Crave

Fucking hell.

Bottom line, though, was you couldn’t fault the reasoning: In XOps, even when you were on assignments with your compadres, it was each man for himself. Decide to leave the fold? If you were smart, you wouldn’t put your life or your faith in your own mother’s hands.

Jim took a drag and focused on the other man’s face, feeling that burning drive in his chest get hotter. Hard to explain the “why” of it . . . but he couldn’t pull out now that he’d found Isaac. Even if that compromised his battle with Devina. Even if Isaac didn’t want his help. Even if it put himself in danger.

Isaac Rothe had to be saved.

“I’m sorry,” he heard himself say. “But I need to help you. And you’re going to let me.”

The other man’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Excuse me?”

Jim glanced over to the door. Adrian and Eddie had reappeared and . . . the two of them were looking like this was all supposed to happen. As if they had known all along that Isaac would show up here. And Jim would talk to the guy. And . . .

On a quick tilt of the head, Jim regarded the dark heavens, and thought about the way his first assignment had gone: no coincidences in any of the chain of events. Everyone and everything he’d met up with had woven into his task. And golly gee-fuckin’-whiz, it was so not hard to imagine that Matthias was playing on Devina’s team. The guy had done evil wherever he went, perpetrating acts of violence and deceit that had both shaped the world on a global scale as well as altered private lives forever.

Jim refocused on Isaac. Maybe being so damned committed to this AWOL soldier wasn’t just a page out of his past . . . Hell, Nigel, his new boss, hadn’t seemed easygoing in the slightest—and yet the archangel had rolled over the instant Jim had announced he was going after Isaac: Not the kind of thing that you did if you were team captain and your quarterback started running for your own goal line.

Exactly the kind of thing you did if your boy was right where you wanted him.

Holy shit . . . Isaac was his next assignment.

Man, that shit he’d pulled over his own corpse at the funeral home was going to prove to be a stroke of genius.

“You’re going to need me,” he pronounced.

“I can take care of myself.”

As Isaac went to leave, Jim snagged his arm. “You know you can’t do this alone. Don’t be an asshole.”

There was a long moment.

“What are you thinking, Jim.” The guy’s pale eyes were haunted. “You were out. You were free. You were the one who got away. Why would you go back into the hellhole?”

Jim led with a logic that the other man could believe in—and something that was also the truth; just not the only one. “I owe you. You know that. I owe you for that night.”

Jim Heron was exactly as Isaac remembered him: big, jacked, and nothing but business. The blue eyes were the same, the blond hair was still mostly buzzed off, the face was freshly shaven as always. He even had a Marlboro quietly smoldering in his hand.

But there was something a little different, some kind of vibe that was just . . . off, though not in a bad way.

Maybe the lucky bastard had taken to actually sleeping at night, as opposed to keeping a gun in his palm and waking up at every sound.

God, when he’d heard Heron had pulled out of XOps, he’d never expected to see the man again—either because Matthias rethought the soldier’s bye-bye-birdie card and put a bullet into his think tank or because Jim wisely stayed away from anyone and anything that had to do with his former life.

And yet here he was.

As Isaac stared into the guy’s eyes, he found himself believing, as much as he could, that Heron had come to help because of that debt created in the land of sand and sun. Besides, if the SOB had wanted Isaac dead, that would have happened long before any of this conversating had gotten rolling.

“If I’d come to kill you,” Jim murmured, “you’d be on the ground already.”

Bingo.

“Okay,” Isaac said. “You hold my shit while I fight. We can start there.”

Well, didn’t that call out the fuck-no in the guy’s face. “You can’t get in that ring. Between the flyer I saw and the arrest, you might as well have a GPS tracker shoved up your ass.”

“I need the money.”

“I have cash.”

Isaac glanced over by the exit and realized that there were two big men hanging by the door. When they raised their hands in greeting, he asked, “They with you?”

Jim seemed surprised. “Ah, yeah. They are.”

“You starting your own crew? Going freelance?”

“You could say that. But we were talking about you and how you’re not fighting.”

To piss with that. He wasn’t stiffing that attorney for twenty-five grand, and the two thousand dollars he had left after that wasn’t going to get him far. And although Matthias could send a guy into the ring who could kill him in front of a hundred witnesses and still make it look like an accident, what choice did he have? He was no one’s charity case—he’d learned that long ago—and he wasn’t about to be in debt to Jim, either, just to settle an old score.

In ten minutes, he could earn another a grand or two. And if he got shanked by Matthias’s second in command, the one who’d showed up last night? It didn’t really matter. He’d known the moment he bolted from the team that a funeral was waiting for him, except he was like someone with a mortal disease: The cure for going AWOL was a bitch and likely to kill him, but at least he was putting up a fight and dying on his own terms.

Staying in XOps? Shit, he was dead even though he had a heartbeat.

He was so hollow at this point he might as well be in his grave.

“I’m fighting,” he said. “And I’ll give you my stuff to hold while I’m in the octagon. That’s as much help as I’ll accept tonight.”

No reason to tell the guy how much cash was in the windbreaker. And Heron already knew about the guns— but clearly wasn’t of a mind to use them.

“This is a huge mistake.”

Isaac frowned. “Lot of people would have told you to leave Matthias out in that desert to die, but you brought him back because you had to—and you wouldn’t have let anyone talk you out of it. Same thing here. Either get on board or get out of my way.”

A curse word. Then another. Finally, Jim took a last inhale on the cigarette and ground the butt out on the bottom of his combat boot. “Fine. But I will intercede—are we clear? You get in the ring with the wrong asswipe, I’m going to shut the fight down.”

“Why the hell are you doing this?” Isaac said hoarsely.

“Why the hell did you go out to find me and Matthias that night?”

Memories of two years ago bubbled up and Isaac went back to the desert, back to the moment when the encrypted radio had squawked and he’d picked it up and heard Jim’s thready voice.

Ten minutes was all it took to make the arrangements: medic to their tent, airlift out waiting, and a trauma team over the border, boom, boom, boom. And then he’d sat there and waited for about a minute and a half.

The Land Rover he’d found had been parked with the keys in it and Isaac had gotten behind the wheel and gone gunning. What Jim hadn’t known was that when Matthias and he had left, Isaac had hung back and watched the direction they’d headed.

Something just hadn’t seemed right about the trip out into the dunes: Nobody went anywhere alone with Matthias. It was like asking an Ebola patient to cough on you.

Making big fat sweeps out from camp, he’d found them an hour later a good five miles away from where he’d started: In his night-vision goggles, he’d zeroed in on something moving slowly across a rise, and considering that trolls didn’t really exist, he could only assume it was a man hefting another man through the sand.

As he’d driven over to them, he’d thought about how funny deserts were: Like their polar opposite, the ocean, at night they melded into the sky at the far distance, and it wasn’t until you had a reference point, like a