Alpha One (Shadow Agents 1)

“No. I fou

nd it when I was fighting with Susan.” A shiver slid over her as she remembered Susan’s scream when the woman had been shot. Juliana could still hear the shatter of the breaking glass as Susan had fallen. “My father...he hid the flash drive in one of my paintings, one that he kept in his bedroom.”

Syd took the drive. A grim smile curved her lips. “You just made my job a whole lot easier.”

Juliana glanced at the blood on Logan’s body. At the injured men on the ground. “If I’d found it sooner, it would have been easier for everyone.”

The EMTs were loading Logan into the back of the ambulance. Someone else—another EMT, a woman this time—was reaching for Juliana.

Pulling them apart.

She didn’t want to be apart from him any longer. They’d already wasted so many years. Too many.

She stepped toward the ambulance. “I was going to give it to him.” Logan should know this.

He stared at her with glittering eyes.

“I wasn’t going to sit there and let him kill you. I was going to trade the drive for your life.”

“Ma’am, you’re going to need stitches,” the EMT next to her said. “We have to get you checked out.”

She didn’t want to be checked out. “Logan...”

He was yanking at the tubes the EMTs had already attached to him. Trying to get out of the ambulance, even as the two uniformed men beside him attempted to force him back down.

Juliana rushed forward and leaped into the ambulance. “Don’t! You’ll hurt yourself!”

He caught her hand in his and immediately stilled. His fingers brushed over her knuckles.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” one of the EMTs muttered, a young man with close-cropped red hair, “before the guy tries to break loose again.”

The ambulance lurched forward.

Logan wasn’t fighting any longer. He let the men tend to his wounds. Juliana let them examine the deep cuts on her arms.

Logan kept holding her hand.

She kept staring at him.

There was so much to say, and she wasn’t sure where to start. They’d been through hell. Death. Life.

Could they go back to the beginning and just be two people again? Two people who wanted a chance at love?

He brought her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “Don’t leave me.”

Her chest ached. “I won’t.”

The sirens screamed on, and they left the blood and death behind them.

* * *

WHEN LOGAN OPENED his eyes, the first thing he saw was Juliana. She was in the chair next to his bed, her head tilted back against the old cushion. Heavy bandages covered the tops of her arms. She was holding his hand.

He stared at her a moment and watched her sleep. She’d always been so beautiful to him. So beautiful that his chest burned just looking at her.

When Guerrero had threatened to use his knife on Juliana’s face, when she’d braced herself, drawing in that deep breath and trying to be strong, something had broken inside of Logan.

He’d killed before. Killing was part of his job, part of surviving.