Hot on the Hunt. Melissa Cutler

trickling from the drainage pipe through the sand and into the surf. Disgusting. This was one section of beach St. Thomas wasn’t going to put on its tourism brochures.

      She’d been here for two days, putting the final pieces of her plan in place. Everything was going according to script, except that she hadn’t anticipated that every step closer she took toward executing her plan evoked a fresh surge of memory—about the ICE black ops team she’d been part of and about the day her teammate Rory tried to kill her. About John.

      Annoyed that her thoughts had slipped so easily to him again, she stared past the sewage to the pristine water of St. Thomas Harbor and counted the cruise liners. Three had pulled into the harbor so far today, unleashing thousands of tourists onto the four-by-thirteen-mile island. The ferry from Puerto Rico had landed on this less-scenic end of the harbor an hour earlier, along with an attempted murderer stowaway in a crate of cheap Puerto Rican rum bound for one of the waterfront hotels that fed into this drain pipe. Unless he did something stupid and impetuous, Rory would be emerging from the pipe any minute.

      Alicia was ready for him. Even if she weren’t a virtual ghost, the Department of Justice didn’t keep homicide statistics about women like her, who’d devoted more than a year to plotting cold-blooded revenge, not against a lover, but the man who’d shot her and left her for dead.

      The idea of coming face-to-face with Rory for the first time since that fateful day made her anxious. Not scared or intimidated, per se, but filled with disquiet over the memory of what it had felt like to be weak. To hand her power over to a man.

      Never again. Killing Rory was the first step in rebuilding her reputation, but it was about so much more than an encore. It was the start of a new career. A fresh beginning. A plan not undertaken to help her make a debut splash as a black ops mercenary, but to blow the water out of the pond. Or out of the Caribbean Sea, as it were.

      Any minute now, a dangerous criminal would be released into the world. Lucky for the masses, Alicia would be there waiting with the kill shot.

      Laughter and a child’s squeal forced her attention away from her duty. Three children were frolicking in the water nearby, amid the concrete storm wall and shallow beach. Her heart sank. This was not the place for them, nor the time. If Rory showed up now...

      The children were a motley bunch, with rags for clothes and dirty faces, wild hair. Every one of them thin and undernourished. Perhaps their parents worked in the hotels’ kitchens or factories pushing so-called “island handicrafts” on tourists. Alicia’s least favorite part of living in the shadows was that the poor lived there, too. Not because she was a snob, but because nothing made her heart ache like children in the kind of desperate poverty she’d seen the world over. It never got easier to accept.

      She hated even needing to shoo these children away. Adults probably shooed them away all the time, treating them no better than stray dogs. She’d watched it happen too many times to count. And who was she to interrupt their fun? She was the intruder in their happy day, the morally corrupt American about to commit an act of violence in their community—in public, in broad daylight.

      Fishing money out of her pocket, quarters and dollars, she walked their way, waving it to show them she meant no harm. They skipped to her, hands out, smiling eagerly. She filled their hands with the money and they thanked her in Spanish. She pointed up the road toward the cruise terminals where the food vendors were, telling them in their language to go buy sweets and food for their family. One of them hugged her.

      With a glance at the drain pipe, she hugged back, trying not to be impatient. Finally, they hurried off, chattering about what they’d buy and how to divide the money. Alicia was free to turn her attention back to the pipe. The only thing worse than children witnessing what she was about to do was her being caught off guard or Rory slipping by while she was distracted.

      She heard a splash before she saw a swish of movement in the shadows. She gripped her gun and pulled it from between her breasts. It was about time, too—the silencer was digging into her middle. She flattened against the storm surge wall adjacent to the pipe, her finger on the trigger.

      Rory’s arm appeared first, then his face and body. He high-stepped through the water in relative silence, dressed in tourist clothes—a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts and sandals. That was a surprise. She hoped whoever he stole the clothes from was still alive, but there was nothing she could do about it now.

      She had a clear shot and could’ve pulled the trigger already, but the cruel streak in her wanted to make sure he knew who was ending his life.

      She pivoted away from the wall, gun first. “Hello, Rory.”

      He froze in midstride, then turned in her direction. “So it was you. I thought that might be the case, but I had to give it my best try, anyway.” His expression was stoic, like a man resigned to his fate.

      She walked closer, until she stood at the entrance to the pipe. “I was counting on that. Though I would’ve preferred it if you’d been a bit more surprised, perhaps begged me to live.”

      He sneered. “And I’d really like a steak dinner before I die, but we don’t always get what we want, do we?”

      She aimed at his heart, her own heart pounding madly. It was supposed to feel better than this. She’d counted on it being a relief to her broken spirit to have achieved revenge, but it was harder than she’d expected. Conjuring the way she’d felt when their positions had been reversed, when he’d stood before her—her teammate, her lover’s best friend—and looked her in the eye as he pulled the trigger of his Kimber 45.

      Yeah, Rory Alderman deserved this. He knew it; she knew it. Karma knew it.

      At the slight movement of her finger on the trigger, a shot broke the stillness from somewhere to her left. It ricocheted off the lip of the pipe. Alicia ducked back and flattened against the pipe’s interior wall. Rory took off along the beach.

      Another shot rang out, but whoever was shooting at her had terrible aim not to be able to hit her or Rory while she’d been stationary, so she decided it was safe enough to keep moving.

      With a fortifying breath, she shot out of the pipe at a sprint. She wasn’t about to let her reputation and her one chance at revenge slip from her grasp while she cowered in a sewer pipe. She’d unleashed a vicious murderer into the world, and, so help her, she wasn’t going to stop until she’d snuffed him out.

      Chapter 2

      Rory had only a small lead on Alicia, but he was moving fast. Alicia’s boots churned up the sand in hot pursuit, leaping like Rory had over the boulders that marked the beginning of a jetty, then up and over the concrete partition and onto the street. Rory disappeared into a wholesale hammock warehouse.

      Alicia shoved her gun back in her shirt for easy access without causing a panic among civilians and looked over her shoulder, hoping to catch sight of the shooter who’d ruined her one good chance at vengeance. She was still going to catch up with Rory, still going to kill him, but now it wasn’t so pretty and clean.

      Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, she flung herself through the door and sprinted after her quarry, ignoring the shouting workers and dodging hammock displays as she followed Rory back to the work area. Rory flailed as he ran, knocking weaving looms and empty wood spools behind him, barring her path.

      A year and a half ago, right after she was shot, she’d gotten winded climbing stairs and had needed to reteach her body how to move like a black market operative needed to. Her need for revenge against Rory and the pain of John’s betrayal kept the fire of her determination lit until she wasn’t merely as physically capable as she had been before, but better. She kept up handily, bursting out of a rear exit into a narrow alley.

      The same pack of children she’d thrown money at stood near the entrance of the alley, nibbling sweet buns. Rory pushed past them, knocking one over. Alicia didn’t have time to console them or explain. She jumped over the fallen child and into the street, running as hard and fast as her legs could go.

      Another shot rang out from