Page 46 of Delta Force Defender

“I take it you defied him, then.” Blue didn’t voice that as a question.

“You’d probably consider it a weak little attempt at defiance,” Caradine replied. She made a face. “It’s hard to remember, now, what a commotion there was when he said I couldn’t go to college and I went anyway. I thought I was proving myself, but what I was actually doing was showing him that I was willing and able to go against his wishes. He killed men for that. He couldn’t let it stand froma girl. Whatever he had planned for me that night was going to be a lot worse than a few bruises or broken bones. Lindsay was in the house. She told me it was weird.”

“I know that there are tough fathers out there,” Bethan said carefully. “My own wasn’t exactly a joy to grow up with. But it’s one thing to be hard-ass. And another to be...”

“Sadistic?” Kate asked brightly. “I’m familiar with that version.”

Caradine smirked. “That. And also a raging, homicidal narcissist.”

“It’s like you’ve met my dad,” Kate murmured.

“Lindsay was in the house that night?” Oz asked from his place at a desk in the corner, where he was dividing his attention between a laptop and a tablet.

“Lindsay was inside when I got there,” Caradine said. “I texted her when I parked, and she came out to meet me. She warned me not to go inside.”

Isaac watched the tension in the room shift, from whatever lingering suspicion of Caradine remained to a different sort of tightening altogether. The kind that usually cropped up when details came together to form bigger pictures. Everyone’s second-favorite part, right after a decisive win.

“Now, why would she say that?” Templeton asked in a musing sort of way, though his gaze was hard.

“Before your imaginations run wild,” Caradine said coolly, “the explosion knocked us both flat. Lindsay texted me from inside the house, then came outside, andwas talking to me when it happened. My understanding of the particular ignition system on this bomb is that the lag time after making the call would be a second. Maybe two. Not enough time for Lindsay to sneak out of the house, then talk to me in the street, all without touching her phone.”

For a moment, everyone processed that. Not only the information but the way Caradine had delivered it and what that meant.

“You considered your sister a suspect?” Isaac asked.

“Of course.” There was a bleakness in her gaze then. “We all come from the same blood. The same dirty gene pool. We’re all polluted by the same father. I knew that I’d dreamed about killing all of them. Why shouldn’t she?”

“So the story you just told, about roaming around from town to town, getting work where and how you could, it was actually the two of you?”

Isaac didn’t look over his shoulder to see the look on Griffin’s face when he asked that question. He could hear it. Ice-cold.

“Yes.” Caradine sat straighter in her chair but still didn’t drop her knees down. As if she still wanted the barrier. “Lindsay was only twenty, and she’d never done anything but sit around in my father’s house, waiting to be bartered off as it suited him. She had a harder time adjusting.”

She considered her own words. “That’s not entirely fair. My father also sent her out on dates, which she survived somehow, so she wasn’t exactly a hothouse flower.”

“How unpleasant were these dates?” Bethan asked.

“There’s the kind of man who likes to break his toys, as we discussed. But without a go-ahead to use a strong hand, there’s the risk of disrespecting my father. It’s a very precise calculus, after all. How much will he care if you break something that’s still his?”

Isaac didn’t have it in him to think—to imagine—Mickey Sheeran’s broken toys. It made his ribs ache. “So you both ran. You both got on a bus to Cleveland.”

Caradine sighed. “Everything I told you is true, but I did it with Lindsay. Who I promised I’d never mention. Between the two of us, we could cover whatever our daily expenses were and stash some away. But after the second time we got robbed, because we had to keep it all in cash, and on us, I figured there had to be a better way.”

“You took self-defense classes?” Blue asked. And sounded almost proud, since he was the one who taught the women’s self-defense class here in town when he wasn’t on an active mission. It had turned into a staple for the community.

And Caradine was always there, training herself into a lethal weapon.

“I couldn’t afford a class,” she said. “And I really didn’t want to go to one where people would learn my name, because I was still having trouble keeping track at that point. We changed them all the time. Every time we got spooked and ran again.” She dropped her knees then, and crossed her arms instead. “What I would generally do was find a scary-looking dude in the bar where I worked and beg him to teach me what he knew. That’s how I learned to shoot. And do some nasty things with a knife. And a box cutter. A fine, upstanding gentleman in Daytona Beach, Florida, told me that you didn’t need moves if you could open a vein. I took that to heart.”

“You’re not going to hear any complaints from me,” Bethan said then, at the door. “We do what we have to do.”

Caradine nodded. “That we do.”

Neither one of them smiled, but Isaac thought it felt like a moment of communion. One he had to step in the middle of to get the conversation back on track.

“But you split up,” he said.

“We thought they found us a few times,” Caradine said. Carefully, he thought. “We’d see a familiar face, and even though it was almost always a stranger, the fear would get its teeth in us and we’d take off. Because it was better to run than to be wrong. We were pretty sure no one was looking for us, but again, Who would want to bet on that and be wrong? But then we had a real scare.”

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