Distressed: Enemy Of The State- Book 1 Read Online Free PDF

laughed and clutched his stomach, waving a finger at Kasaika. “It sounds like Western capitalism is growing on you. Thinking about buying some stocks, Kasaika? I can guarantee that right now everything is cheap. The financial markets are in ruin, and people are selling whatever they can just to make ends meet, and how long have we been at it? A week? And we haven’t even begun to show them what we are able to do.” Perry squeezed his fist so hard the large, lumpy knuckles on his hand cracked from the pressure. “This is our time. And I need men who are willing to do what needs to be done.”
    Kasaika looked from Perry to Sefkh, his brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”
    “The boy will have to die eventually,” Sefkh said.
    “And I want you to be the one who does it.”
    Kasaika had killed men, dozens. His country had been so ravaged by war and conflict that it was the only thing he’d known for most of his life. When he was a boy, he watched soldiers, grown men, mow down women and children in villages. He hid under the ruins of an old building where his father had put him when the war factions came. But in all the wars he’d fought, in all his fights, he’d never killed a child. He wavered slightly, shifting uncomfortably with Perry so close to him, watching him with those eyes. Kasaika had never seen anything so alive and dead as Perry’s eyes. “What good will the boy’s death bring us?”
    “There will come a time when I need the captain to lose all hope in his life, to break him. Right now he’s holding onto the belief that he can somehow get his son back. It’s his last shred of hope, a connection to a life he still thinks he can have. We need him to believe that. And one day soon, that same hope will strangle what life is left in him. He’s justifying everything he’s doing in the name of his family,” Perry said.
    “Why don’t we just kill the captain?” Kasaika asked.
    Perry cocked his head to the side then quickly rolled up the shirt sleeve of his left arm and thrust the scarred and disfigured flesh in front of Kasaika’s face. “Pain,” Perry said. “It’s what all of this is about. People don’t understand why we suffer, why we bleed, why we have spent our lives washing ourselves in the blood of revenge. It is pain, Kasaika. The same pain that you witnessed in your country, the same that I have in my own. It has controlled us, and we will control it!”
    Both Perry and Sefkh smiled. Kasaika took a step back. “Control? The only control is with Allah. He decides who will suffer and who will be granted entry into his kingdom. Not us. This is folly, Sefkh. We may be winning the war, but we are losing our souls!” Kasaika’s body shook. His feet kept the pace of retreat until he backed into the wall, into the shadows of the room. Perry and Sefkh still remained in the light, their faces twisted in the yellow of the lamp above.
    “Souls?” Perry asked, taking a step out of the light and joining Kasaika in the darkness. “Your soul, like that of every other man in this fight, is poisoned. Tainted by the very same men who proclaimed love for another god, and as such marked me as the claimer of souls.” Perry was covered in shadows and had pinned Kasaika against the wall. “And I will take your soul when it is time, just like the others.”
    The moments when Kasaika was a boy, when soldiers had come to his village, when he first experienced the horrors of war, had always caused a chill to ripple down his back. It was a shaking that plagued him through most of his childhood, because his young mind saw nothing but the devil. As he grew older, he understood that the men he saw were only instruments of the devil, sent to do his work. But standing there in the hot dark, his back against the wall, staring into Perry’s face, the chills returned. This man was no instrument. Kasaika was present with the devil himself.

 
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    Dust kicked up from the tires of Cooper’s vehicle. The road