Sniper's Pride

by Megan Crane

“And now you show up in a panic in the middle of the night—”

  “I’m not in a panic.” Though he counted himself lucky to be breathing after that crack about Caradine.

  “—demanding that we pull back from this woman, right now, because you had a flash of inspiration in the middle of the night. And you just know, somehow, that we should be looking elsewhere.” Isaac shook his head. “You know what that makes me think? You don’t want us looking at you.”

  Griffin was surprised he didn’t break in two, he was standing so stiff and furious. “Are you questioning my integrity? My honor?”

  “As your commanding officer? Never.” Isaac studied him for a moment. “As your friend? Yeah, buddy. You’re acting crazy.”

  But Griffin refused to accept that. Crazy had been that room at the inn. The way Mariah and he had . . . fit.

  “I told you,” he gritted out. “None of this is personal.”

  “Griffin. You’ve spent so many years acting like nothing’s personal that I don’t think you know how to identify when it is, in fact, incredibly personal.”

  “I told you what I think needs to happen, but the final vote is yours, as usual.” Griffin glared at this man who had given him a purpose and a home, who had allowed him to spend these years on the other side of the Marines continuing to do what he loved. The man who had created this space where Griffin could be who he was meant to be, instead of the shadow of himself he’d pretended to be for those strained, unhappy months he’d played a well-adjusted civilian in Arizona. That was who Isaac was, and Griffin knew it—but tonight Griffin didn’t have it in him to access his usual respect. What he wanted to do was punch Isaac in the face. “Or we can keep standing around, gossiping like teenage girls.”

  This time when Isaac grinned, it was like another man’s sucker punch.

  “You know I’ve been thinking we need to reconsider our approach,” Isaac said after a moment. “Why don’t you take the rest of this ridiculously early morning to get your head on straight.”

  Griffin started to protest, but stopped when Isaac’s gaze hit his.

  “Clean your gun a few times,” Isaac suggested. Except it was less a suggestion and more an order. “Run up that mountain and sweat out some of this crap you’re not feeling. Then come to the briefing with a few suggestions and we’ll figure out the next step.”

  Griffin wanted to fight. He wanted to throw down and get in Isaac’s face. And the very fact that he wanted such things was a warning sign. Hell, it was a whole five-alarm fire and then some. Griffin wasn’t a fighter—because he didn’t have to be. His fight was always and ever with himself. He was the one who had to stay in position, still and ready, until the right time. He fought a thousand wars against his own impatience, his own demons, and his own distressingly human body long before he took a shot.

  He didn’t need Mariah making his blood too hot. He didn’t need her kicking through him, making him over into some kind of hothead, and making him question . . . everything.

  But thank God he had the presence of mind to nod, turn, and take himself off into the dark before he did something seriously stupid, like try to take Isaac down.

  Instead, he took Isaac’s advice. He ran.

  He ran as he was, in combat boots with his rifle slung over his back, hauling ass up the side of that steep, unforgiving mountain. He ran past his own cabin and kept right on going, farther into the dense bush like he was trying to make it over Hard-Ass Pass—and only stopped when he hit the snow line.

  The downhill was worse, punishing and dangerous at any speed, but he only made himself go faster.

  What little sun there was finally got around to appearing by the time he got back down to his cabin, with only a few grazes and bruises for his trouble. He showered, keeping the water icy cold to test the resolve he seemed to have left behind in Mariah’s bed.

  But no matter what he did, he couldn’t seem to get images of Mariah out of his head. Much less the sensations. It was like she’d burrowed under his skin, making herself a part of him whether he liked it or not. Like he’d been starved for touch and was hoarding it now, no matter how he tried to sweat or freeze it out.

  He made himself his usual breakfast—the optimal combination of protein, carbs, and good fats—ate it too quickly to enjoy the taste, and then calmed himself down even further by assembling and disassembling his favorite three rifles in rapid succession.

  Again and again, eyes closed, then open, then closed again, the way he’d learned to do when he’d been a too-intense teenager who’d wanted more than a life in the Tucson suburbs—not least because he knew he didn’t have it in him to follow in his father’s footsteps all the way through medical school.

  This was who he was. The deceptively delicate barrel, the perfect scope. A rifle so high-tech it always returned to zero no matter what.

  A beautiful, lethal machine, good for only one thing.

  Griffin was significantly more calm when he went to the morning torture session down on the beach. The day’s workout had a name, which assured it would be brutal. It was.

  You’re talking to the only person around who wears more masks than you do. Do you really think I don’t know what that costs? Mariah had asked.

  And maybe that was the problem, Griffin thought grimly as he fought his way through the grueling movements toward the blessed end of the workout. Today the only thing he could seem to feel at all was the weight of his own mask smothering him, even when he was done killing himself in Isaac’s box of pain.

  But he shoved all that aside, too, and concentrated on his second shower of the day. This one colder than before. And when everyone was assembled in the lodge for the briefing, he took pride in delivering his assessment of Mariah’s situation without a single trace of emotion in his voice.

  Like he was still glacial straight through. The way he should have been.

  “We’ve got no hits on her phone or on the trail she laid out toward Greece,” he pointed out while everyone else looked at their tablets and files. “The only interest we’ve seen on her apartment in Atlanta has been the ex-husband performing drive-bys at night, consistent with relationship drama, not attempted murder.”

  He congratulated himself on extricating himself and Alaska Force from this mess. The mess he hadn’t wanted to take on in the first place.

  “Assuming we’re cutting her loose, the question I have is what happens when she gets back to Atlanta,” Blue said.

  “We can sweep the apartment. Make sure it’s clean and also increase security,” Griffin said. Sounding far more unassailable and sure than he felt. “There were already two attempts made on her life. A third shellfish contamination in this short period of time is going to bring in more interest from authorities, and I’m guessing that’s not what the husband wants.”

  “That doesn’t prevent other attempts,” Jonas pointed out in his usual gruff, irritated way. “More overt attempts.”

  “Talk to the client,” Isaac suggested, and Griffin noted he seemed to have no trouble sounding exactly as he should. “She’s the one who has to agree to walk back into the situation she left behind, and she might not want to do that. Find out if she’s willing to put herself up as bait before we start planning around it.”

  Griffin nodded an affirmative, and deeply disliked the part of him that clenched tight at the very idea of Mariah being bait for any kind of trap.

  Or Mariah at risk. Or Mariah scared in any way.

  But he refused to feel this. He refused to feel.

  And it was going on two in the afternoon when he caught another boat into town to pull Rory and tell her exactly that. What happened last night was a mistake. Every minute that passed made that more clear to him, especially when he was alarming himself with his incapacity to stop. Freaking. Thinking. About. It.

  This had to end. She had to go.

  The sun had peeked out in
the morning, then thought better of it. The day was overcast and chilly, too much like winter, as if spring had been nothing more than a fairy tale they’d all been telling themselves lately.

  Rory wasn’t outside when Griffin got to the inn, so he went inside, assuming when he didn’t see the Green Beret in the lobby that he’d secreted himself somewhere nearby, the way he liked. If Rory followed procedure, he’d either show himself or call in, and either way, he’d get the same message: Their surveillance of Mariah was terminated.

  Griffin nodded at Madeleine. “Is she here?”

  Madeleine took her sweet time looking up from her paperback, then shrugged enough to make her beehive shudder. “I haven’t seen her all day.”

  That was weird.

  Griffin felt a prickle deep in his gut, the one that too often operated as its own kind of alarm system, cluing him in when something wasn’t right.

  He jogged up the stairs, rapping on Mariah’s door when he reached it. There was no answer. He figured that meant it was unlikely she was curled up in a ball in there, brooding about last night.

  But he was sure there was an explanation. Just because Madeleine usually saw Mariah at some point during the course of the morning, that didn’t mean her failure to do so today meant anything. And it didn’t mean he could justify using his key. Not yet.

  Not when she could be choosing to ignore him.

  He tried to call Rory, on the phone and on his comm unit, but there was no reply. That was weirder still—but they could be eating. Talking. Hanging out the way people did with Mariah because no one had ever been chasing her.

  Griffin walked down the road to Caradine’s café, but Mariah wasn’t there, sitting at the table he now considered hers with her laptop and a bottomless mug of Caradine’s high-octane coffee. Rory wasn’t there, either. And Caradine said she hadn’t seen either one of them all day.

  “But no one actually clears their schedules with me,” Caradine said, all attitude behind her counter.

  “A simple yes or no is really all I’m looking for.”

  Caradine smirked. “Did I give you the impression that I’ve ever cared all that much what you’re looking for?”

  Griffin walked out without responding to her. He did a circuit around Grizzly Harbor, up and down the streets, poking his head into all the shops—many just opening up now that winter was over and summer seemed almost possible again. He even ran along her favorite trail, taking it all the way out to the point, where the dirt track started to double back on itself and climb.

  But Mariah was nowhere to be found. Neither was Rory.

  And it was when he got back from the trail, dug out his key no matter what Madeleine might think about it, and found himself standing in the middle of Mariah’s room that he accepted the fact that there was a problem.

  All her things were there. Her suitcase was right where she kept it. That stupid, ridiculous cape was where he’d put it on her chair in the dark. Her boots and hiking shoes were lined up neatly in the closet. Her laptop was open at the foot of her bed, its screen dark.

  He called in and reported, and while he waited for his brothers to show, he went downstairs and asked Madeleine what her morning had looked like.

  “What does my morning ever look like?” She scoffed at him. “Not a song and dance, I can tell you. Today was like every other day that ends in y. I checked in a couple from the Lower 48 after the ferry got in. They went out again about fifteen minutes later. That’s it. That was the big excitement.”

  “Where’s the couple now?”

  “I forgot to put a GPS tracker on them,” Madeleine said, unhelpfully. “Sorry.”

  The married couple from California walked in not long after Blue and Jonas turned up. Which meant the tourists got to nervously tell all three of them that they hadn’t, in fact, left their room fifteen minutes after checking into it.

  “We were tired,” the man said defensively. “We have some big hikes planned, so we decided to take the rest of the morning to relax. We went out around noon to explore.”

  Griffin’s first thought was the ferry. He went down to what passed for a ferry terminal at the docks to see if he could look through the security camera footage, while Jonas went upstairs to take a closer look at Mariah’s room. Blue took to the phone, calling their contacts in Juneau to see if they could get a handle on a woman of Mariah’s description possibly boarding a plane.

  But there was no sign of her getting on the ferry no matter how many times Griffin watched the footage. And Blue reported that there was no sign of her at the airport in Juneau, either.

  “I found something weird,” Jonas said when Griffin went back to the inn.

  He showed them a video he had found when he opened up her laptop. It was a series of disjointed silent images around a farmhouse, and a woman at the end who looked a whole lot like Mariah might if she’d lived a whole lot harder.

  Griffin didn’t need to consult his files to know it was Mariah’s mother.

  “I’m not liking this,” Blue muttered.

  “She can’t have disappeared into thin air,” Griffin said. “Even if it was possible to disappear off of this island without leaving any trace, Mariah isn’t the person who would manage it.” He faced the obvious. “Do we think the new guy . . . ?”

  “No,” Jonas said flatly. “He’s one of us. I’d stake my life on it.”

  That was the highest accolade Jonas could give, and he gave very few, so Griffin accepted it with a nod. But that left even fewer good options. For both Rory and Mariah.

  “The couple,” Griffin muttered.

  “You think she’s not alone,” Blue said flatly. “You think the couple who left fifteen minutes after those people from California checked in was her. And whoever he is, if he’s not Rory.”

  “He’s not Rory,” Jonas growled.

  “If she was leaving voluntarily, she would have taken her stuff,” Griffin continued. “And she would have told someone.”

  He meant him. No way would Mariah leave this place without telling him. Especially not after last night.

  It took hours of searching every fishing boat that came in and talking to all the people who worked on the water before they found old Ernie Tatlelik’s buddies throwing back a few drinks at the Fairweather, talking about the weird couple the crusty old bush pilot had set out to fly all the way to Anchorage in his seaplane. Because Ernie was just nuts enough to fly up along the coast and risk the notorious bad weather and big waves in the Gulf of Alaska. Ernie was nuts enough to do anything if the price was right.

  When they got the old man on his phone, he’d bunked down for the night with his sister’s kid up in Anchorage before attempting the flight back the next day. And he’d been happy to describe his customers. The big, burly man with a beard—like all the mountain men wannabes who flocked to Alaska from Outside each spring—who wouldn’t listen to reason and fly to the much more accessible Juneau if he wanted a city. Only Anchorage would do. And the woman, who’d done nothing but sit like she was frozen solid through each refueling stop, never so much as cracking a smile—though Ernie allowed as how that could have been due to the inevitable turbulence on takeoff and landing.

  “There it is,” Blue said in a low voice when they’d let Ernie go back to his dinner.

  Mariah wasn’t simply gone. Someone had taken her.

  Griffin was forced to sit with that. And while he was trying to get right with it, Templeton found Rory tied up and gagged in a backyard shed a few buildings down from the inn, bleeding from the head. Pissed and woozy.

  There it is, all right, Griffin thought grimly.

  Because Mariah had been snatched from under their noses and his brother was hurt, and there was no pretending this whole mess wasn’t entirely his fault.

  Fourteen

  At first Mariah was in shock.

  There was a man in her room.


  Inside her room.

  A big, terrifying man who looked at her with a certain focused and yet pitiless expression that made her skin crawl. Right there in front of an unmade bed that seemed to her, suddenly, to pulse with a kind of revolting invitation that made her entire body go cold.

  Her body that was currently barely covered by a T-shirt and a pair of underpants.

  Nausea made her stomach cramp, but she didn’t dare bend over or draw attention to all the parts of her body that were so . . . accessible.

  Mariah reminded herself—fiercely—that she’d trained for this over the past few weeks, no matter how accessible her body currently was. Blue had prepared her, and she’d practiced it over and over in their makeshift classroom. She slid her laptop onto the end of her bed, took a deep breath, and tried to remember all the various strikes she’d been taught.

  “You can try one of those cute moves you’ve been learning with your friends if you want,” the man said, and there was a note in his voice that made Mariah’s stomach twist harder. Like he wasn’t simply doing this, he was relishing it. “But you should know that I don’t care if you get hurt. And you will. Badly.”

  In her head, Mariah was bold and mouthy and effortlessly brave. But her actual mouth was too dry to work, her knees were threatening to give out beneath her, and her stomach was staging a riot. She didn’t feel at all brave. She wanted to cry.

  More than once, David had looked at her as if she were something stuck to his shoe that he’d very much like to scrape off. Maybe hundreds of times. And she’d been very aware of how dangerous Griffin was from the first moment she’d clapped eyes on him at the docks.

  But she wasn’t sure she’d ever stared straight into the face of a man who both didn’t care about her at all and really, really wanted to hurt her.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen,” he told her in that same creepy, casual voice. And it hit her then why he knew she’d been training with Blue. He’d been watching her. She remembered that shadow she’d seen across the street her first night here. That twisting doorknob. It all led straight to this scary man, with his bushy black beard and that glittering promise of pain in his gaze. She wasn’t sure she would ever breathe fully again. “We’re going to walk out of here. None of your friends are around, and no one is going to recognize you anyway.”