Page 100 of Special Ops Seduction

He understood that meant Carter was his to find. His to stop. His to take apart, when what he wanted right now was to charge the crowd, find Bethan,do something—

Or, barring that, rip down Grand Central with his bare hands.

And he had already had entirely too much practice with the fury and anguish storming through him. Too much practicetoday. He had thought he’d lost his two best friends and all the rest of his colleagues, and he and Bethan had been exposed to this poison inside them, and all of that he’d handled the way he was trained to do. More or less.

But not this.

He was actually sweating. Breathing too hard. Acting like some newbie instead of who and what he was—

Jonas found himself hoping that was the SuperThrax, because otherwise, he was imploding on his own emotion, and he had no idea how to handlethat.

“Jonas,” came Templeton’s voice in his ear. “We have your back, brother. Believe it.”

“Look out for the NYPD and Fed response,” Isaac said a moment later, so cold and precise that Jonas knew he, too, wasn’t handling this well.You killed me. “They have every intention of taking control of the situation.”

The laugh Jonas let out then was bitter. It made an older man near him flinch. “Then they’d better find him before I do.”

And then, the way he had in water, jungle, city, desert, and mountain too many times to count, he went on the hunt.

Grand Central was packed, and getting more crowded by the minute. And Jonas wanted to go find Bethan more than he wanted to take his next breath. But he also knew that if she lived through this—You killed me—she would never forgive him if he didn’t handle Dominic Carter when she couldn’t.

The way she had done for him without hesitation all those years ago.

And as he melted through the mass of people around him, scanning the main concourse as he went, the fragments of that night that were still with him rose up like a wave. The endless dark of the desert night. The heat like its own implacable weight. The pressure in his head and the pain that rose and fell inside him like a tide—going out or coming in, but never letting him be.

He remembered his own voice spilling out into the space between them. Telling her things he had never said out loud before or since.

He remembered her fingers moving through his hair, gently. Cool, somehow, despite the heat. He remembered the tension in that body of hers—different then, but still spectacular—as she’d lifted her weapon. As she’d fired offa few rounds when necessary and held both him and their position through the night.

Jonas did a loop around the information booth and that clock that stood there, counting down what was left of his life, but there was no sign of her now. Not the faintest trace that she had ever been there. And it took all the self-control he had not to throw back his head and let out his rage and his grief, loud enough to shatter all three of the great windows that hung there above him and let in the last of the day’s light.

He didn’t see the point of light without Bethan.

Years after they’d survived the desert, entirely thanks to her, he’d looked up to see her face on that big screen in the lodge in Fool’s Cove. He’d told himself it was resentment that had washed through him at the sight. His past coming to haunt him, when he preferred to be the ghost in any given situation.

And when she’d arrived that first day and smiled at him with pure delight, there on one of those wooden walkways, there had been no audience. It wouldn’t have hurt him any to say hello, explain his position, then treat her the way he had no doubt she would have treated him. But he hadn’t been able to do it.

He remembered how quickly her smile had frozen and gone blank when he’d stared at her as if he didn’t know her, then kept walking.

He also remembered how hard he’d worked—for years—to pretend that didn’t bother him. That she didn’t.

Jonas had spent his whole life putting himself at risk without a second thought, because he’d been prepared to die since long before he’d lived on his own. Since he’d sat in the back of one broken-down car after another and wished for death before morning, because that way he’d escape. In all the years since, he’d never cared much if he went home or not.

Until now.

Until her.

And if he couldn’t have her, if she was already gone, he would do the damn job anyway. The way she would. The way she had.

He would take care of her the only way he had left.

Everything inside him was a howl of rage. A black, crushing grief and a white-hot fury.

Jonas used it.

The rest of his team kept talking to him, but he wanted none of it. He pulled his comm unit out of his ear and shoved it into a pocket. Then he leaned in, hard, to all the training he’d had. All his instincts honed to a vicious, wicked edge. All the things he’d learned to become who he was, a ghost in any crowd.

He cut through the mass of people surging around him like a wicked blade, and they hardly registered he was there.

---