'd amassed quite the body count in her name. I'd like to say I felt guilty for that, or that I had nightmares over the people I'd killed, but the truth was I didn't. The only nightmares I had, the only guilt I felt, was over not being home when they came for my wife.

Since she was taken from me, I've felt nothing. How could I when the love of my life was gone along with my unborn child, and I'd turned myself into a murdering monster? But today was different. Today, I felt something, and it was fear. Lexie and Willow were two of the sweetest girls I'd ever known, and they didn't deserve to deal with what they were going through. Hell, nobody did. I thought I'd taken care of the whole nest of those vipers after I lost Lessa, but I guess I missed some if they were coming after the girls. I couldn't let that happen.

I jumped into my car, which was a brand new black Audi RS e-tron GT with dark tinted windows so nobody could see me at all. I fired it up and got on the road fast. It was early enough that there wasn't much traffic on this warm summer morning and started driving as fast as I could. Lexie and Willow lived just south of Atlanta, but if Zac was involved, they were hopefully headed towards me, since he lived near Montgomery, Alabama. I could make that drive in under two hours, which was probably faster than he could. I pulled out the phone that Lexie had called and opened up the tracer app for the bracelet she had, and it pinged right away. Yep, it was still up near Atlanta. I got on the road, hoping to intercept them before anything bad happened.

My father died during the attacks on 9/11. I was a toddler at the time, and barely remember him. I have a few more memories of my mother, but not many. After he was gone, my mother spiraled into a depression, and ended up taking her own life less than a year later, leaving me in the care of my uncle John and his husband Leo. They were barely kids themselves, only 19 and still in college, but did an amazing job of raising me. They were heartbroken to have lost my parents but were happy to adopt me since they had wanted to have kids but couldn't afford to adopt or find a surrogate. It was probably a good thing I had their support when it was discovered that I wasn't the little boy they thought, but intersex instead. It was much easier to cope with that new knowledge with two amazing men as role models in my life. To them, it didn't matter. I was still the same person; I was just going to get some boobs too. Pretty big ones at that.

When the Navy SEALs were in the news a lot while hunting for the terrorists that helped with the attacks that killed my father, I became a little obsessed with them. By the time high school was over, it had been my dream to join them. I'd been dating Lessa for a long time by then, and she knew what I wanted to do and why. It never crossed my mind that we'd break up while I was gone, we'd been together since kindergarten. First as friends, and then dating since middle school, and nothing could end that.

I first met her when I transitioned from living in New York with my parents to living in Alabama with my uncle and his husband, and it was rough on me. I could still remember the first day of school, when I popped a little asshole in class in the nose for giving me grief about having two dads. I was sent to the corner for time out, and this adorable little blonde girl yelled at the teacher. When he asked if she wanted time out in the corner too, she said yes, and joined me. She was instantly my best friend, and she made my life so much more bearable. We shared our first kiss, an innocent one, when we were only 7, and that was probably when I realized I felt like I wanted to be with her like my parents had been. Maybe we didn't know what true love was, but we were those kids in elementary school that said they were boyfriend and girlfriend, except we wholeheartedly meant it. And then when it turned out that we were really girlfriend and girlfriend, Lessa never batted an eye, she still loved me and was fine with me being me, regardless of what gender I was. We learned what that true love was, and kept it in our hearts.

She was beautiful. She was silly. She was a little ditzy. But she was the most kindhearted person I'd ever met, and I loved every inch of her. I could still remember the time we were hosting a party in high school, and she wanted to have the fancy cute shark boards for it, and I had no idea what she was talking about. When she told me it was the plates with meat and cheese on them, I realized she meant charcuterie boards, and just kissed her while she giggled in embarrassment.

I joined the Navy when I graduated high school at 18, and it wasn't easy. Bootcamp and the training were both brutal, but I got my wish. I qualified to be a SEAL and I'd like to think that the missions I was on helped to save lives. But of course, then I lost Lessa. I was on a deployment, no contact for 6 months. I got home to our little place in Atlanta where she was a nurse and was shocked to find her gone. Her family was evidently assuming she had been with me, so had never reported her missing. Three days later she was found wandering through a strip mall in Ohio, with nothing but a tattered blanket for covering, strung out on heroin and a complete mess. I was able to get there in time to spend one day with her before her body shut down, and I may have gone a little nuts.

I got a name from Al, and I got even more from Lessa's father when I took him out to the woods for a chat. Over the next four months, I killed more men than I ever did while in the SEALs. Speaking of which, I had gone AWOL from the SEALs to perform this little personal mission, and when I was done, I didn't care. I showed back up on the base, completely numb, and had the military police waiting for me. I was expecting a death penalty, I knew I'd killed a lot of people, but I'd lost count when I hit 30.

But then the strangest things happened. A man showed up, with a lot of paperwork that seemed to anger my commanding officer, and the next thing I knew I was given an honorable discharge and a new lease on life. Well, a lease that kept me alive, though I wouldn't exactly call what I was doing these days living. At this point, I was pretty much a self-appointed angel of death, and got the wing tattoos on my back to prove it. My contact gave me a target, sometimes a low level thug like Al that could give me more names, sometimes a victim who had seen a criminal go free, and once someone in witness protection who I had to be very sneaky about seeing. But my job was the same thing I'd done on my first killing spree. For the last five years I had done that very well. I had put a lot of criminals into the morgue, and my boss was happy with the results.

My current employer had incredibly deep pockets. How deep? I really didn't know, nor did I care, but I was pretty sure they could buy a country or two. They paid me to eliminate the scum of the earth, a professional vigilante if you will, and I was very good at it. The car I drove was a good indication of the money they had, since I had just mentioned I needed one, and it showed up the next day. Now I was using it to drive over 100 miles an hour towards a little blinking dot on my phone's display that was moving towards the same destination I was. Lexie and Lessa's old childhood home in Montgomery, where Zac still lived after their mom overdosed on antidepressants.

She'd sent an email to Lexie begging her for forgiveness, because she'd found out that her late husband had sold Lessa. We don't know how she found out, nor do we know where she went, but the next day she was gone. Her funeral was the last time I'd seen Lexie and Willow, two wonderful women who, at the time, were going to college to become nurses like Lessa had and were still in a tight relationship. Even then I only watched from a distance before tracking the girls down afterwards. Until that point, they'd thought I was dead since that was what had been reported. It was an emotional reunion, with a lot of tears, and since then they were the only ones that knew that I was alive. That was when I gave her the tracking bracelet because I didn't trust anyone anymore. They were the only ones in the world, besides my uncles, that I had even a little bit of feelings for. It just made me wish I had a second one for Willow.

I checked the GPS and saw that I was only 45 minutes from the bracelet. I just needed them to stay strong! I was on my way!