Page 63 of Sniper's Pride

“This isn’t on you,” Isaac said, an hour into the drive.

Griffin automatically checked his six, but Jonas and Blue were sacked out in the back and snoring, because soldiers slept wherever they could. Whenever they could.

Griffin didn’t look at Isaac when he turned back. He kept his gaze trained on the two-lane highway in front of them. “You told me I was acting crazy. You were right.”

“Sure. But everything isn’t all one thing or the other. There are gray areas.”

All his locks and steel walls were melting, compartments flying open and slamming into each other, and Griffin didn’t know how he was sitting upright with all that agony tearing his ribs apart. If this was a gray area, he wanted no part of it.

“Maybe for you. I either make a shot or I don’t. It’s that stark, brother. Every time.”

“You’re going to make the shot, Griffin. You always do.”

That was supposed to be encouraging, Griffin guessed. He could do without it. It made his skin feel like it was peeling back off his bones, exposing all the muck beneath.

He’d survived a whole lot of terrible things in his lifetime. It was his job. His calling, even. But he didn’t know how he would survive this.

“Besides,” Isaac was saying, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening in the passenger seat, “you didn’t make the call. I did. I could have ordered you straight back to the inn when you showed up at my front door like a wild man before dawn. And I could have overruled your request for a shift in our approach. I didn’t.”

“You operated on intelligence I gave you. Faulty intelligence.”

Isaac sighed as he sped up to get around a slow pickup truck.

“I hope you’re having fun up there on your cross, friend. I hear martyrdom is real entertaining.”

Griffin entertained himself the next few miles by imagining all the ways he could kill—or at least stun—Isaac without even breaking a sweat or necessarily crashing the vehicle. And when he’d finally soothed himself enough to break through the murderous red hazethat wasn’t helping anybody, his phone buzzed in his pocket.

He pulled it out, expecting it to be an update from Oz, then froze.

“She’s alive,” he told Isaac.

Isaac belted out a command that had both men in the backseat sitting up straight and alert before he was done.

“Alive and unhurt, for now, but in the trunk of a Honda Accord,” Griffin told them, staring down at his phone while everything in him roared.She was alive.“Headed south into the woods. And they have her mother.”

He heard Blue flip open his tablet, and knew without having to ask that he was getting Oz on that Honda Accord. And the GPS coordinates to Mariah’s phone, which they hadn’t been able to lock in on before now, suggesting she’d had it turned off all this time.

Griffin relayed the rest of the information in the text, except for the last line.

That was his.

Though the heat that moved through him because of it was shame. And guilt.

Because it was ridiculous that she would want to repeat anything that ended with her in the trunk of a car.

He only hoped he had the opportunity to tell her how ridiculous it was.

To her face.

And soon.

Isaac kept driving, even faster than before.

It took Oz minutes to find Mariah’s phone. Jonas calculated the change in their direction, directing Isaac offthe main roads and into the spiderweb of back roads that laced the rural Georgia countryside.

“We’re about twenty miles outside Two Oaks,” he said from the backseat. “And headed away from the crossroads that marks the town center.”

“It makes sense.” Blue levered himself forward. “Whoever’s doing this—and I’m thinking it’s the husband less and less—they’re zeroing in on her family.”

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