Chapter Three

Ghost

"W hat the hell happened to you?" The brunette glanced toward my retreating blonde. "I thought I knew every limit you were capable of crossing. But that ?"

She didn't know the first thing about my limits or capabilities.

But I knew her.

Army. Enlisted. Had something to prove but took orders like a Brass licker. She moved up the ranks until Intelligence Support Activity grabbed her. SIGINT, HUMINT, she excelled at all of it. Tracked more HVTs in Iraq than her male counterparts and had a rep for having a level head, not giving head. Then the CIA recruited her for their Special Activities Center, trained her as a profiler, and she slid into their Special Operations Group like a fish to water. She was Ground Branch when she pulled me from the Teams for a test disguised as a Black Ops mission. One I still didn't fucking forgive her for. Never would.

"Who found me?" I demanded.

"I did."

No break in eye contact, no hesitation, no shifting. She didn't give any tells, but I saw right through her. She was lying, albeit expertly. Another quality of hers SOG had nutted themselves over when they'd recruited her.

I flipped the blade in my palm. Purposely. "Eight years and suddenly you find me?"

Showing the kind of restraint I might've admired in someone else, she didn't glance down at my hand. "What makes you think I haven't known where you were all along?"

I stepped into her personal space because that was something else I knew about her.

The woman wanted a piece of me.

Had since she'd first laid eyes on me.

Using the advantage, one she hid better now than she had years ago, I stared down at her.

No self-preservation, her ego ruling, she didn't step back or stand down. "You think you can intimidate me?"

I didn't need to. I could kill her in a fraction of a second. "I already have."

"Who's the minor?"

The question was further proof the brunette hadn't found her way here by her own means. If she had, she would've done her homework and known who the blonde was. She also would've made her approach a dozen different ways. Infil my blonde's house, text me from the blonde's cell, catch me at the private airstrip. Hell, she could've called in a favor with CYBERCOM.

In less time than it'd taken her to approach on foot, a drone strike could've obliterated me. Dropping my turbo prop from the sky before I'd landed at that private airstrip at oh five hundred, hitting my vehicle before I'd gotten to the busy open market with hundreds of potential civilian casualties—either would've gotten the job done. The fact that I was still alive while she stood motionless put the last piece of the puzzle into place.

"You going to tell me who sent you?" The question rhetorical, it was her final warning.

Recruited from the Teams for Black Ops with the Special Operations Group's Ground Branch, years as a SEAL, every tactical move I'd made since going dark, the reason I'd gone dark—I had more enemies than most countries. But the list of people who knew how to get in touch with me was short. The list that could've actually tracked my movements and found me today, then infiltrated SAC at the Agency and gotten word to the brunette was even shorter.

Tellingly short.

Which meant my activity hadn't gone unnoticed, and years of groundwork had finally come to fruition.

Good.

Two days ago, with the final parameters of my operation in place, I'd leaked my initial piece of intel aimed at drawing out my main target. I was expecting contact. It was the reason I was here for my blonde, why she was the first stop of many. The last phases of my plan were already in action, but the brunette's presence just accelerated my timeline, and I was done with leniency.

Glancing down at my hand, the brunette held on to her attitude. "You make a lot of assumptions."

She didn't make enough. "Grace period's over."

For the first time since she'd walked up on me, she showed a split second of fear. "If you kill me, you won't know how I found you."

Leaning in and lowering my voice, I cupped the side of her face with my left hand. "I don't need to." Driving my Benchmade SOCP black fixed blade into her stomach, I sank seven inches of the nonreflective steel into her abdominal aortic artery with a single thrust.

Before the shock of pain registered on her face, I'd whipped my knife out, wiped the blade on her shirt, resheathed it, and was moving.

She dropped to her knees.

I disappeared into the crowd.