Exposed Read Online Free PDF Page B

recognized his voice, knew when he visited. Her pulse rate would quicken when he spoke to her, then settle, and her eye movement would slow. He liked to think his presence relaxed her. That was why he came twice a week when he was home in Miami. Well, that and guilt.
    He still felt responsible for what had happened to her. If he’d been home that day instead of off looking to escape from his own troubles, he might have been able to stop them. Would have shot those cowardly fuckers that had broken into his sweet abuelita’s house looking for cash and jewelry they could turn over fast to buy their next fix of drugs.
    His brave grandmother hadn’t cowered from them though. Oh no, she’d stood her ground and told them off. The neighbors had heard her shouting right before one of them had taken a baseball bat to her head and caved her skull in.
    That day he’d lost what little he had. A relative who’d given a lonely, bullied little boy a safe place to stay, and showed him the miracle of unconditional love.
    He’d walked in to see the paramedics carrying his grandmother out of the kitchen on a stretcher, her head wrapped in bandages. Her blood had stained the linoleum floor, had splattered the cheerful yellow rose wallpaper near the table where he’d sat and done his homework and eaten home cooked meals. They’d taken him away and he’d bounced from foster home to foster home until he wished he’d died defending her that day.
    Bautista blinked, clearing away the images imprinted in his mind, consciously uncurled his fists on the armrests of the leather chair. His time in the Army had saved him.
    It had also made him into what he was today: a trained killer. He’d gained and perfected the skills he used to take lives. Then he’d met Perez, and the man had given him the one thing he’d craved most in the last twenty-two years.
    Revenge.
    Perez had given him his first job as a contract killer. Not a calling that Bautista had been looking for, but one that had come to him. And it suited him perfectly. He’d known it from the moment he’d first realized why Perez had approached him.
    He’d listened to the intel on the two targets; two low-level drug runners that were causing Perez trouble in Miami, both who had recently been paroled from prison for another murder they’d committed. He’d recognized their faces instantly as his abuelita’s attackers. Perez had done his homework. Somehow he’d known Bautista would jump at the chance to take them out.
    From that moment on, they’d been dead men walking.
    Bautista had hunted them down relentlessly, paid them back for what they’d done. Tortured them for hours before finally caving in one of their skulls with a bat while the other one cried and sniveled in the corner, begging futilely to be spared the same fate.
    Since then he’d dispatched many others to hell with those first victims, and he slept just fine at night.
    His gaze slid over to his grandmother, past her to the medical equipment and monitors she was hooked up to, her treasured framed icons of the Virgin at her bedside, passed down from her Spanish ancestors. Her pulse and heart rate were calm, her respiration rate relaxed. Because he was near.
    So many times he’d wanted to tell her what he’d done, but he hadn’t. He knew she would have hated what he’d become, that she wouldn’t have condoned his idea of justice and he never knew who might be listening anyway. The only reason he was still alive, still free, was because he was always so careful. Careful enough that no one ever found out who he really was.
    A tap at the door made him look up. His heart lurched when her face appeared in the opening. He rose from his chair automatically, all his muscles locked.
    Julia gave him a warm smile from the doorway, her expression soft. “Had a feeling I might see you this week,” she said. “Want some company?”
    “Sure,” he said, a strange sense of relief filling him as she stepped inside and shut the