Page 85 of Delta Force Defender

And the clatter of her own heart, thick and hard, in places like her thumbs. Her ears. Her throat.

She wiped her suddenly damp palms against her thighs and kept walking, crossing the room and skirting the ominous drain in the middle of it. She made it to the other side and opened another door to find herself in a stairwell. She vaguely remembered it, mostly because Danny had been so boneless. And obnoxious. Calling her and Lindsay names as they’d tried to rouse him enough to help them get him up the stairs.

It had never occurred to her then that she might look back on another dark and squalid Sheeran family night as if it had been innocent. Fun, almost. But compared to her other family memories, dragging her wasted brother around with Lindsay felt like a happy, bonding, nostalgic experience.

Something worth laughing about on a porch in Hawaii.

Caradine really, really wanted to get back to that porch someday.

She walked quietly and carefully up the stairs to the first floor and tested the reinforced steel door she found there. The handle moved when she tried it, so she pulled it open—

And then everything happened too fast.

There was a hand on her throat, and it hurt. But even as she processed that she was hauled forward, then slammed back against the wall so hard she lost what little breath she had left. Especially with her feet just off the ground, letting gravity do the work of choking her out.

Caradine knew what to do. She knew how to fight choke holds. She’d worked on this with Everly, Mariah, and others in Grizzly Harbor. Blue had taught them how to duck their chins and raise their hands, and she did both now. But she didn’t let herself enact the rest of her actual training because she didn’t want to show her hand.

Even when the hand at her throat tightened.

She couldn’t help but move her chin a little more then,and tug with her hands to free up her airway. She tried to focus on the man before her.

And for a long moment, she stared at him while he sneered. While her vision narrowed.

But no matter how much or how hard she stared, despite losing her air, she couldn’t make the face in front of her make any sense. It wasn’t Francis. It wasn’t Jimmy. It wasn’t anyone she knew.

“Who are you?” she managed to wheeze out.

The hand around her neck loosened slightly. Caradine could already feel where the bruises would come in, but she told herself getting to worry about bruises was winning. The alternative was death.

But he didn’t tighten his grip again. He lowered her instead. Her toes found the ground, and that was better.

It was even better when he took his hand off her throat.

And watched, his eyes glittering, while she coughed and fought to breathe freely.

Caradine wiped the moisture from her eyes, swallowed a few times and ignored how raw her throat felt, then straightened.

He was still sneering.

“You should’ve stayed out there in the middle of nowhere, Julia.” His voice was half a sneer, half a growl. It shocked her. “You should never have come back home.”

The shock reverberated through her as she took him in, this man with a stranger’s face. A different nose. A different chin. A shiny bald head.

At a glance she would have sworn she didn’t know him.

But she did.

Those terrible, dead eyes alight with a certain malicious satisfaction. The middle-aged paunch he hadn’t had ten years ago, but reminded her a little too stronglyof another ghost. And that telltale red roll on the back of his neck that she’d spent far too much time staring at in places like the parish church.

She bet if she lifted his handprint from her face, she’d recognize that, too.

“It’s nice to see you, too,” she said, though her mouth felt swollen and talking hurt. “You look a little bit different, Jimmy.”

Far behind her brother with his new face, two other men in ominous suits stood near a set of glass doors that Caradine knew led out to the street. It couldn’t have been more than ten yards, but it might as well have been ten thousand miles. She had a sudden, irresistible image of herself running for it, crashing through the glass, rolling out into the street...

But that wouldn’t do much besides hurt her.

Ten years ago this had been the lobby of a down-market office building that opened up into a dead-end alley, not a main street. It looked even shabbier than she remembered, which suggested it was unlikely any offices would empty out and accidentally help her. And there would be no one out in that alleyway. No pedestrians cutting through to get somewhere else.

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