Page 18 of Sniper's Pride

Gabrielle had told him so herself at a Christmas Eve party he’d been forced to attend with his entire family during his Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing week. She’d gripped Oscar’s arm and they’d both beamed at him, obviously terrified. They clearly worried a whole lot about Griffin.

More than he ever had about them, if he was entirely honest with himself.

He might have been tempted to share that fact had hissister, Vanessa, not steered him away from the pair of them. In a hurry.

“And let’s be real here,” he continued now. “I could never have been happy in that world. Oscar likes being a dentist. He likes taking his kids to Little League and the Girl Scouts and working on his front yard on the weekends when it’s not too hot. That’s not the life I want. That’s not who I am. If it was, I wouldn’t have joined the Marines in the first place. I should have cut Gabrielle loose when I enlisted.”

“I said okay, brother.”

“And even if I wasn’t okay with her choices a hundred years later, it wouldn’t affect my work now. I’m offended that anyone would think otherwise.”

This time, when Isaac turned toward him, Griffin met his stare.

“I’m not commenting on your work, dumbass. I’m pointing out that you’re having a reaction to a pretty blond woman who looks a whole lot like the one who cheated on you with your best friend, then turned around and married him instead of you. It’s not crazy that you might have some stuff crop up around that.”

“Now I’m offended that you think I need to... what? Talk about my feelings? What’s next? Are you going to give me a unicorn stuffed animal? Are we going to make friendship bracelets?”

Isaac laughed, though Griffin couldn’t tell if the laughter made it to his canny eyes. Horatio’s head cocked to one side, as if he wasn’t fooled. Isaac clapped a hand on Griffin’s shoulder.

“I’ll come with you into town,” he declared, pulling Mariah’s cell phone from his pocket and flipping it over to Griffin. “I want to meet this blond woman who doesn’tremind you of anyone, is in no way a ghost of your own complicated past, and absolutely, one hundred percent, doesn’t get beneath your skin.”

Griffin had a lot of things he would have liked to say to that, but decided it was better to maintain a dignified, affronted silence instead. Because if anyone had ever gone head-to-head with Isaac Gentry and won, he sure hadn’t heard about it.

He and Isaac took one of the boats this side of the spring breakup of all the winter ice. The frozen rivers inland were starting to flow again. The snow that had been packed down hard all winter had started to melt, leaving mud and puddles everywhere. Even the sea was settling down as the days stretched out longer and longer.

Griffin had been born and raised in the desert—and he’d joined the Marines, not the navy. He was fully competent, but he was also more than comfortable letting Isaac do the navigating through the dark, with the expertise he’d learned growing up here.

This part of Alaska had been settled by prospectors out of places like Seattle, San Francisco, and Russia, drawn to the mountains by rumors of gold. They’d mingled with the natives that were already here when the gold didn’t pan out, then carved out hardy settlements where the edge of the world met the elements and often lost, and they dug in. There was no living here without contending with nature in a major way, day in and day out. No one here was indifferent to the seasons. There were four, they were distinct and challenging in their own ways, and everyone tracked them with the obsessiveness of people whose lives depended on knowing what was coming. Because they did.

Tonight Griffin felt the cold slap of the wind on hisface as Isaac took them out into the swells, then along the coast of the island to Grizzly Harbor. But it was already significantly warmer out on the water than it had been a few weeks back. He’d call it downright balmy.

The members of Alaska Force lived in their own cabins in the woods around Fool’s Cove, with views out over the same intense sea. Some of those cabins were connected to the lodge. Some were accessible by a short hike. Still others were set back in the woods, off anything resembling a grid. All that undisturbed silence allowed men like Griffin, who spent most of their time assessing every person they saw for potential threats, to actually relax.

The demanding sea in the distance was the only companionship he really needed. It was as much a part of him as his rifle.

Isaac piloted the boat into town with the same offhanded skill he showed in everything he did. They moored down at the docks, then walked the rest of the way into the village. Everyone in town liked to hang lights on the outside of their houses, all huddled together in the narrow strip between the high tide line and the forest. Tonight the lights blazed against the thick spring dark, as if daring the inky, endless black fist of winter to take another swing. It was a moody sort of night, with a hint of fog pooling between the buildings, and Griffin liked that Isaac kept his own counsel as they headed up the hill when he wasn’t fielding mission-related calls.

Griffin found himself thinking about Gabrielle, the girl he’d expected to spend the rest of his life with back when he’d expected to have a completely different kind of life. She was supposed to have waited for him to come back so they could pick up the plans they’d made whenthey were still kids. And she had waited, or so she said, through his first two tours.

It was when he’d re-upped instead of coming home and settling down that she’d had enough. Apparently. She and his best friend from high school had comforted each other—because Griffin’s service to his country was equally upsetting to both of them, they’d claimed. The fact that Oscar had wanted Gabrielle for himself since they’d all hit puberty hadn’t factored into it at all, Griffin was sure.

He could have forgiven that. Probably. But neither of them had confessed what they’d done when Griffin had finally come home. Gabrielle had moved ahead with their wedding, acting every inch the excited bride-to-be—until right before the invitations were set to go out.

Six weeks before he’d been set to get married, Griffin had instead discovered that he not only didn’t have a fiancée, he didn’t have a best friend, either.

He hadn’t even been as angry about it as maybe he should have been. He’d taken it as a sign.

I don’t know who you are,Gabrielle had told him, convincing tears tracking prettily down her cheeks. She’d always been good at crying, and it always used to make Griffin feel like crap, but he’d changed in the Marines. She was right about that.I don’t know what they made you, but it isn’t the Griffin I remember.

Of course he wasn’t the Griffin she remembered. That dumb kid had died in boot camp when he was still eighteen. The Marines had made him a man, then he’d taken it a step further and made himself a perfect machine. One who had seen too much, too fast, in far-off countries, and had quickly taught himself how to feel as little as possible. A sniper, cold and calculating, who needednothing and no one and could therefore take out anyone on command. He’d been so good at what he did that the enemy had given him their own nicknames but never managed to stop him.

His real secret wasn’t that he remembered Gabrielle and mourned for what he’d lost. She was his cautionary tale. He shouldn’t have imagined that he could be who he was, do the things he did, and slip back into that kind of life. He shouldn’t have tried so hard to convince himself he could feel the things others did, because he couldn’t. He’d given that up.

He would never make that mistake again.

He’d left for Alaska the morning after Gabrielle and Oscar had delivered the news, leaving them to clean up the mess they’d made. He’d followed up on that legend he’d heard while he was still in the service, about a dangerous man on the edge of the world and the band of skilled soldiers who gathered there to keep fighting.

All these years later, he still didn’t regret his choice.

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