shouldn’t have cared. Dammit. Why the hell did he have to care?
“Gracias.” She blew him a kiss. “Be happy.”
Bryce turned, ran. The mortars hit. The mines exploded. Smoke billowed in the air behind him and rushed upon his heels.
White-hot pain ripped through his legs and back, cutting through scars and skin and muscle and bone.
He flew through the air, knowing he’d been toasted long before he hit the ground.
Campbell and Blackhaw charged from their cover. He felt their hands on him, dragging him out of the fire and smoke and death.
Bryce twisted in his scratchy, lumpy bed, reliving the torturous pain, inside and out. Replaying the months of recovery that had tested even his considerable patience, unable to find a comfortable position that didn’t make something itch or burn or ache.
A gunshot cracked through the night air. The sound jerked through him before Bryce went still. His eyes snapped open to hazy darkness. Not a remembered firefight. The real thing.
Dread made his body rigid, suffused him in sweat. God, no. He swung his legs off the cot and ran barefoot across the slimy cold stones of his cell. Over the rattle of his chains, he heard the hoots of laughter and triumph from outside in the courtyard.
Grasping the vertical bars of his cage, he hoisted himself up to look out. “Son of a bitch.”
He dropped to his feet, turned his back to the wall and sank down on his haunches. He knew the wall was as cold and damp from the night air as the floor beneath his feet. But he barely felt it. He couldn’t feel much of anything beyond rage at his captors.
This was worse than his nightmares.
The bastards had just executed an innocent man.
Devil’s Fork Island, U.S.A., November 8
2:13 a.m.
Bryce stared at the soldier’s bloody chest. “Kid?” God, had he ever been that young?
Cruel hands dragged him away from the dead man he’d scrambled into the slick underbrush with. Despite a flying tackle, he’d been too late to save him. Hell. He and his comrades from Big Sky Bounty Hunters had unknowingly brought the enemy with them in the first place.
Tailed. Like a bunch of amateurs. When they’d been trying to help. To warn their old unit of a terrorist attack.
Only, these were no terrorists. Not the foreign kind, at any rate.
The fight was on.
“Grab the big guy! Take him down!”
How many times had he heard that kind of threat?
Three men piled on, forcing him to the ground. He got his hands around the throat of a black-haired man, butted him in the head, kneed him where it counted and shoved him out of the way. Down to two. More wrestling than punching. Idiots. With all the mud and water they couldn’t get a grip. His meaty fists were far more effective.
“Martin!” He heard Jacob Powell’s voice, shouting his name. “Money’s on you, big guy! Take ’em—”
A deep grunt silenced his cheering section. They were outnumbered. Taken by surprise. Going down or neutralized one by one.
Bryce felt the bonds going around his wrists as they finally wised up and started beating on him. He pitched, kicked, pounded—and with a mighty effort, he lurched to his feet, hauling the two men up with him.
The tattoo of an upside-down burning flag swam across his vision before a new fist connected with his jaw, driving him back to his knees in the muddy marsh of North Carolina’s Swamp Lejeune. But it was the telltale click of a military-issue Colt sliding a bullet into the firing chamber that finally stilled the fight in him. “Let me just shoot him like I did the other one.”
The man with the curly black hair and the gun, the only man here who could match Bryce in stature, waited for the okay.
“No, Marcus! The ones out of uniform are not to be killed. You’ve enjoyed enough target practice for one day.” Even with the steel barrel of the Colt pressing into the back of his skull, Bryce turned to get a good look at the scraggly beard and brown ponytail of the tall, well-armed man approaching him.
“Boone Fowler.”
“I see my reputation precedes me.”
Like a rat spreading the plague.
The weasly son of a bitch headed up the Montana Militia for a Free America. Fowler was the fanatic who’d broken out of prison four months ago with his loyal minions, regrouped his own private army and waged a personal vendetta against the men of Big Sky who had imprisoned him in the first place. He didn’t care who he hurt or how he hurt them—only that he got his way.
Bryce breathed hard, tasting the blood in his mouth and ignoring pain in his side, keeping his enemy in sight.
Fowler doffed a distinctly unmilitary salute. “I want them alive. But I don’t necessarily need them in one piece.”
The man named Marcus needed no urging. He rammed the butt of his gun into Bryce’s head, swirling pain around inside his skull.
Bryce struggled against the beating hands that bound his wrists and ankles and inflicted what damage they could.
He was still swinging until the moment his world went black.
Bryce swung at his attackers in his sleep, rattling iron chains, pinching his wrists and startling himself awake.
He sat bolt upright in the bed, orienting himself to surroundings illuminated only by the cold threads of moonlight shining in through the open grating at the small, high window.
Sweat trickled along his cheek and dripped onto the deep rise and fall of his naked chest. It pooled at the small of his back and soaked into the waistband of his jeans. With each breath, he inhaled the stale smells of mold and damp, the pungent odor of the straw ticking in the mattress beneath him, and the cool, salty tang of an ocean breeze. They were familiar smells by now, though not necessarily welcome ones.
Two dead now. Boone Fowler had promised to kill one man every day until he got what he wanted. Whatever the hell that was. They had to get out of this hell-hole.
As Bryce’s eyes and mind adjusted to the here and now, he took note of the stone block walls. The surfaces had been worn smooth, the edges eroded unevenly by centuries of use. He noted the new steel bars and massive lock that kept him from leaving his six-by-eight cell.
His ankles chafed and the chain between them rattled as he swung his legs off the side of the iron cot and flattened his bare feet against the cold stone floor. This fortress was solid as a tomb and sported all the archaic comforts of a medieval dungeon.
Ignoring the scars of his life and the bruises from his capture, he jerked his wrists out to the side, stretching his arms as wide as the eighteen or so inches of chain connecting them allowed. He squeezed his hands into fists, swelling his mighty forearms and biceps until every muscle shook with the effort to rip the restraints apart. Though rust from age and the damp sea air colored the
