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Sometimes I catch him looking at me the same way, a sort of loathing but not today. Even though we both know I’m just like her in every way.
“I-I’m sorry, Stephanie,” he murmurs, absently reaching for me before jerking his hand back, recovering his usual stony composure instantly.
“It’s just this meeting… The Whitehouse though, think of it!” he exclaims, his eyes widening with an almost crazed look.
There’s been some noise about Daddy running for presidential nominee, but his senatorship and business ties, our family history basically, it’s not what the bigger wheels that turn actually want. But for my dad, it’s like the Holy Grail.
“You’ll be late,” I remind him clinically. I gave up years ago trying to reach Daddy anymore. I play the innocent, pure daughter, and he plays the grouchy man of authority with the whole world at his feet.
The list of instructions he reels off as I keep pace with him all the way to the front door is his farewell. No hugs or kisses. No emotion.
Once he is gone—and I make sure he is, watching for his limo still long after it disappears into downtown traffic thirty stories below—I shiver a long breath out.
“Finally.”
He’s not the only one who can switch his mood. I can play my part to the letter, but as I said, there are just some things a girl—hell, even a future senator—has to take care of before anything else.
I swear, the next man I see, if he has a pulse, I will devour him whole.
Senator Stephanie Foster, virgin.
Not what I want on my tombstone, but more important than that, it’s not who I want to be anymore either.
CHAPTER 2
Logan
My scar itches. Still half asleep, I scratch at it, working hard in my mind before I even open my eyes to forget the recurring dream that jars me awake a dozen times a night.
Hearing the envelope I already know is thick, brown, and oblong sliding under my apartment door, my eyes snap open like steel traps.
Taking a long breath through my nose, I absently scratch my jaw again, reminding myself it’ll be the last time.
I’ve got plenty of scars, but when my latest one itches, I know it’s not just because I have another assignment.
I earned the scar the same day I lost my kid brother Jase and my military career. Lucked out by winning an honorable ‘psychiatric’ medical discharge for my troubles. Ruined my chances at any official military employment but I somehow managed to escape with my life.
No family left to look out for. No official duties from the only life I’ve ever known. Nightmares for the rest of my days. Worse than that, I’m a loose cannon now.
A solo operative. No platoon, no rank or C.O., and what should worry folks the most—no rules for me to follow.
An ex-black ops soldier who has a chip on his shoulder as well as an ax to grind with his former employer. Who, as fate would have it, still has plenty of work for highly trained, specialized killers, but none of it’s on the record.
A mercenary assassin for hire, a bodyguard, or even sometimes just a common thief—if that’s what the assignment entails. It’s not who I am, it’s what I’ve become.
A darker shadow than the one that took Jase and my men that night.
This mission though, ‘the last mission’ I’d call it out of habit. This one really is, I can feel it in my gut, on my scar.
It feels different before I even spot the telltale mail call. A ripple of something I haven’t felt since Jase and my team were ambushed that night in a jungle so dense, there’s no way it was a chance encounter.
We were sent there to be slaughtered. A team of perfect killers who had seen too much. Collateral damage removed. Wiped clean.
Except I was the only one who managed to get away, leaving my men, leaving Jase behind. That’s what keeps me up most nights.
I’ve never run from anything, but that night, I know every one of my men, Jase included, would have ordered me to save myself over being bushwhacked by our own like that.
The same caution, my gut instinct that I ignored only feels like yesterday, letting him go ahead when it should have been me who got his face blown off.
