Hot on the Hunt. Melissa Cutler

cause of the implosion of his former life.

      The problem with confidence was that it led to trust. And trust led to assumptions like there’s no way a blood brother who he went to war with would betray him. Or that loving a woman with every cell of his being would earn her loyalty, if nothing else. Dangerously naive assumptions like those were why John Witter—former Green Beret sniper, former ICE black ops agent, former somebody—had spent the past twenty months waiting for complacency to set in so he could kick his own ass back into fighting shape.

      It was a far cry from a do-over, but earning the status of persona non grata with the U.S. government and its world allies didn’t leave him a whole lot of viable options.

      He lifted away from the rifle and peered through his scope at the buoy swaying in the waves and wind. He should have this shot. He’d adjusted for elevation given the tide, he’d lain in the exact same position he always did, with only a plain cotton T-shirt between his shoulder and the rifle butt, with a wad of gum sandwiched between his left-side molars. All the lame superstitions and habits he’d long ago forgiven himself for. Every sniper he’d trained with seemed to have them, or even nuttier ones than John, as symbols of control and consistency.

      Ah. That was the problem, right there. All the things he always did. Control and consistency—the most dangerous illusions of a complacent mind.

      He spit the gum into the sand, then shifted from his belly into an awkward hunching seated position. Then he did the most uncomfortable, distracting thing possible—he thought about Alicia. He thought about her the second to last time they were together, about her lying on her stomach and the path of water left by the ice cube he’d trailed along her spine—one of the many memories of her that hurt in a physical, permanent way.

      He could still hear the hiss of protest she’d given when the ice cube had first touched her skin, followed by a giggle that had quickly turned into a purr. He’d loved the sounds she’d made in bed. Sweet, vulnerable, girlie sounds that were totally incongruous to the Alicia the rest of the world knew—the soldier, the computer genius, the femme fatale. His secret Alicia. His Phoenix.

      At the next knife of pain to his heart, he steadied his gaze through the mounted scope. He thought about the wind and the rate of the incoming tide. He studied the buoy’s pattern of movement, then set his finger on the trigger. Breathe in—Alicia’s hair fanning over her smiling cheek. Breathe out—her hand finding his and holding tight. A squeeze of the trigger. The buoy bell gonged with the hit.

      He loaded another round and repeated the process, twice as fast this time. Gong. Maybe that was why he wasn’t entirely sure, at first, that he’d heard the chirp of the alarm from his computer alert system. He stood and shook out his legs, then dusted the sand from his shirt.

      The computer chimed again. Sometimes it was easy to forget that life in the real world had gone on without him. He went weeks now without tuning in to world news or checking his email accounts. A long time ago, he stopped caring about war or what his old friends were up to. But guarding himself, resisting complacency, meant keeping tabs on the two people who’d destroyed him. The email alert meant that Logan McCaffrey, his one friend left in the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement—better known as ICE—was contacting him with news about either Alicia or Rory.

      Maybe Rory had been moved to a new wing of the prison. Or Alicia had decided to rejoin ICE. Most likely, the news was something benign, but still beneficial for John to be aware of. Someday, he planned to reenter the world and it’d be good to know exactly where his enemies were and what they were up to.

      He propped his rifle against the wall just inside the cabin door, then unloaded the spare ammo from his pocket to the shelf next to it. From the fridge, he grabbed a bottle of cola, then crossed the wooden floorboards to the communication console he’d set up on the far side of the room. An email window had popped up.

      John dipped his head to read it without sitting.

      Rory escaped at 0700 hours. Alicia is missing.

      He paused with his hand around the cola’s twist-off bottle cap and read the message again. Stunned into numbness, he drew a slow, lung-filling breath through his nose, set the unopened bottle down and braced his hands on the table. Then he read the message one more time.

      On this last reading, two thoughts burst through his shock. One, Alicia wasn’t missing. People with her particular skill set never went missing; rather, they chose not to be visible anymore. And two, Rory was a dead man—unless John got to him first.

      Not that John cared if Rory died, but he was the only man who knew the truth about John’s innocence. John had made peace with the reality that he’d never have the chance to press Rory into coming clean about the lies he’d gone on record with about John, locked away as he was in the ultramax prison—the one that didn’t officially exist—inside Fort Buchanan, the U.S. airbase on Puerto Rico.

      Seven hundred hours was only thirty minutes ago and Puerto Rico was only one hundred and twenty miles northwest. How far could Rory have gotten? Fort Buchanan was solid, security-wise. A man imprisoned there didn’t simply hide in a laundry cart and steal away under everyone’s noses. With the full press of the U.S. military, ICE and whatever other federal agencies the government sent looking for him, it wasn’t likely that Rory had gotten very far at all.

      What if John got to him first, before the government or Alicia did? The idea sent a thrill coursing through him. This might be John’s one chance to clear his name. It was the opportunity he never knew he’d been waiting for. Talk about a shock out of complacency.

      He looked northwest across the Caribbean, the vibrant blue sea that had acted as his buffer against reality since Rory, John’s closest friend and sniper partner for a decade, self-destructed and tried to take John down with him.

      Like being startled awake after a long, deep sleep, John’s heart beat loud and fast, pumping adrenaline-laced blood through his body. He pivoted and grabbed a hammer from his tool chest. Normally, he pried off the boards from the wall behind his sitting area, but the clock was ticking, so he wound back and smashed the planks to get at the metal locker.

      Into a black canvas bag, he stuffed all the gear, cash and weaponry he could fit, reserving a brick of C4 explosives for his immediate use. He set the C4 on the table next to his computer. Whatever happened with Rory, whatever came next, John wouldn’t be back to this place. Not that he had anything to hide, necessarily, but it was bad form in the black ops world to leave a trail.

      He unwound the cable from the C4 to the door, then grabbed the key to his boat and the plastic package of a new, untraceable cell phone, slung the bag and his rifle over his shoulder and stuffed the extra ammo in his jeans pocket. He took one last look around, then stepped into the morning sunshine. Trailing the C4 cable behind him, he followed the path downhill toward the water until he was far enough away to be safe from the blast. He’d wait to call Logan for more details once he was on the water.

      No time for ceremony, he flipped the switch to initiate the reaction, then set the detonator box on the ground and broke into a jog to his boat as an explosion ripped through the air behind him.

      It was a good sound—loud and angry and full of force. Like John. It was a sound that said, “Goodbye, exile. Hello, last chance.”

      * * *

      Ninety percent of murders were committed by men. The Department of Justice statistic made sense to Alicia. Most men she knew weren’t exactly creative thinkers. Of the 10 percent of murders committed by women, Alicia bet the vast majority of them were crimes of passion against boyfriends or husbands. Again, not a surprise.

      Alicia, for one, had debated long and hard about whether she’d kill her ex-lover. She still wasn’t sure she’d made the right call to focus her revenge solely on Rory and leave John unharmed. After all, what kind of world was it when a man conspired to kill one of the most lethal women on the planet and lived to tell about it? Even now, twenty months later, his betrayal burned like acid in her heart.

      Swallowing back the hurt, she adjusted the