2. Blasted and Burned

New York City's skyscrapers loomed over the narrow street like a claustrophobic canyon where every enemy had the high ground.

Blaze pointed the nose of his Aston Martin Vantage through breaks in the block of cars, darting whenever he could to elude any pursuers, whether they were the three men he'd thought were his lifelong best friends or Mary Varvara Bell's other goons she'd called into the chase.

During his time in the service, Blaze had seen the worst wartime atrocities that humanity had conjured, which was to be expected. That was war.

After his friends' betrayal, the world felt more dangerous. Logan, Micah, and Tristan had rescued him, literally and when he'd needed someone in his corner, when no one else had. He'd thought they were his family, his chosen family even more solid than his SEAL brothers-in-arms, and he didn't have anyone else.

Logan, Micah, and Tristan had been a safe harbor of last resort, a hometown now blasted and burned.

He was utterly alone for the first time since he'd been thirteen years old.

But Blaze was an American Navy SEAL. He was at his most dangerous when backed against the wall. He was at his most versatile when improvising.

He had a mission to keep Sarah Nevaeh Bell safe, so the mission was paramount.

A car changed lanes ahead of him on the packed city street in the night. Blaze floored the accelerator and slotted into the opening.

In the passenger seat, Sarah stared out the windshield at the trail of red taillights ahead of them in the darkness, her fingers knotted around the door handle and seatbelt. Her lips were slightly parted, and Blaze didn't think she'd blinked since they'd gotten in the car.

He threaded the car through another opening between the other vehicles and into the leftmost lane. "Are you injured?"

The mob of cars lockstep-marched through the night ahead of them, and she shook her head negative.

He said, "Our first priority is shelter for the night and food for you. After that, we will consider our next move to ensure your safety."

Sarah's grip on her belt and handle tightened. "I'm not safe anywhere. Even my aunt and my brother want me dead. There's nowhere I can hide."

Logan, her brother—Logan had been worried about his sister—Logan had told Blaze to head to Iowa to protect Sarah."Shit, I need you to do something."

"I don't know how I'm useful in the flippin' slightest, but okay."

"My phone is in my trouser pocket nearest you. I need you to turn off location permissions. Logan has been tracking us with my phone."

"Are you serious?" Sarah's light fingers tapped his hip to find his phone in his pocket. "That's how my aunt's mobsters knew we were at that hotel in Cleveland?"

Well, yeah, dammit.

Blaze tried very hard not to be aroused by her hands caressing his groin region. The middle of an operation was not the time to divert blood from his brain, but even the phone's metal case slipping inside his pocket and shivering against his skin underneath made him grind his molars together.

She asked, "Why the heckers did you let Logan track you?"

"When Logan called me to go back to Iowa to rescue you, he was worried I'd get into a car accident and no one would be there to protect you. I thought he was my closest friend. I usually turn off the location permissions for those guys only before I leave for a mission. It's normal for him to track me and me to track him, and both of us are tracking Micah and Twist."

She stretched her arm over and held the phone below his chin to open it. "I haven't shared my location with anybody since high school. Anyone watching me go back and forth to the barn and fields all day would be bored out of their mind. Okay, there. I turned off your location sharing with everyone. It doesn't look like they were sharing their locations with you, anyway."

Another static snap of betrayal jolted Blaze. "They must've turned them off at some point. Otherwise, I might have noticed Micah and Twist were in Logan's apartment, though I would have interpreted it as a party, not an ambush."

In the constantly shifting mosaic of the traffic around them, a few cars had allowed a gap between them and the vehicles ahead of them, so Blaze spun the wheel and jammed the accelerator. The engine roared as he crossed all three lanes to the right edge of the road and shunted them down an exit ramp.

Sarah asked, "Do you know where you're going?"

Blaze didn't look away from the road and the red-glowing lines of taillights leading into the night. "I'm heading for the George Washington Bridge to take us into upstate New York. We need to get off the island of Manhattan and not take the Lincoln Tunnel to do it."

Sarah's phone pinged.

"What's that?" he asked.

She looked at it and shrugged. "Nothing important. So, what are our options?"

Blaze liked her straightforward practicality. "We'll have to improvise. Open the texting app on my phone. You are looking for a group chat called Bully Boys."

Out of the corner of his eye, Blaze could see her head bent over his phone and light from the screen reflecting on her plush lips and nose.

She asked, "What's a Scholarship Mafia?"

Anger coarsened Blaze's voice. "That's just a group chat for some people I used to know. Don't even open that one."

"Found Bully Boys. It was a-ways down there."

"Type in, ‘Gentlemen, I have fouled up, and the situation is FUBAR.'"

Sarah asked, "How do you spell that?"

He told her and continued, "‘I am in Manhattan, NY, USA. I need a bolt-hole and supplies. Do any of you have assets in Manhattan or within fifty klicks?' That's the end."

"Got it and send." She paused and squinted at the phone. "You're already getting texts back. Are these guys actually bullies? I had a problem with a bully in high school."

"It's a Navy term that literally means something like beef-eating boys. Back in the days of the Colonial Navy, sailors at sea ate horrid dried, salted beef. It's generational trauma. Who answered, and what did they say?"

"Five people are saying negative and wishing you luck."

The phone rang, and the change on the screen lit up the inside of the car in the night.

Blaze didn't look away from the speeding traffic around them. "Who is calling?"

"It says the caller's unknown."

It had better not be Logan, Twist, or Micah. Blaze would reach through the cell phone signal and rip their throats out. "Answer it."

A man's hoarse voice eliminated the possibility that one of his three former friends had called. "Lieutenant Commander Robinson? Are you all right?"

"Who is this?"

"Staff Sergeant William Spitz, sir. What's going on?"

Blaze had counseled Will Spitz through the Vets in Crisis hotline, and he'd bunked in Blaze's guest room and worn Blaze's emergency clothes for a few weeks to get back on his feet a few years before. "Will, it's good to hear your voice."

"I am at the ready. What's your situation?"

"I am in the middle of a—" Blaze glanced at Sarah, sitting so primly beside him and holding out the phone for him to speak even though the car's microphone was near the rearview mirror. "—Charlie Foxtrot."

The words Charlie and Foxtrot denoted the letters C and F in the military phonetic alphabet. Charlie Foxtrot was thus a euphemism for a clusterfuck, but Sarah didn't need to be scandalized by his language so soon after a narrow escape.

"Are you safe?" Will asked, his voice quiet and calm.

Will's ascending pitch sounded too much like the questioning intonation Blaze used to invite hotline callers to expand on their problems. "No. Criminals are hunting me."

A keyboard clacked through the car's speakers.

Blaze cranked the wheel, and the tires squealed as the car fishtailed off another freeway exit. "Do you have any assets near New York City?" he asked.

Will's immediate response was jarring. "Looks like you're near upper Manhattan, correct?"

Will knew too much, like Tristan fucking King tracking Blaze from his computer array that now seemed sinister instead of impressive. Had Mary Varvara Bell gotten to Will Spitz, and either was holding a gun to his head or a stack of money out to him? "How the hell did you know where I am?"

Will's gruff snort chuffed over the car's speakers. "I worked in signals intelligence for twenty years, first with the Army and then with the NSA. It isn't hard to locate a damn phone."

That checked out, though Blaze was still wary. He grimaced as he slipped the car through yet another minuscule break in traffic. Will was too whip-smart for his own good, as piercingly inquisitive in his forties as a nosy teenager.

Will continued, "My brother-in-law has a hunting cabin in Rockland County. He's hella into bowhunting. When the apocalypse comes, I want him on my team. It's rustic, but it's out of the way. It's got a fireplace if it gets too chilly."

"I have a civilian with me."

"There's room."

"I'm on the Harlem River Drive, heading north. I just passed Yankee Stadium," Blaze told him, even though Will evidently had a bead on him.

"At the interchange, go west on I-95 toward the GW Bridge. Take the GW to the Palisades Parkway North. I'll text you the address and where the key is hidden."

Blaze saw the interchange for I-95 coming up and took the cloverleaf that led to the west lanes. Centrifugal force tilted the world as the Aston Martin raced around the loop.

Will said, "Address coming through now. I'm also texting you my actual phone number. This is a burner number."

Figures.Hackers are always the most paranoid about being hacked.

The connection closed with a click as Will hung up, and a text arrived seconds later with the information.

While Sarah transcribed the location into Pathz, Blaze kept his head up and drove west to the massive George Washington Bridge.

This probably wasn't a trap. The odds that Mary Varvara Bell had found all of Blaze's contacts, especially one that was supposed to be confidential under HIPAA and whom he hadn't contacted in over a year, and then had the manpower to threaten or bribe all of them were infinitesimal.

Though not zero.

The tall buildings of upper Manhattan and then the Bronx glowered down on the other side of the car where Sarah was staring out.

"It's after midnight, and yet everything's so busy," she said. "I'm not sure whether to be inspired by all the work getting done or afraid because only criminals go out at night."

"A little of both, I'd guess. I would say that not only criminals are active at night because many Navy SEAL operations are performed around zero-dark-thirty, but I think I'd only make your point."

As they crossed the massive bridge spanning the Hudson River, the water's reflection smeared the city's streetlights like runny oil paints. Traffic thinned as they drove away from the city and into the bedroom communities of Rockland County, New York.

Yellow signs portraying leaping deer flashed in the headlights along the sides of the highway.

Sarah turned to Blaze as they drove. "There aren't any big buildings here."

He nodded. "We're in Rockland County, not Manhattan. It's suburban and will turn rural."

"This close to New York City, there're houses?"

"There are farms and huge wilderness state parks. Bear Mountain State Park off Exit Fourteen is famous for its bears."

Sarah went back to staring out the window. "I thought the whole East Coast was nothing but big skyscrapers and apartment buildings."

God, Blaze was a dick because he just had to needle her. Lack of sleep had sapped his willpower, and he couldn't resist. "Even Maine?"

She didn't take the bait. "Like, from Boston to Washington DC. This is weird. You always see Times Square with huge buildings all around it. I thought it was representative."

And now he felt like a heel because he'd been a dick. "It's barely representative of Manhattan."

As she turned her head and stared out the windows again, her eyes were so wide that she looked like she might reach out to touch the stars in the dark sky as they drove northward away from the city glow that blotted out the features of the sky. "I never knew."

Blaze had to work on being less of an asshole. "Wait ‘til I take you to Europe. You'll love Paris."

Her shocked blinks and then grin were more of a reward than they should've been, and Blaze had half an inclination to drive all the way to Boston and rent a private plane to smuggle his little hayseed without a passport into Europe.

His ears popped as they drove from sea-level Manhattan into the mountains of Rockland County.

Blaze prayed that this was not a trap.