Orpheus!
Her palms were so clammy she could barely grasp the butt of her service weapon as she slowly, ever so slowly, slipped her hand beneath her body to pull the semiauto from its leather holster.
How? How could Russia’s most notorious assassin, a man whose very existence was hotly debated, have learned what she and her partner were up to?
Of course, as much as she might wish it weren’t so, she knew how. It was just as she and Stewart had suspected.
Now the question became, since Orpheus did know, and since he’d been sicced on her by some mysterious player in this game of cat and mouse, how could she possibly survive him when so many before her had not?
Run. Hide, the text had read. But run to whom? Hide where?
The forest less than a mile from the motel wasn’t exactly a world away from the scene of the crime. And this fallen log wasn’t exactly a safe house.
She needed a place off the grid while she worked things out. She needed someone who could help her disappear into darkness so deep that not even the world’s brightest spotlight could find her. She needed—
The crackle of another snapping stick had her squeezing her eyes shut. A poisonous brine of despair and terror swirled in her stomach. And muscles filled with adrenaline and twitching from inaction prompted her to leap up and run. Just escape into the night in heedless flight.
Before her lizard brain could take over and push her into foolhardy action, she heard a flurry of movement followed by the clomp-clomp of hoofbeats as something four-legged dashed off to the north. Straining her eyes against the darkness, she caught a brief flash of white through the trunks of the trees.
Not Orpheus. A whitetail deer foraging in the undergrowth. It’d spooked when it caught her scent.
“You won’t last ten more minutes if you keep on like this,” she admonished herself.
Before she could talk herself out of it, she re-holstered her Glock 19M and pulled her cell phone from her hip pocket.
Hiding the device inside her suit jacket—she didn’t dare let the lit screen pinpoint her position—she thumbed it on. Her fingers trembled as she punched in her six-digit code and then immediately hit the phone icon.
She didn’t need to scroll through her contacts. She could key in the telephone number by heart.
A thousand. That’s how many times she’d stared at those digits since he’d plugged them into her cell. Nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine. That’s how many times she’d been tempted to hit the “call” button so she could hear his voice. Nine-hundred-and-ninety-eight. That’s how many times she’d refrained from doing exactly that.
There’d been that one time early on when she’d given into the urge. But she’d hit “end” before the first ring. Because an image of how his hazel eyes had held such sympathy, how his beautifully stern mouth had softened with compassion when he’d said, “If you ever need anything, even if it’s just a willing ear to listen, please call” had popped into her head.
It’d been three years, but the sting of his pity still felt fresh.
Then and now, she hated that all he’d seen when he looked at her was a charity case. A spurned divorcee. A fragile woman who’d been rendered meek and mute when she’d come face-to-face with her ultimate failure in the middle of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel’s ballroom.
She’d hoped that one day, if they ever bumped into each other in the real world, she’d be able to show him who she truly was. A strong woman. An independent woman. A woman capable of facing all comers.
And yet…here she was reaching out in desperation to the mysterious man who’d haunted her dreams. The enigmatic operator who’d entered her life in an instant, seemingly from out of nowhere, and then disappeared just as quickly.
Hunter Jackson.
His name was enough to make her mouth go dry.
2
Black Knights Inc,
Goose Island, Chicago, Illinois
For those who knew how to listen to their senses—senses passed down through eons of ancestral memory—it was easy to detect an approaching threat.
Hunter knew how to listen.
His first warning someone snuck up behind him were the fine hairs lifting on the back of his neck. His second warning was the subtle, nearly imperceptible shift of the air around him.
When a hand landed on his shoulder, he instinctively ducked and spun. His arm flew out in a semi-arc as he used his momentum to aim the hard edge of his hand at his assailant’s ribs. His attacker blocked his blow at the last second by chopping at his wrist.
Pain exploded in the joint. He barely noticed as his muscles coiled to take a second shot.
Of course, as soon as he saw it was only Samuel Harwood, he straightened from his fighting stance. “What the hell?” He plucked out his earbuds and pocketed them. AC/DC’s “Back in Black” was replaced by the low hum of the overhead light and the quiet of the night. “You know better than to sneak up on a man programmed for extreme violence. I can’t just shut that shit off.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Bruh, there’s no one here but me, you, and Eliza. Who did you think would be coming at you sideways? This place”—Sam gestured around the cavernous space that used to be a menthol cigarette factory and now fronted as a custom chopper shop—“is Fort friggin’ Knox.”
“Sometimes muscle memory takes over,” Hunter explained with a careless shrug. “Especially this late and when I’m low on sleep.”
Sam shook his head. “You’re gonna make a therapist very wealthy someday.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“True,” Sam agreed easily. “The difference between you and me, though, is that my way of coping with trauma is to employ a little gallows humor. Totally normal. Totally healthy. Your way is to go full-on hermit for days at a time. Ted Kaczynski ring a bell? Should I check your room for pipe bombs and triggering devices?”
Hunter hated how clearly Sam saw him. Not about being Unabomber 2.0, but about having to squirrel himself away in order to keep himself together.
Blame it on his youth. When things had gotten too chaotic, his only means of self-preservation had been to hide away in the abandoned cabin perched on the edge of town. There’d been no electricity. No running water. And the hole in the roof had let the rain and snow drift in. Still, he’d felt better there than he had anywhere else.
Cut to the present and he still only felt truly at ease when he was removed from the rest of the world. Somewhere quiet where he could listen to his own thoughts instead of other people’s words. Somewhere hidden where he could be totally and completely alone.
Of course, he said none of that aloud. Aloud he told Sam, “Fuck you.”
“Not even on your birthday,” Sam deadpanned. “Besides, I wouldn’t know what to do with your teeny, tiny Tic Tac testis and itty, bitty micro-peen. I mean, how do you manage to keep the ladies coming back for more? Do you always do it in the dark so they can’t see what they’re dealing with?”
The thing about men whose jobs required them to flirt with danger on the daily was that they tended to cut the tension by gleefully feeding each other heaping helpings of shit.
Hunter shook his head. “See, that would be funny except you know it’s not true. You’ve seen what I’m packing. That time in Karachi?”