Page 7 of Delta Force Defender

Isaac kept going. He took the trail out of town, and he didn’t look over at the house he’d grown up in, because he didn’t torture himself like that anymore. He’d been a commissioned marine officer. Then he’d been Force Recon. And then he’d gone deep into a far darker hell. If he started counting up ghosts, he’d be too haunted to take a breath.

Caradine had taken care of haunting him for years now.

He listened to Blue’s conversation with the hired guns Rory had rounded up over his comm unit and wasn’t surprised the two of them had nothing productive to say about who had contracted them. Only that it had happened in Juneau.

And when Jonas returned and started trailing him again, he was aware of it by the prickle on the back of his neck—but that was the beauty of his silent, infinitely lethal friend. Jonas was never going to feel the need to make idle conversation.

Together, they followed Caradine’s tracks to the collection of little huts that functioned as the community baths and sauna, taking advantage of the island’s natural hot springs. Beyond the hot springs, the trail wound out toward the far point of Grizzly Harbor proper. Isaac stood there, ignoring interior mortar shells and tectonic shifts alike. He was aware that he was holding himself funny, stiff and furious as he glared out at what he could see of the trail in the strange summer night.

“She jumped out her side window.” It wasn’t a question.

Jonas made an affirmative noise. “She climbed down. Fast.”

Isaac nodded, because that was how he’d interpreted the tracks, too. Enough of a depression in the dirt beneath the window to suggest a jump from a height, but not too much of one, and then she’d taken off running. Until she got here. The baths were a great place to switch out whatever shoes she’d been wearing, he figured. For a pair of hiking boots, maybe, that looked like every other shoe impression in the dirt trail.

It was June. There were a lot of tracks on the island’s most accessible trail. Tourists and locals alike, this time of year.

He could picture Caradine here too easily. And as he did, separate threads he’d gone out of his way not to knit together braided up tight.

He saw her face perfectly, as if she were standing before him with her arms crossed belligerently, the way she liked to do. That smirk that drove him wild. The cool, challenging way she stared him down, as if he’d never torn her up and never would again, when they both knew better.

Isaac was done being haunted.

It was time to drag the ghost that was Caradine Scott out into the light, no matter what happened.

“You have command,” he told Jonas shortly. “If I’m not back before Templeton, you can argue it out with him.”

“I don’t argue,” Jonas replied coolly. He paused. “Are you thinking she hired those fools?”

“Caradine doesn’t suffer fools, Jonas. I doubt she’d hire a couple.”

Isaac stared down the trail. Follow it long enough up into the trees that covered the side of the mountain, and it branched out. The official trail carried on toward the summit of what the locals called Hard Ass Pass and were rarely dumb enough to test, because it got dangerous, fast, up there. Other paths wound around as they pleased. Many led out to the farthest, most off-grid homesteads and cabins.

Like the one where Isaac’s grumpy, people-hating uncle Theo lived. With his thoughts, like Madeleine had said. That, and his own personal arsenal.

Isaac highly doubted Caradine had headed there.

But beyond the various, little-traveled trails that led to all the survivalist enthusiasts who called this island home was another path that dead-ended in a tiny inlet. Where Theo and some of the other locals who preferred not to deal with people in town—or having agents ofthe man, like the Grizzly Harbor harbormaster, knowing their business—kept their boats.

If Isaac was going to sneak out of Grizzly Harbor and then off the island, without being seen and withoutaccess to the various toys he had at his disposal thanks to Alaska Force, that was how he’d do it.

He’d steal a boat, but unlike the idiots who’d thrown that pipe bomb through Caradine’s window, he wouldn’t hit the open water. He’d stick to the rugged coast, find a hidden cove on a neighboring island, and hunker down until daylight. When there would be enough fishing vessels out there that it was worth the gamble that Alaska Force wouldn’t catch him before he made it to a better boat. Like the Alaska Marine Highway ferry that could take him out of here and all the way down to the Lower 48, if he liked.

“I don’t think Caradine lit her own restaurant on fire,” he said to Jonas now. “But she sure was prepared for it to happen. Practiced for it, even, if that climb down two stories is any indication.”

“Looks that way.”

And those threads braided up tight inside him seemed to ignite.

There were the things he knew about her. The things he’d long suspected. This long, maddening dance of theirs had already gone on for what felt to him like too many lifetimes.

“Bring her back safe,” Jonas said gruffly when Isaac started down the trail to confirm his first set of suspicions.

“I will,” Isaac promised him.

He’d bring her back, all right.

But how safe she stayed while he did it was going to be entirely up to her.

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