Clutching her sidearm close to her chest, she remained stock-still inside the oversized drainpipe running beneath the roadway. When fear tried to claw its way up the back of her throat, she did her best to swallow it down.
Her instincts told her to take aim and fire.
Logic and training kept her from listening.
It might not be Orpheus dogging her ever step. It could be one of her colleagues, an innocent FBI agent simply doing what they’d tasked him to do.
Besides, if Grace fired and missed—which, as good a shot as she was, was likely since the man was still deep inside the woods—she would give away her position. That was the dead last thing she wanted. This spot in the road, and more specifically the mile marker above her head, was where she’d told Hunter she’d meet him.
Even though she was a little hazy on which agency or branch of the government he worked for, she knew he called the Windy City home. Convenient since her latest assignment had brought her to Koontz Lake, Indiana. A wide spot in the road less than two hours from Chicago.
But it’d been dumb luck, or maybe simply good timing, he’d actually been home when she phoned. One of the few details he’d shared during their brief association had been that he spent more time out-conus—military speak for outside the continental U.S.—than he did in.
She wished she could check the time again on her phone. But after hanging up with him, she’d run a mile up the road and chucked the device over the side of an overpass.
Her cell was government-issued, encrypted, and difficult to trace. But there was a difference between difficult and impossible. Give her colleagues enough time and they would hack into her signal and pinpoint her location.
Plus, there was a golden rule when it came to going on the lam: lay down tracks in the opposite direction. Her phone was east of her position. And hopefully, once Hunter arrived, she’d be headed due west.
Once Hunter arrived…
If Hunter arrived.
How long has it been since I made that call?
Ninety minutes that felt like ninety hours.
Ninety minutes where she’d tried to sort out when and where and how her investigation had gone so wrong. Ninety minutes where she’d made herself stay still inside her hiding place even though her left leg was asleep and a beetle kept crawling back and forth across her lap. Ninety minutes of hoping and praying Hunter would believe her when no one else seemed to.
Headlights rounded the bend and hope swelled in her heart. It deflated like a popped balloon when the car passed the mile marker without slowing, its tires creating a hollow-sounding roar above her head that reminded her of the High Falls in Dupont State Forest where her father had taken her and her siblings camping during fall breaks.
What she wouldn’t give to be back there now. Safe in the arms of family. Happy in a place where the only bad thing to ever happen was her oldest brother’s twisted ankle.
The man in the woods ran headlong into a line of bramble bushes. She knew it was a line of bramble bushes because she’d stumbled through them herself.
She’d silently cursed even as she’d charged toward the safety of the quiet country road and the hollow steel drain running beneath it. Her pursuer wasn’t so circumspect. He let loose with two words that made her mouth fall open in a soundless scream.
She didn’t speak Russian. She had no idea what zalupa konskaya meant. But there was no longer any question who was out there.
It was Orpheus.
Whoever sent her that text had been telling the truth.
Terror fueled her movements as she carefully slipped her pointer finger from the trigger guard and curled it around the cool metal of the trigger itself. When her head buzzed, she raked in a slow, steadying lungful of air that smelled of damp concrete mixed with the cloying aroma of decaying flesh.
Something dead lay in a puddle of rainwater at the other end of the storm drain. She hoped like hell she wouldn’t be joining its ranks anytime soon.
Concentrating on the sound of the assassin’s approach, her brain absently noted that a mockingbird called from the trees. A bullfrog croaked from the tall grass near the side of the road. And off in the distance came the low rumble of thunder.
No. Not thunder. An engine.
A big engine.
Like the kind in a muscle car and—
Once again, headlights.
She chewed her bottom lip and didn’t allow herself to take her eyes off the trees. If the headlights spotlighted the Russian, she would take her shot.
Her father’s slow, Appalachian drawl sounded in her head. “Fix your weapon on the target, Grace. Gently pull the trigger. Don’t yank it.”
She’d been twelve years old the first time he’d put a gun in her hands. She realized how ridiculous that would sound to most people. But to the Beachams, mountain folks since King George II took over what would later become North Carolina from the lord proprietors and generated a land bonanza, learning to shoot, learning to handle a gun, was a rite of passage. A step into adulthood.
Her mother had taught her to shuck corn and make a quilt from fabric scraps, and her father had taught her to kill what she aimed at and to only aim at what she planned to kill.
Grace was a true-blue product of the hill country. A Blue Ridge Mountain girl through and through. And even though she would do things differently with her own kids—if she ever had any; her divorce had certainly thrown a wrench in those works—she couldn’t find any fault in the way her folks had raised her.
Their parenting style might not have been conventional, but they’d given her the skills and the confidence to stand on her own two feet. And for that, she was forever grateful.
Wish I was sitting at Momma’s table now, she thought longingly, having buckwheat cakes and listening to Daddy talk about the Tourists’ season.
Her father enjoyed keeping up with the local minor league baseball club, the Asheville Tourists. And her mother loved to gift him with season tickets when they had the extra cash.
The noise from the approaching car grew obscenely loud and Grace grimaced. Then, to her relief, the big engine cycled down. When she heard a second vehicle shut off, she assumed Hunter had brought along backup.
In the next instant, however, her blood ran cold when her follow-up thought was that it was possible it wasn’t Hunter on the road above. Maybe the Russian didn’t work alone. Maybe Orpheus was the code name given to a group of—
“Grace?” Hunter’s deep voice echoed into the night and she hiccupped on a sob she hadn’t realized was sitting at the back of her throat.
“Hunter!” she screamed, bolting from the relative safety of the drainpipe and scrambling up the side of the embankment. Her motions were jerky; she couldn’t feel her left foot, only the pins-and-needles sensation of the blood rushing back into it. “I’m here! I’m coming!”
She could feel the Kremlin’s assassin aiming at the invisible target on her back. Any second she expected a round to slam into her spine. Expected to feel the shock of the impact. The burst of agony.
But she topped the rise without any extra holes being drilled through her body. And the sight that met her eyes had her blinking in surprise.
It wasn’t a pair of muscle cars parked in the middle of the roadway but a pair of motorcycles that appeared as mean as they were strangely beautiful. Two men in helmets and dark leather jackets sat astride the metal beasts.