Page 3 of Delta Force Defender

She reached out and laced her fingers through her sister’s, the way she used to do when they were little. Back when it was easier to pretend.

“Come with me,” she said fiercely.

And Lindsay looked as if she wanted to cry.

“It’s too late,” she replied. Her voice was soft. Painful. “He asked me to marry him.”

“You don’t have to say yes.”

“I love that you think it matters what I say.”

“All the more reason to come with me,” Julia said stoutly. “We can figure it out. We can... do something.”

Lindsay’s smile pained Julia, like someone had prized her ribs apart.

“Julia,” she began.

But when hell came, it came out of nowhere.

A bright, hot, terrible flash of horror.

They were both on the ground, dazed and stunned, and Julia lifted a hand to her temple, where she feltsomething sticky. But she couldn’t find her way to caring about it much. Something was wrong with her ears, her head. Something waswrong.

Car alarms were going off up and down the street, there was a siren in the distance, and she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten to the ground. She pulled herself to her hands and knees, grabbing for Lindsay as she went.

And they knelt there, hugging each other even though it hurt, and stared at the roaring fire where their childhood home had been.

Their mother. Their brothers. Even their father—

Julia couldn’t take it in.

Lindsay made a shocked, low sort of sound, like a sob.

And somehow, that crystallized things, with a wrenching, vicious jolt inside of Julia. Half panic, half resolve.

She turned to her sister and took her shoulders in her hands, ignoring the stinging in her palms.

“This is the other choice, Lindsay,” Julia said, her voice harsh and thick and not her own at all. But she would get used to it. She would grow into it. If she survived. And she had every intention of surviving. “But we have to choose it. Now.”

One

The call came in at 2:47A.M.

Isaac Gentry wasn’t asleep because Isaac rarely slept, especially when Alaska Force was running active missions.

And Alaska Force always had active missions.

As the owner and leader of the most elite group of ex–special forces operatives in the world—the kind of individuals who didn’t think it was particularly heroic to save the world, because it was simply their job, in and out of active military service—Isaac had long since accepted that monitoring ongoing situations came with the territory. His cabin in Fool’s Cove, a remote and hard-to-reach spot on the back side of a distant, isolated island in the Alaskan Panhandle, was outfitted with enough tech to track his people wherever they found themselves on the globe.

“Report,” he said into his comm unit by way of an answer, the way he always did when a member of his team called in.

“There’s a fire,” Griffin Cisneros, known ice man and almost supernaturally self-possessed marine sniper, belted out. Sounding in no way self-possessed or icy or really like himself at all.

Isaac’s gut twisted. Because Griffin wasn’t on a mission. Griffin was supposed to be at home in his cute little house on the other side of the island in picturesque Grizzly Harbor, tucked up with his woman and enjoying the relatively mild June weather.

“Report,” he said again, though he already knew it was going to be bad. And worse, local. “Is it happening again?”

The tiny fishing village of Grizzly Harbor was supposed to be too far away from anything to attract attention. It was on a small island in a little-traveled part of Southeast Alaska’s Inside Passage, where nothing ever happened. Something Isaac knew personally and well, having grown up here.

---