Soldier For Hire. Kimberly Van Meter

interface and pulled Xander’s file. She knew it by heart, but she went over it again just to be sure she wasn’t missing anything.

      Her gaze skimmed the basic blotter information: name, highest active rank, MOS, commendations, etc.

      The psych evals were her favorite—to sum up: the guy had issues, but who didn’t in their line of work? Scarlett didn’t hold that kind of stuff against her team members. She judged them based on their performance, their skills and their ability to walk unflinching into a shit storm.

      Xander was the best of all of them when it came to looking danger straight in the eye and laughing.

      From the outside looking in, one might say Xander was bat-shit crazy.

      But Scarlett understood Xander on a different level than most. She recognized that need for danger that flowed through Xander’s veins, that hunger to face death and win.

      It wasn’t hero-syndrome. It was something far darker.

      It was the need to feel worthy of being alive.

      Each successful mission appeased that insatiable desire for redemption, even though they all lived with the knowledge that redemption wasn’t in the cards for most.

      They’d all done things in the service of their country that had left scars, nightmares and broken off a piece of their souls.

      But hey, that was the job.

      And they accepted it.

      Scarlett closed the laptop, knowing she wasn’t going to find the answer there. In spite of her gut instinct telling her to screw the evidence, she had to trust the process. If Xander was innocent of the charges, the courts would exonerate him.

      It wasn’t her job to prove his innocence.

      It was her job to bring him in—and that’s exactly what she was going to do.

       Chapter 3

      Xander kinda wished he could call up his buddy Zak and rub it in his face that a certain level of mistrust in banking institutions had worked out in his favor.

      When you were on the run, cash was king. Seeing as Xander had kept his money in weird little stashes around his apartment, when he’d made the decision to cut out and run before Scarlett could bring him in, being able to stuff his bag with cash had been a plus.

      It wasn’t like he could’ve waltzed up to an ATM to pull out his money because then his face would’ve shown up on the Big Brother spy network. And yeah, if people didn’t believe that all their shit was on display in some techno-nerd’s deep web, they were naive.

      And the government was the biggest techno-nerd around.

      But Xander was prepared. He had a wad of cash, a burner phone and a laptop with the latest encryption software that zing-zanged around the globe for IP addresses so if he needed to nose around for intel, he could do so without risking a trip to the city library to use their public terminals.

      Still, being on the run wasn’t chill.

      It sucked.

      Not to be a wimp about it, but he missed his bed. Too many tours on the ground had turned him into a crotchety old man when he didn’t get a good night’s sleep on his expensive Tempur-Pedic.

      He chuckled, hearing in his head how the team would’ve busted his balls for being such a baby. God, he missed those guys already.

      He’d give his life for any of them. Even Scarlett.

      Irony, right?

      Xander wasn’t going to hold it against them that they were following orders. Although, he kinda wished they’d given him more of the benefit but that was selfish, and it went against their ingrained training. Soldiers followed rules or people died.

      He wanted to shake some sense into Scarlett so she’d recognize that Red Wolf was being used to do someone else’s dirty work.

      But until he could show her that he was right, she was going to chase him down. Simple as that.

      The neon light of the dive bar beneath the seedy motel gave the room a reddish glow, appropriate for the rattrap but it served his purposes.

      The place reminded him of a roach motel he’d crashed in once in a while in DC. At the time he’d found the parallel between the place where self-important men made decisions that affected everyone, except themselves, was a seething cesspit of political bullshit where people smiled right before they plunged the knife in their so-called allies’ backs and the shitty motel amusing. Xander couldn’t take the hypocrisy any longer, which was why he’d gotten out of the Rangers, but found, like most Red Wolf team members, there just wasn’t a place for guys like him in society.

      Red Wolf had been his sanctuary, his lifeline.

      Once again, he’d found purpose. And, not gonna lie, the pay was pretty sweet, too. But then the private sector had always been superior on the pay scale in comparison to government work.

      Unless you were so far up the chain you could sniff what Uncle Sam had for dinner the night before. Xander had known that he’d never be cut out for that kind of work, so getting out and doing merc work with a private company would’ve been his only option.

      Until Red Wolf had approached him.

      Yeah, Red Wolf wasn’t a place that advertised on Craigslist for job opportunities. No, they sought out their targets carefully and then made a surgical strike, quietly and efficiently.

      Xander sighed, giving into a moment of self-pity before reaching into his shirt pocket for his meds.

      He grimaced as he shifted in the bed, his back clenching in an angry spasm, reminding him who was in charge. He washed down the potent painkiller with a generous swallow of his beer.

      He was no different than most in his position. His body was screwed and tattooed. Literally. But chicks dig scars, right? Yeah, but did chicks dig drug addicts?

      His body had been broken and mended back together again one too many times. The pain was just a part of who he was now. The painkillers were part of his management.

      That was the story he told the docs and they’d bought into it for a long time, but then government regs changed and the lockdown on narcotics got downright militant.

      He’d gone from getting his shit the legitimate way to paying an exorbitant amount to a man named Pablo who sold him Oxy by the tab.

      And he needed more and more just to get through the day.

      Okay, and maybe sometimes he took a little more than he needed but who didn’t play fast and loose with prescription drugs these days? Hell, college kids lived off Adderall during exams and that was perfectly fine when everyone knew it was just legal amphetamines. But hey, it’s all good...until they get caught and then mommy and daddy throw a fit, demanding to know how little Johnny got his hands on something so addictive.

      Maybe the doc should’ve warned Xander how addictive Oxy could be; maybe it would’ve made him look for an alternative.

      Hell, there were a lot of what-ifs but what good did they do? Didn’t change the facts of what’d happened in Tulsa.

      Scarlett wanted to know why he’d run?

      Because he was guilty.

      Not of setting that bomb—No, he’d never do something so cowardly as to kill innocent people.

      But make no mistake, he was guilty as hell.

      And whoever had set him up knew of his little problem.

      Former bomb-squad, Army ranger and current drug addict.

      Yeah, his life read like a damn play-by-play for how to draw a direct line toward the easiest chump to take the fall.

      The