Page 6 of Witness Security Breach

The sniper wasn’t alone.

Chapter Two

Dead silence.

Aiden must’ve stopped the sniper. Of course he had. Whenever her partner set his mind to a task, he accomplished it no matter what.

Charlie clasped Eugene’s shoulder and gave him a quick once-over, making sure he wasn’t injured.

Eugene let out a ragged breath he’d been holding. Other than a bloody palm, he was fine.

The kitchen looked like a war zone. The sniper had turned the cabinets into Swiss cheese and every breakable item that had been in Eugene’s vicinity had been shattered.

They were lucky not to have been torn to pieces.

Charlie rose, finger on the trigger of her 9 mm, and stepped out from behind the fridge door, then stopped cold.

A prickle of alarm streaked up her nape, tightening every hair on her scalp. The back door was ajar. Aiden had closed it behind him when he left. She was certain of it.

Charlie raised her palm, urging Eugene to stay put and keep quiet. He clung tighter to a shelf inside the fridge, understanding the silent warning.

Nothing stood out. No overt sign of lingering danger caught her attention.

But that open door was wrong.

Her intuition wasn’t nearly as razor-sharp as Aiden’s, but her situational awareness—the instinct that flared if you were walking down a dark alley or found a door open that should’ve been closed—was finely tuned and had kept her alive after four years in tactical operations.

Charlie remained perfectly still and listened.

There. Not a breath. Not movement. A presence. Someone else in the room with them.

Then the whisper-soft slide of footsteps across the wood floor.

Her blood ran cold. She dropped to a low crouch behind the kitchen island with her gun leveled. Had the sniper taken out Torres, too, evaded Aiden and got into the house?

The prospect of Aiden being hurt or worse was unconscionable.

Another subtle scrape across the hardwood. Glass crunched underfoot and it wasn’t hers.

“Charlie,” Aiden said in a ragged groan over comms in her ear. “The sniper isn’t alone.”

His little news flash was thirty seconds late. Aiden’s timing sucked, but she breathed an inward sigh of relief that he was alive. Thank God.

“Charlie? Are you all right?” Aiden’s usual smooth, carefree voice sounded rough-edged, more than winded. He must’ve been really hurting. “Come in.”

Responding or calling for backup would’ve only given away her exact position. That was the absolute worst thing she could do.

Shifting the angle of her body, she peered through the holes of the cabinets.

Movement on the other side of the island. A shuffle. Rustle of debris.

Pressure already on the trigger of her gun, as soon as she glimpsed a shadow, Charlie squeezed, sending a bullet into the silhouette.

With an audible grunt, the person changed course. Charlie adjusted likewise.

Instead of tracking the shadow as training had taught her, getting sucked into a game of cat and mouse while uncertain who was higher on the food chain, she did the unexpected. She leaped up and slid across the countertop to the other side of the island, landing at the back of a man shrouded in black.

She was about to fire, but he pivoted and threw a leg sweep, moving with a speed and grace that defied his great bulk. The maneuver caught her behind the Achilles, launching her feet out from under her.