Page 91 of Delta Force Defender

The one that kept flickering into his own family drama, somehow, when he knew he couldn’t let thathappen. This wasn’t the day he’d lost his parents—and one crucial distinction was that he was right here. Not haplessly sitting in school with no idea his world was ending.

Focus, he barked at himself.

Caradine was whistling theatrically. “Oh, Jimmy. Bad news, big brother. Phase two is the feds. Won’t they be surprised to learn that you’re not dead?”

“You can call the feds all you want,” Jimmy snarled, and shook her, like a rag doll. Isaac kept his aim steady, because he knew it was a distraction technique. Not that knowing it made him less homicidal. “They can’t help you, Julia. You should have died ten years ago. You’resupposedto be dead.”

“You’re looking pretty spry for a ghost yourself,” Caradine said airily.

Isaac wondered what it cost her to sound like that. So carefree when a monster had her in a tight, hard grip.

“You never could do what you’re supposed to,” Jimmy growled. “Why couldn’t you be like Lindsay?”

“She ran away, too,” Caradine pointed out. One eyebrow arched as she looked at Isaac. “Even if she did end up dying. I’m not sure she’s the angel you think she is.”

“Then you can tell her all about it in hell, bitch.”

And everything seemed to slow down to a deadly crawl.

A flattening Isaac knew all too well.

Caradine’s gaze was locked on to his, that eyebrow high and a smirk on her face, looking bruised and battered but still the woman he knew so well. Still the only woman who had ever lodged herself beneath his skin.

The only woman who mattered to him like this.

Her brother shifted his weight, then slammed that gun against her temple again, intent and resolve all over his fake face.

Isaac wished he’d let her say what she was going to say in the SUV. He wished he’d allowed that good-bye speech.

He wished a thousand things, all of them in an instant—

Then he was lunging forward, but it was already too late—

Once again, he was much too late—

And all he could see was her face. That determined chin. That light in her blue gaze, locked on to his.

I can’t lose another person I love,he thought, very distinctly, as her brother’s finger moved on the trigger.I won’t live through this if she doesn’t—

And then everything sped up.

Jonas roared from behind him.

Something slammed into the floor where he’d been standing.

He heard the crack of a bullet a split second later, and he was still midlunge, suspended in the air, but Caradine was moving, too.

She was moving.

Her head was tucked and her hands were in a position he’d seen her practice in Grizzly Harbor. A duck of the head and the thrust of her hands and the muzzle of the gun was pointed somewhere it couldn’t hit her.

She moved.

Isaac let his fist lead, slamming it into Jimmy Sheeran’s plastic face. Jimmy was still holding on to Caradine, so they both moved as Isaac slammed Jimmy back into the wall.

Maybe Isaac ordered him to let her go. Maybe he only thought it.

But Caradine did something else, using her hip and a vicious twist. Then she had the gun, and she propped herself up against the wall while her older brother lurched for the far door, slipping and sliding over the lobby floor.

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