PROLOGUE
CILLIAN
Eight Months Before Christmas
The cabin is quiet tonight. Too quiet for some reason, and I can’t really say why other than the fact that I feel it in my gut. Something’s wrong, and since I live alone, that means whatever bullshit is about to happen is my grief to deal with.
This is the kind of silence I used to crave when I lived out of a backpack, moving between contracts, between continents, between versions of myself. Silence meant safety. Privacy. Control.
But lately…it feels like something is missing.
Someone.
I don’t know what that feeling even is. I didn’t grow up with family or softness or anything close to it. I don’t know what it means to want someone. But there’s a pull inside my chest I can’t shake, like I’m waiting for something I’ve never experienced.
I sigh and rub the back of my neck.
I never knew my parents. Not their names, not their faces, not the sound of their voices. I grew up in foster homes that blurred together. I knew cramped bedrooms, rotating rules that never made sense, adults who were already half-checked out. I aged out at eighteen with a trash bag of clothes and no one to call.
I’ve been striving to control my own life ever since.
College wasn’t a dream, it was survival. I worked every shift I could find, warehouse nights, campus security, whatever paid enough to keep me enrolled. I didn’t party. Didn’t date. Didn’t have the time or the interest, really. I’m attracted to women, or at least the concept of them. But the idea of having to let someone in? Share the control I’ve carefully mastered over the years? I’ve never seen a woman who interested me enough to do that.
The government recruited me right after graduation. I don’t know how long they’d been watching me or why they thought I’d make a good sniper, but they were right.
Before I knew it, I was in the sniper program. Classified work. No attachments.
I took to it easily. Too easily, probably, and that’s another reason I don’t let myself get close to anyone.
Since then, I’ve spent my life on contracted work. My choice. My terms. I’ve been with the program long enough that I pick the jobs I want and walk away from the ones I don’t. No one questions it. I work a lot, mostly because there’s nothing else waiting for me and there’s a lot of bad fucking people in this world.
People drain me. Crowds irritate me, and noise puts me on edge.
So I bought this cabin in the middle of nowhere years ago. No neighbors. No visitors. Just quiet. Just control. Just me.
It’s better that way.
Until now. The silence is irking me now too.
I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, silence and solitude were my only rewards.
Then I hear the bullshit I’ve been waiting for. It’s the roar of an engine.
My cabin is miles off any main road, buried in woods people don’t stumble into without getting themselves shot. Except for the college kids who try to four-wheel onto my property and chase their girlfriends around in the woods wearing those dumb light-up masks. Who even came up with that shit? I’m not experienced, not even at my mature age of thirty-nine. But if I was going to fuck a woman, I wouldn’t cover my face in LED lights and run around on someone else’s property like a little twit.
I reach for my firearm, rack the slide, and move toward the door.
One look through the window tells me this isn’t stupid college kids again. A dark vehicle is already reversing down my long dirt drive, fishtailing in the downpour. Whoever was driving knows if they give me half a shot, I’ll take it.
I throw the door open and freeze.
There’s a girl on my porch. Eighteen? Maybe a little older. I feel like the biggest fist in the world just sucker-punched me right in the chest. She’s fucking beautiful.
Her long blonde braid is soaked to her spine and her jacket is plastered to her skin. She looks up at me with wide brown eyes, shining with unshed tears and gasps when she sees the gun in my hand.
Shit.
I lower it immediately because she already looks like she’s been put through the wringer. And something inside me snaps at the thought. I’m never emotional on any of my jobs, even whenmy target is heinous. But whoever hurt her? Dead. I’ve already decided, and I don’t even know her name.
