Delta Force Defender

by Megan Crane

  It was June. There were a lot of tracks on the island’s most accessible trail. Tourists and locals alike, this time of year.

  He could picture Caradine here too easily. And as he did, separate threads he’d gone out of his way not to knit together braided up tight.

  He saw her face perfectly, as if she were standing before him with her arms crossed belligerently, the way she liked to do. That smirk that drove him wild. The cool, challenging way she stared him down, as if he’d never torn her up and never would again, when they both knew better.

  Isaac was done being haunted.

  It was time to drag the ghost that was Caradine Scott out into the light, no matter what happened.

  “You have command,” he told Jonas shortly. “If I’m not back before Templeton, you can argue it out with him.”

  “I don’t argue,” Jonas replied coolly. He paused. “Are you thinking she hired those fools?”

  “Caradine doesn’t suffer fools, Jonas. I doubt she’d hire a couple.”

  Isaac stared down the trail. Follow it long enough up into the trees that covered the side of the mountain, and it branched out. The official trail carried on toward the summit of what the locals called Hard Ass Pass and were rarely dumb enough to test, because it got dangerous, fast, up there. Other paths wound around as they pleased. Many led out to the farthest, most off-grid homesteads and cabins.

  Like the one where Isaac’s grumpy, people-hating uncle Theo lived. With his thoughts, like Madeleine had said. That, and his own personal arsenal.

  Isaac highly doubted Caradine had headed there.

  But beyond the various, little-traveled trails that led to all the survivalist enthusiasts who called this island home was another path that dead-ended in a tiny inlet. Where Theo and some of the other locals who preferred not to deal with people in town—or having agents of the man, like the Grizzly Harbor harbormaster, knowing their business—kept their boats.

  If Isaac was going to sneak out of Grizzly Harbor and then off the island, without being seen and without access to the various toys he had at his disposal thanks to Alaska Force, that was how he’d do it.

  He’d steal a boat, but unlike the idiots who’d thrown that pipe bomb through Caradine’s window, he wouldn’t hit the open water. He’d stick to the rugged coast, find a hidden cove on a neighboring island, and hunker down until daylight. When there would be enough fishing vessels out there that it was worth the gamble that Alaska Force wouldn’t catch him before he made it to a better boat. Like the Alaska Marine Highway ferry that could take him out of here and all the way down to the Lower 48, if he liked.

  “I don’t think Caradine lit her own restaurant on fire,” he said to Jonas now. “But she sure was prepared for it to happen. Practiced for it, even, if that climb down two stories is any indication.”

  “Looks that way.”

  And those threads braided up tight inside him seemed to ignite.

  There were the things he knew about her. The things he’d long suspected. This long, maddening dance of theirs had already gone on for what felt to him like too many lifetimes.

  “Bring her back safe,” Jonas said gruffly when Isaac started down the trail to confirm his first set of suspicions.

  “I will,” Isaac promised him.

  He’d bring her back, all right.

  But how safe she stayed while he did it was going to be entirely up to her.

  Because as far as Isaac was concerned, it was high time for an overdue reckoning.

  Two

  Running for her life was a lot like riding a bicycle.

  It came back to her that easily. Like muscle memory the moment she heard the noise outside that night. The unmistakable sound of breaking glass followed by the ominous rush of flames igniting.

  She’d been asleep, then awake and alert in an instant. She knew exactly what she had to do.

  What she’d always known she would have to do, sooner or later.

  Even if this time, she’d gotten complacent. She’d let herself imagine that she could be Caradine Scott forever. She’d started thinking of herself as Caradine and had assured herself that was a good thing. That she was well and truly in character. That it would be that much easier to hide the more fully she embraced her made-up life.

  She’d done a lot more than embrace it—but Caradine couldn’t let herself think about Isaac Gentry. Not now, while her world was literally on fire. Again. When she’d known better all along. From her very first night in Grizzly Harbor, when she’d walked down what passed for a road in the most remote and unlikely place that she’d been able to find, located the only bar on the island, and seen him.

  Only him, though the bar had been full of locals making merry on that chilly fall night.

  Caradine’s breath still deserted her in a rush every time she remembered it. Even now, in these crucial moments, when she should have been focused on other things. Like staying alive.

  She’d pushed open the heavy door to the Fairweather, then found her way in out of the cold. And she’d gotten tangled up in Isaac Gentry when he looked up from the bar as surely as if he’d set a trap for her.

  His gray eyes had found hers and held, like he’d been waiting for her all along.

  And she’d known better. She’d always known how her time in Alaska—or anywhere, forever, until they finally caught her the way she knew they would—would end.

  “It was always going to be exactly like this,” she muttered at herself as she rolled out of her bed.

  Caradine was all too aware of what she needed to do now, no matter how gray Isaac Gentry’s freaking eyes were.

  His eyes never should have mattered in the first place.

  She took nothing but the bag she kept packed and ready for precisely this purpose. She’d practiced a hundred times a year, at least. More, probably. The getting out of bed at the first sound, no matter when she’d gotten in it. The dressing in deliberate layers for any weather in less than ten seconds. Then out the window immediately, scrabbling down the side of her house the way she’d also practiced. Over and over again, night and day, in all kinds of weather and regardless of whether she felt like it, making use of the fact the café stood over the boardwalk and the water, but the rest of the building was set back into the hill. And though the town was built on an incline, there was nothing directly behind her.

  That meant that no one could happen by and see who was at her back stairs. Or how many times she climbed out of her side window. A person would have to deliberately walk around to the back of the building to see her, and no one did. This was Alaska, where people respected one another’s privacy. Because that privacy often came heavily armed.

  It was nice that it was summer, she thought, as she hit the ground twenty seconds after waking up. Cool, but not cold, and that weird almost-light she’d never quite gotten used to. She froze when she landed and assessed the situation. Half hoping it had been nothing but another bad dream—but no, she could see the glow of a real, honest-to-God fire flickering in the gloom, from the front of the restaurant.

  There was no time to mourn her life here. There was no time to grieve for what she was losing in those flames.

  It was never your life in the first place, she reminded herself fiercely. Not out loud, because she had to assume that whoever had started the fire was still here. Waiting for her to reveal herself.

  She executed her plan, the way she’d practiced and plotted so many times. She slunk up the hill, trying to blend in with the shadows and make as little noise as possible, then caught the trail out to the community hot springs. She changed her shoes when she hit the cabin that made the hot springs accessible and comfortable all year round, grabbing the hiking boots she kept there for precisely this purpose, then kept going.

  And she didn’t look back.

  She told herself she didn’t want to look back, because the next s
tep was all that mattered.

  Caradine had worked out a lot of contingency plans over the years. If they came when it was winter and too cold to risk prolonged exposure outside. If an assailant broke into her apartment and attacked her, leaving her injured but still needing to disappear. If they got the drop on her and incapacitated her. If they reverted to type and used a fire—either meant to lure her out or meant to kill her.

  They’d gone with the fire. Downstairs, in the middle of the night. That suggested they wanted to give her the chance to live long enough to be killed in a more personally upsetting fashion. And they weren’t chasing her out of town now, meaning whoever had started the fire probably figured she was still inside. They’d have to look for her body before they decided to look for her, and she could use that.

  She would use everything she had, the way she always did.

  The minute she was in the woods again on the trail that led away from town, she ran. Flat out. And she was grateful that she’d trained so hard all this time. So relentlessly, year after year, without any contact, because she’d known that sooner or later, it would come to this.

  It would have been so easy to get soft. To let herself imagine she was safe, here on a faraway island with its very own collection of commandos. To shift over into complacency about this, too.

  That was what they’d been banking on. Caradine had no doubt.

  A brutal and vertical forty-five minutes after she’d been woken up by the sound of shattering glass, Caradine made it to the inlet she’d found by accident her first year in Grizzly Harbor. When she’d done the same hike at a reasonable pace and it had taken hours. She was more breathless than she liked, sure, but that was as much to do with adrenaline-fueled trail running in the half dark as it was the fact she’d heard the Alaska Force helicopter overhead.

  Another thing she couldn’t let herself focus on. Not now.

  Not until she found a place she could hole up in, assess the scope of the damage, then figure out her next steps. Caradine knew there was no point succumbing to emotion when she couldn’t contain it—and when she couldn’t tell if she was blundering into a wider trap.

  And maybe by that time she could forget that when she’d heard the helicopter overhead, her first reaction had been relief. As if they were coming to save her.

  As if she could be saved.

  She climbed down the sharp ravine and found a boat that looked like the one she’d practiced on, pretending for years that she truly wanted to learn how to fish and wasn’t scoping out escape routes. She checked the fuel gauge, started it up, and headed out fast. Straight out across the choppy water to the neighboring island she’d explored years ago. She left the boat in another isolated cove, nicely tied up so it would find its way back to its owner eventually, once someone stumbled upon it—but not soon. Then she set out on another grueling trail run into more dense, wet woods, too aware that she had two sets of highly motivated individuals after her now.

  One set wanted to kill her—if not today, eventually. The other was Isaac and his friends, and that wasn’t much better.

  Because he’d want to save her.

  And that was the one thing no one could do.

  She hadn’t looked back. She’d left her café burning and she’d loved that place, against her better judgment. She didn’t have time to think about Isaac Gentry or his hero complex. Or the way he said her name.

  “It isn’t your name,” she snapped at herself, alone in the woods on a cold island with only the wild, unsettled sea below to hear her. “You picked two surnames out of a phone book in Sioux City five years ago.”

  But she couldn’t seem to dislodge the weight of it from her chest. The name. The life.

  And if something yawned open inside of her, hollow and raw like an ache, she would ignore it. Eventually, she knew from experience, she could make herself ignore anything.

  It took her well into the morning to hike to the outskirts of the main village on the island. Caradine knew the town, having visited a number of times over the years—also supposedly because she was so interested in fishing. And she had her first stroke of luck, because it was ferry day. She didn’t have to camp out in the woods for half a week to wait for the ferry to Juneau to come or, in a pinch, steal another boat and hope the Troopers—or, worse, Alaska Force—didn’t run her to ground out in the channel.

  When she walked on board the Alaska Marine Highway vessel later that same morning, she no longer looked much like Caradine Scott, famously grumpy owner and proprietor of the Water’s Edge Café over in Grizzly Harbor. She’d pulled out the first of her two carefully selected wigs, this one blond, and styled it into two cute braids. Something Caradine would never, ever do, because Caradine was never, ever cute. She mimicked her friend—not her friend, she corrected herself sternly, because she didn’t have friends when her life was a lie—Mariah McKenna’s thick Southern accent as she smiled and blessed hearts all the way to Juneau and then down to Bellingham.

  Where, thirty-eight hours later, she dropped the Southern accent, exchanged the blond hair for bright pink, and used cash to buy a junky car from a used-car lot.

  It turned out that driving was another thing that came back to a person, even if they hadn’t done it in a while. Because there were no real roads in Grizzly Harbor, so there was no need for cars. People came over in them on the ferries, then left them parked down at the bottom of town.

  “Stop thinking about Grizzly Harbor,” she ordered herself, her voice loud in the car as she drove it out of Bellingham, then south to Seattle, where she headed west.

  She drove until she reached Spokane, then found a motel there. Inside the room that smelled too strongly of cleaning fluid, she readied herself for a war and . . . waited.

  But no one showed up.

  No one burst through the door to confront her, or worse, kill her. She curled up on top of the thin, scratchy motel bedspread, ordered herself not to think too hard about the hygiene in a place she wouldn’t want to look at in any bright light, and tried to sleep.

  It was a fitful, restless night. Caradine got to work on ignoring things when she woke up with moisture on her cheeks. And again in the shower, where a casual observer might have suggested she was sobbing.

  But she didn’t sob. Because she wasn’t observed, so it didn’t happen. She hadn’t let herself cry in a long while, maybe a whole decade, and this was no time to start.

  “You had five years,” she reminded herself once she crept back out to her car and started it up while it was still dark. “That’s a lifetime. And it’s much better than before.”

  But before was another thing she didn’t like to think about. All that running. The panic. That first month, scrabbling to make money and find food, then another middle-of-the-night race to get away. Another few months somewhere new, then the terror of a potentially familiar face in a crowd.

  The near-disaster in Phoenix that she still didn’t know how she’d survived.

  Five years in one place had been a gift. Wishing she could have had more than that was greedy.

  Caradine twisted her hair up wet and shoved it beneath a trucker hat that dwarfed her face, added knockoff Ray-Bans she’d found in a truck stop, and drove south. Out of the cities where people gathered and watched and made calls back East. Into the country, where there were more cows and fields than curious human eyes.

  She wound her way through the undulating hills of eastern Washington, then down into Oregon. She crossed the Columbia River and kept on south, following a twisty road that cut down the heart of Central Oregon. Hours later, she found herself crossing the high desert of southeastern Oregon, eventually dipping down into Nevada. Once she hit I-80, she kept going east all the way to Salt Lake City.

  Caradine stopped only for gas and more caffeine, as much sugar as she could consume, and let that same adrenaline keep her going out there on one deserted highway after another.
She kept heading south and east, through Albuquerque and on through Lubbock, Texas.

  Some forty or so hours after she’d left Spokane and still hadn’t seen anyone coming for her, she bought a cell phone from a convenience store in Galveston, Texas. She punched in a number she knew by heart and waited to get kicked into voice mail. She typed in the code and held her breath—but there was no message.

  No message didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  Then again, it could mean the worst had already happened.

  By this point, Caradine was rocking her blond wig again. She’d taken the time to curl her hair, Texas style, in a truck stop near Waco with a water bottle and a hand dryer. And she’d traded one junker car for another in Houston. Still, she felt ridiculously exposed and obvious, out there on the Historic Pleasure Pier on Galveston Island. She shoved the cell phone into her pocket and headed back toward the parking lot where she’d left her car, forcing herself to slow down to an unmemorable amble in the oppressive heat and humidity, the way someone who wasn’t afraid for her life would walk.

  When she reached her car, she climbed back in, drove back onto the mainland, and headed west. Four hours in, she was too delirious to make sense of the road, so she crashed in a motel near San Antonio. Eight hours of dreamless sleep later, she felt like a new person and celebrated with pink hair again. Then she settled in for a hot, arid twenty-hour drive west.

  She found another motel in Riverside, California, and called the same number again when she was barricaded in her room with the AC set up to a dull roar. This time, she left a message. One word.

  The next morning, she left the cell phone in pieces in the Dumpster behind her motel, got back in her junky car, and drove north. And east. For three thousand miles, give or take.

  One very long week after her life in Alaska had gone up in flames, Caradine staggered out of her car in a picturesque tourist town on the coast of Maine. The kind of place no version of her would ever go, for any reason.