Page 9 of Delta Force Defender

A brutal and vertical forty-five minutes after she’d been woken up by the sound of shattering glass, Caradine made it to the inlet she’d found by accident her first year in Grizzly Harbor. When she’d done the same hike at a reasonable pace and it had taken hours. She was more breathless than she liked, sure, but that was as much to do with adrenaline-fueled trail running in the half dark as it was the fact she’d heard the Alaska Force helicopter overhead.

Another thing she couldn’t let herself focus on. Not now.

Not until she found a place she could hole up in, assess the scope of the damage, then figure out her next steps. Caradine knew there was no point succumbing to emotion when she couldn’t contain it—and when she couldn’t tell if she was blundering into a wider trap.

And maybe by that time she could forget that when she’d heard the helicopter overhead, her first reaction had beenrelief. As if they were coming to save her.

As if she could be saved.

She climbed down the sharp ravine and found a boat that looked like the one she’d practiced on, pretending for years that she truly wanted to learn how to fish and wasn’t scoping out escape routes. She checked the fuel gauge, started it up, and headed out fast. Straight out across the choppy water to the neighboring island she’d explored years ago. She left the boat in another isolated cove, nicely tied up so it would find its way back to its owner eventually, once someone stumbled upon it—but not soon. Then she set out on another grueling trail run into more dense, wet woods, too aware that she had two sets of highly motivated individuals after her now.

One set wanted to kill her—if not today, eventually. The other was Isaac and his friends, and that wasn’t much better.

Because he’d want to save her.

And that was the one thing no one could do.

She hadn’t looked back. She’d left her café burning and she’d loved that place, against her better judgment. She didn’t have time to think about Isaac Gentry or his hero complex. Or the way he said her name.

“It isn’t your name,” she snapped at herself, alone in the woods on a cold island with only the wild, unsettled sea below to hear her. “You picked two surnames out of a phone book in Sioux City five years ago.”

But she couldn’t seem to dislodge the weight of it from her chest. The name. The life.

And if something yawned open inside of her, hollow and raw like an ache, she would ignore it. Eventually, she knew from experience, she could make herself ignore anything.

It took her well into the morning to hike to the outskirts of the main village on the island. Caradine knew the town, having visited a number of times over the years—also supposedly because she was so interested in fishing. And she had her first stroke of luck, because it was ferry day. She didn’t have to camp out in the woods for half a week to wait for the ferry to Juneau to come or, in a pinch, steal another boat and hope the Troopers—or, worse, Alaska Force—didn’t run her to ground out in the channel.

When she walked on board the Alaska Marine Highway vessel later that same morning, she no longer looked much like Caradine Scott, famously grumpy owner and proprietor of the Water’s Edge Café over in Grizzly Harbor. She’d pulled out the first of her two carefully selected wigs, this one blond, and styled it into two cute braids. Something Caradine would never, ever do, because Caradine was never, evercute. She mimicked her friend—not herfriend, she corrected herself sternly, because she didn’t have friends when her life was a lie—Mariah McKenna’s thick Southern accent as she smiled and blessed hearts all the way to Juneau and then down to Bellingham.

Where, thirty-eight hours later, she dropped the Southern accent, exchanged the blond hair for bright pink, and used cash to buy a junky car from a used-car lot.

It turned out that driving was another thing that came back to a person, even if they hadn’t done it in a while. Because there were no real roads in Grizzly Harbor, so there was no need for cars. People came over in them on the ferries, then left them parked down at the bottom of town.

“Stop thinking about Grizzly Harbor,” she ordered herself, her voice loud in the car as she drove it out of Bellingham, then south to Seattle, where she headed west.

She drove until she reached Spokane, then found a motel there. Inside the room that smelled too strongly of cleaning fluid, she readied herself for a war and... waited.

But no one showed up.

No one burst through the door to confront her, or worse, kill her. She curled up on top of the thin, scratchy motel bedspread, ordered herself not to think too hard about the hygiene in a place she wouldn’t want to look at in any bright light, and tried to sleep.

It was a fitful, restless night. Caradine got to work on ignoring things when she woke up with moisture on her cheeks. And again in the shower, where a casual observer might have suggested she was sobbing.

But she didn’t sob. Because she wasn’t observed, so it didn’t happen. She hadn’t let herself cry in a long while, maybe a whole decade, and this was no time to start.

“You had five years,” she reminded herself once she crept back out to her car and started it up while it was still dark. “That’s a lifetime. And it’s much better than before.”

Butbeforewas another thing she didn’t like to think about. All that running. The panic. That first month, scrabbling to make money and find food, then another middle-of-the-night race to get away. Another few months somewhere new, then the terror of a potentially familiar face in a crowd.

The near-disaster in Phoenix that she still didn’t know how she’d survived.

Five years in one place had been a gift. Wishing she could have had more than that was greedy.

Caradine twisted her hair up wet and shoved it beneath a trucker hat that dwarfed her face, addedknockoff Ray-Bans she’d found in a truck stop, and drove south. Out of the cities where people gathered and watched and made calls back East. Into the country, where there were more cows and fields than curious human eyes.

She wound her way through the undulating hills of eastern Washington, then down into Oregon. She crossed the Columbia River and kept on south, following a twisty road that cut down the heart of Central Oregon. Hours later, she found herself crossing the high desert of southeastern Oregon, eventually dipping down into Nevada. Once she hit I-80, she kept going east all the way to Salt Lake City.

Caradine stopped only for gas and more caffeine, as much sugar as she could consume, and let that same adrenaline keep her going out there on one deserted highway after another. She kept heading south and east, through Albuquerque and on through Lubbock, Texas.

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