Sniper's Pride

by Megan Crane

  PRAISE FOR

  SEAL’s Honor

  “Megan Crane’s mix of tortured ex–special ops heroes, their dangerous missions, and the rugged Alaskan wilderness is a sexy, breathtaking ride!”

  —New York Times bestselling author Karen Rose

  Also by Megan Crane

  SEAL’S HONOR

  A JOVE BOOK

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by Megan Crane

  Excerpt from Sergeant’s Christmas Siege copyright © 2019 by Megan Crane

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  A JOVE BOOK, BERKLEY, and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780451491527

  First Edition: May 2019

  Cover photo by Claudio Marinesco

  Cover design by Sarah Oberrender

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Private Johnson

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Kerry Donovan for making my stories sing, and to everyone else at Berkley. It’s such a pleasure to work with you! And I can never thank Holly Root enough.

  Thanks as ever to Nicole Helm and Maisey Yates for being my first readers—and for keeping me from jumping off that proverbial cliff halfway through, when I’d forgotten what on earth I was doing. And to Lisa Hendrix for once again giving me an “Alaska read.” Any remaining mistakes are all mine. Let’s hope they serve the story!

  Thank you, thank you, thank you to Lucianne Crenshaw and Shantell Dayton for teaching me, among too many other things to name here, how to fight. And to Kendall Coe and Brenda Kizzire for teaching me how to fight dirty.

  And to Jeff, who still makes me giddy when he walks into a room.

  Contents

  Praise for Seal’s Honor

  Also by Megan Crane

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Sergeant’s Christmas Siege

  About the Author

  One

  After the second time her husband tried to kill her, Mariah McKenna decided she needed to get out of Atlanta.

  The first time could have been an accident. That night she had gone to yet another strained charity dinner where everyone smiled sweetly, blessed her heart, and made it perfectly, politely clear they wouldn’t be taking her side in the divorce. And even though Mariah knew better than to touch shellfish, it was always possible that there could have been cross-contamination in the food. Especially in a hotel banquet situation with complicated hors d’oeuvres passed around on gleaming silver trays by bored college students.

  Mariah knew it was entirely possible that she’d tossed back what she’d thought was a little cheese puff pastry when it was actually cleverly concealed shrimp. She’d been too busy pretending not to notice the speculative, not particularly friendly looks being thrown her way to taste a thing.

  It could easily have been an unfortunate accident. Or her own fault for not paying attention.

  But she was pretty sure it was David.

  He had gone out of his way to get nasty with her only the day before.

  “You can’t divorce me,” he’d snarled, getting much too close to her in the sunny parking lot of the Publix in her new neighborhood. That had been her fault, too, for not paying closer attention to her surroundings. She should have seen David’s overly polished Escalade. She shouldn’t have imagined for a single second that he’d allow her to go about without permission, having a normal life like a regular person. “You can’t divorce me.”

  That was why, when her throat had started to close up, the first thing in her head was the way his face had twisted like that, out there in a parking lot in the Atlanta spring sunshine for anyone to see. When David got mad, his accent—what Mariah’s mother had always called high Georgia—changed. It became clipped and mean. Then there was the red face, the bulging eyes, that vein on his forehead, and the way he bared his teeth. None of that was pleasant, surely.

  But for some reason the fact that he sounded less Georgia old money and more cruelly staccato when he was mad was what got to her the most. Because she’d worked so hard to get the redneck out of her own decidedly low-brow accent and she never, ever let it slip. Never.

  Still, accidents happened. That was what the doctors told Mariah when she could breathe again. It was certainly what the hotel hastened to tell her, in the form of half their legal team crammed into her makeshift cubicle in the emergency room.

  And despite the overly exposed feeling that stuck with her every time she flashed back to that ugly parking lot confrontation, Mariah accepted the idea that it was an accident. She wasn’t living in a gothic novel. Her divorce was ugly, but what divorce wasn’t? There was no need to make everything worse by imagining that David was actually trying to kill her.

  But the second time she found herself in the hospital, she stopped kidding herself.

  There had been no banquet with questionable puff pastries that night. She’d been at home, delighted that she was now pointedly excluded from social invitations as word got around that David Abernathy Lanier and his jumped-up, white trash wife weren’t simply in the throes of one of those trial separations that always ended up with a tight-lipped decision to stay together for the sake of the family fortune. David was divorcing her—Mariah knew that was how the story would make the rounds, no matter that she’d been the one to leave him—and Atlanta society was sensibly siding with the old money that made them all who they were.

  Mariah had been all alone in the cute Midtown apartment she’d moved into when she’d fled David’s showcase of a home in tony Buckhead. Her cozy one-bedroom was a mere seven miles away, but located in an entirely different world than the one where David and people like him lived. And it was the only place that she’d ever lived alone. She had gone straight from her mother’s house to her husband’s, where she couldn’t say she’d lived with him so much as near him, surrounded at all times by the loyal staff who mi
ght have pitied David’s poor, unsuspecting wife but were too well paid to intervene. Or even treat her kindly if David didn’t wish it.

  For a long time she’d measured her life against that falling-down farmhouse in rural Two Oaks, Georgia, where there were more boarded-up buildings than people and where her family continued to live out of sheer stubbornness. While nothing in Mariah’s life had turned out the way she’d been so sure it would when she’d been a foolish twenty-year-old looking to be rescued by a handsome man in a fancy car, she couldn’t deny that there was a certain pleasure in having her own space at last.

  No matter how she’d come by it.

  It was while she lay there in another hospital room, cordoned off from the rest of the emergency room by a depressing blue curtain—staring up at the fluorescent lights, waiting for her EpiPen to finish letting her breathe, wondering if she’d have the dreaded biphasic second reaction—that she finally understood.

  There was no safe space. Not for her.

  David shouldn’t have been able to get into her apartment, but he had. She was still trying to breathe, feeling like there was a hand wrapped tightly around her throat. She didn’t bother telling herself any comforting stories this time. David had broken in or hired someone to break in for him. The latter scenario was more likely, because David was not a man who did anything that he could hire someone else to do for him. She felt a sick sensation roll through her, adding to the panic. It felt a lot like shame.

  Or worse—fear.

  Because David or some faceless minion had been in her pretty furnished apartment with its pastel walls and view over Piedmont Park. They had touched her few personal items. Rifled through her clothes. Sat on the furniture she’d started thinking of as hers. And at some point, tampered with her food to make sure she ended up right back in the emergency room with a far worse reaction than before.

  They’d defiled the one place she had ever considered hers, then she’d put their poison in her own body, and she hadn’t even known it. She hadn’t sensed it. She hadn’t felt any of it. She’d gone about her life as if everything were normal when it was actually a trap.

  The sheer violation was almost harder to take than her near-fatal allergic reaction.

  Again.

  “You need to be very, very careful, Mrs. Lanier,” the doctor said, scowling at her as if she’d thought to hell with this potentially lethal allergy and had treated herself to a big old lobster dinner.

  “I’m always careful,” she replied when she could speak. “And it’s Ms. McKenna, not Mrs. Lanier. My name change hasn’t gone through yet.”

  “Two anaphylaxis episodes in one month isn’t being careful, ma’am.”

  And what could Mariah say? My husband would rather kill me than suffer through a divorce, as a matter of fact. I think he snuck into my new apartment and doctored my food so this would happen. Even if the impatient doctor hadn’t already been scowling at her, she wouldn’t have risked it.

  David’s family had a wing named after them in this hospital. In every hospital in Atlanta, if she remembered her father-in-law’s genial bragging correctly. The last thing she wanted to do was find herself remanded to the psych ward, where a man whose name was all over the hospital could access her as he pleased. Possibly kill her at his leisure. Right out in the open, no incognito shrimp required.

  “I’ll be more careful,” she murmured.

  But she decided there was no longer any choice. If she wanted to live, she needed to run.

  The only question was how to do it. If David had people jimmying locks and dosing food to kill her with her own allergy, she could hardly expect that a change of address would do the trick. She’d already tried that when she’d left that cold, bitter house of his.

  She decided she couldn’t call anyone she knew. She couldn’t trust any of the friends she’d made since David had swept her straight off her feet and out of that tiny nowhere town in backwoods Georgia. She also couldn’t go back there, no matter how many times she woke in the night with tears on her face, a deep longing for her mother’s coarse smoker’s laugh, and the scent of wild honeysuckle in her nose. Because David had found her there all those years ago, and it would be the first place he’d look.

  Mariah was tough, but David was vindictive. And vicious in the way only a very rich man could be. His family had been proud residents of this city since they’d come in with the railroads, and he had allies everywhere. All his Southern captain of industry friends and their wide-ranging, overlapping networks of influence and threat. Police. Government. Charities. Media. Name it, and some person who supported David had a finger in it. Or three.

  And he had already tried to kill her twice.

  By the time she was released from the hospital, she’d tried to talk herself out of it a hundred times. After all, accidents really did happen. It was entirely possible that these were freak occurrences and she was letting David get to her. Letting him win without him having to do much more than say a few ugly words to her in a supermarket parking lot.

  Imagining that he has this kind of power is giving him exactly what he wants, she lectured herself in the back of the taxi that took her home from the hospital. She gazed out at another spring morning, bright and sweet, filled with flowers and lush green trees and good things that had nothing to do with David Abernathy Lanier. He would love nothing more than thinking you were this scared of him.

  It was all in her head. She was sure of it. She needed to pay closer attention to the ingredients in the things she ate, that was all. Hadn’t she heard allergies got worse as people got older? She needed to be more careful, just as the exasperated doctor had suggested, and she’d be fine.

  But when she let herself back in to her cute apartment and stood there, looking around at the cheerful rooms that had brought her such pleasure only last night, she knew better.

  David wasn’t going to stop.

  Because David didn’t have to stop.

  He had determined that he would rather be widowed than divorced. It would be better for the political career he’d informed her he was plotting, since he planned to run on wholesome family values—none of which, she’d pointed out at the time, he actually possessed.

  “And whose fault is it I don’t have a family?” he’d asked her, his blue eyes glittering, never dropping that soft drawl that sounded the way old gold would if it could speak.

  And if Mariah had learned anything over the course of their ten years together, it was that what David wanted, David got. Her wishes and feelings were utterly unimportant to him. He had picked her because she was a good story he got to tell. She got to play Cinderella games, sure, but he was the benevolent Prince Charming in that scenario.

  David really liked playing Prince Charming.

  And when playing roles no longer worked to keep her in line? He’d showed her what was behind the mask. Threats. Contempt. Maybe even outright loathing.

  What Mariah had to live with now was why she’d seen the truth and stayed. For much longer than she should have. And worse, why she hadn’t seen these things lurking in David from the beginning, the way her mother had.

  Mariah sat on the edge of the bed in the charming bedroom she doubted she would ever sleep in again and forced herself to think. To really, truly think with all the desperate clarity brought on by two near-death experiences.

  Anaphylaxis got worse, not better. She had to assume that all the food in her house was tainted. That anything she touched could have been doctored and likely was. And that if she ingested shellfish even once more, it could kill her. Especially if she ran out of EpiPens.

  She also had to assume she had no friends or allies in Atlanta. There was no one she’d met here who didn’t have ties to David in some way. That meant none of them were safe. And she couldn’t head home, no matter how much she wanted to slam through the old screen door into the farmhouse kitchen, let the dogs bark at her,
and sit at the table with a slice of her great aunt’s sweet potato pie until she felt like herself again.

  Whoever that was.

  Mariah blew out a shaky breath. She could always just . . . go on the run and plan to live that way. But that seemed inefficient at best. She would have to take excruciating care in covering her tracks, always knowing that one tiny slip could be the end of her. Every book she’d ever read or movie she’d ever seen about someone going on the run ended the same way. They slipped up and were found. Or they were caught by whoever was after them no matter what they did. Or they couldn’t handle the isolation and outed themselves, one way or another.

  Whatever the reason, life on the run never seemed to work out all that well for anyone.

  If David was prepared to kill her—really and truly kill her—going on the run would only make it easier for him. And Mariah had no intention of dying in an out-of-the-way horror show of a motel somewhere, on the requisite dark and rainy night, with some pitiless henchmen of David’s choking the life out of her.

  She had no intention of dying at all. Not now.

  Not when she’d finally gotten herself free of the lie she’d been living all these years.

  If David succeeded in killing her the way he’d told her he would, he won. And if he won, nothing would change. He would go right on being the smiling monster she’d married because she’d wanted so desperately to believe that Cinderella stories could be real. Even more hilarious, she’d convinced herself that a white trash girl from those no-account McKennas out in Two Oaks could wake up one morning and find herself starring in a fairy tale.

  If she died, David would tell her story however he liked, and no one would know any different.

  But if she lived, Mariah could change everything.

  She could go back home and see her mother at last. She could try to figure out which one of them had caused this distance between them. She had nieces and nephews she’d never met, and she was sure her network of cousins had some things to say to her after all these years. She could repair those bridges before they burned up altogether.