Skidding to a halt beside a fallen tree, she pressed a hand to the stitch in her side as she tried to catch her breath and think.Think.If she had any hope of making it through the night she needed her wits about her.
Something moved in the undergrowth to her left. Somewhere off in the distance an owl hooted. To her right? The snap of a twig broken by a footfall.
Instinct had her flattening herself beside the log. The rich smell of fertile soil and decaying plant matter tunneled up her nose. And she bit her lip to keep from crying out when another footfall landed on crunchy leaves.
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?Howcould 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 Orpheusdidknow, 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 theclomp-clompof 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 shetrulywas. 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.
