Page 39 of Delta Force Defender

And over by the giant fireplace, looking scruffy, rumpled, and furious, was Isaac.

His gaze like gunmetal.

She thought she might choke, but she couldn’t. As usual, she had to brazen her way on through.

“This looks like a business meeting,” she said mildly, gazing around from one set, hard face to another. “Which means I shouldn’t be here, because I didn’t hire Alaska Force. I feel like I keep saying that.”

“Why don’t you take a seat?” Isaac suggested in that bossy way of his that was actually a direct order. He gestured to a chair that wasn’t exactly set in the middle of the room, as if prepared for an interrogation—but it was close enough. “You can sit down and tell us your story.”

That hard gray gaze slammed into hers from all the way across the lodge. Intense. Demanding.

It made her think of that bullet she’d shot at him. The way it had punched into the wall after the sting in her wrist that had reverberated all the way up her arm. And how long it had taken her to piece together what he’d done.

How easily he’d disarmed her.

A foreboding washed over her, bright like heat. Like a touch.

But Isaac didn’t waver.

“You can start by telling us about your family,” he said quietly. Too quietly. “Julia.”

Ten

He thought she might try to bolt.

She didn’t move, standing in her usual crossed-arm stance like she was prepared to fight, if necessary. But her gaze moved from his, coolly assessing the exits. And all the Alaska Force members she must have known would stop her. Easily.

When the door opened again and more people walked in—Everly, Mariah, and Kate—he thought he saw a flicker of something cross her face. But she didn’t indulge it. She looked at the women she liked to swear up and down weren’t her friends, and then looked back at Isaac.

Another time he would have smiled and told Kate she could stay in her professional capacity but asked the other two to go while they discussed Alaska Force business. But it wasn’t Alaska Force business. It was Caradine business, and he knew no one would budge.

So he waited while they found seats, Everly communicating silently with Blue as she sat near him, Mariahsmiling enigmatically and looking only at Caradine. Kate took a place near the main entrance, near Bethan.

But Caradine stood still. There in the center of the biggest room in the lodge with her head high, looking straight ahead. Straight at him.

She looked like the loneliest, most solitary woman in the world—but Isaac assured himself he was much too pissed to let that get to him.

“I haven’t heard that name in a long time,” she said finally. “I’d rather not hear it now, if I’m honest.”

It was still her voice. A little raspy with an undercurrent of something he wanted to call fear, but likely wasn’t, but otherwise Caradine all the way.

“Julia Colleen Sheeran,” Isaac said. He didn’t have to look at the files Oz had prepared. It was all burned into his brain. “Born outside of Boston thirty-two years ago in Massachusetts General. Grew up in Quincy. Went to Boston University, but never graduated.”

“I’m especially pleased that I get to take this trip down memory lane in a crowd,” Caradine said in that cool way of hers that he knew too well. It matched that murderous gleam in her eyes. “You know how much I love sharing. Particularly personal details.”

Everly muttered something, but Isaac didn’t ask her to repeat herself when it looked like Blue was handling it. It didn’t matter anyway. Nothing mattered but the contents of that file—and whatever faint hope he might have had that Oz was wrong for once was gone. Because, clearly, this was her.

She was Julia Sheeran.

He finally knew everything about her, and it didn’t make a single thing better. Not one thing.

It was that damned optimism, taking his knees out from under him. Making him imagine there were such things as happy endings. A person didn’t disappear under a fake name without a reason. And they certainly didn’tcling to the fake part when reality came crashing in. Or go on the run. Or do any of the other things Caradine had spent the last week doing.

Not Caradine.Julia.

“As interrogations go,” she said now, glancing around the room and then shifting that narrow blue gaze back to him, “I have to tell you, this is a little bit lame. I don’t like being stared at, sure, but it’s not going to make me cry and tell you all my secrets.”

“I don’t need you to tell me your secrets.” Isaac stared back at her, hoping he looked impassive. “I know them all now.”

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