Page 92 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

In anything but the most experienced hands, it was a death sentence.

Templeton stared out at the water, scanning the darkness. But he saw nothing.

It was happening again.It was happening again.

But this time, Templeton had every intention of dying himself if that was what it took to make sure Kate was okay. If he had to swim out there and find that boat himself. Whatever it took, this was not ending the same way it had last time.

He was an Army Ranger, and he would not allow this to end badly. He would not lose her. The truth he beat himself up with from time to time was that he barely remembered the woman he’d lost. He had known her so briefly, lost her so quickly.

But Templeton knew that Kate was burned on his bones. There was no forgetting his trooper.

Not tonight,Templeton vowed, still scanning the dark water for signs of her.Not ever.

“Rory,” he growled into his comm unit, to the Green Beret who was running point back in Fool’s Cove. “Bring me the helicopter.”

•••

The explosion rocked her, then confused her.

Kate had forgotten that creepy smile of Tracy’s as she’d tossed herself at her mother and brought them both to the ground. She’d rolled up to her feet again and had automatically started cataloging the scene as an odd silence hung over the town. One beat. Another.

Then people started to come out of their houses. Some were already running, with fire extinguishers in hand. Others looked more wary.

Tracy grabbed at Kate’s arm. “This way!”

Kate was scanning the buildings they passed, looking for structural damage. She let her mother lead her away from the café and down the hill. But when Tracy started to tug Kate away from the fire, away from the beach at the other end of town where everyone else was heading, she resisted.

“We have to help,” she said.

Tracy didn’t let go of her arm. “Don’t you hear the children crying?”

Kate heard the waves against the beach. The shouts from those fighting the fire and higher up on the hill. But she couldn’t hear any children.

And by the time they made it to the far side of the harbor, where the waves were even louder and a little boat was waiting, it was too late.

There were no children. There never had been. She was an idiot.

The two men she’d seen in the café and thought were familiar-looking were standing there by the boat. Another man stood between them, though he was holding his body at an awkward angle.

But as the flames down the beach climbed higher against the night sky, Kate could see that the awkward-looking man was tied up. With duct tape.

More important, he was her cousin Will.

Everything slid into place, with a little click that sounded like a gun.

A real gun, Kate amended, when she felt the muzzle of a handgun in her back.

“I wanted to see your face again,” Tracy said from behind her, “because I wanted to see if you still needed cleansing. If you were still wrong all the way through. And you are worse, Katie. Filthy and twisted andunworthy.”

Unworthy.

There had only ever been one way to handleunworthinessin the Holiday family.

Kate stared at Will. At his expression, sad and something like resigned. As if he’d always expected to end up here, on a dark beach, on the longest Christmas in recorded history, caught up in this crap all over again.

“Are you sure, Mom?” Kate asked. Conversationally. “You make it sound like you came all this way to see if you needed to perform the ritual. When I think you and I both know this is nothing more than revenge.”

The other men laughed. And Kate belatedly realized that they might have insinuated themselves as fishermen here in Grizzly Harbor with the rest of the men who came in for the seasonal jobs and sometimes stayed, but they were in fact her second cousins. The little ones she barely remembered, all grown up now and no longer drinking themselves into a stupor in Anchorage, apparently. And she’d bet they knew their way around some C-4. If she recalled anything about them correctly, it was that the two of them had always loved playing with fire.

---