Friendly Fire

Book 8: Jonathan Grave Thriller

by John Gilstrap

Genres: Action & Adventure; Political Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

It begins with a shocking act of vengeance. Barista Ethan Falk chases a customer into the parking lot and kills him. He tells police that years ago the older man abducted and tortured him. Then Ethan's story takes an even stranger turn: he says he was rescued by a guy named Scorpion. Of course, there is no record of either the kidnapping or the rescue, because Scorpion—Jonathan Grave—operates outside the law and leaves no evidence.



As Grave struggles to find a way to defend his former precious cargo without blowing his cover, he learns the dead man has secrets that trace to an ongoing terrorist plot against the heart of America. It's up to Grave and his team to stop it. But first they must rescue Ethan Falk—a second time.

Release date: July 1, 2016

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 342

Sample

Ethan Falk recognized the monster’s voice before he saw his face. The voice in combination with the phraseology. “Be quick about it, if you don’t mind.”

Be quick about it.

With lightning speed—the speed of imagination—Ethan was once again eleven years old, his ankles shackled by a chain that barely allowed for a full step, that prevented him from climbing a ladder without hopping. The pain was all there. The humiliation and the fear were all there.

It had been eleven years. The monster’s hair had turned gray at the temples, and hugged his head more closely. The features had sagged some and his jaw had softened, but the hook in the nose was the same, as was the slightly cross-toothed overbite. There was a way he carried himself, too—a square set to his shoulders that a decade had done nothing to diminish.

Ethan felt his face flush as something horrible stirred in his gut, a putrid, malignant stew of bile and hate and shame. “Look at me,” he whispered. He needed the confirmation.

An old woman’s voice startled him. “Are you even listening to me, young man?”

No, he wasn’t listening to her. She stood there, a silver thermos extended in the air, dangling from two fingers. “You’re out of half-and-half,” she said. Her clipped tone told him that she’d said it before.

Because reality had morphed into the past with such sudden violence, the request registered as a non sequitur. “Huh?”

“My God, are you deaf? I said—”

The monster turned. Raven, Ethan’s nominal girlfriend and fellow barista, handed the man his drip coffee, and as the monster turned, Ethan caught a glimpse of him, full-face. His heart skipped. It might have stopped.

The lady with the thermos continued to yammer.

Please need cream or sugar, Ethan pleaded silently. That would put him face-to-face with the man who’d ruined so much. The man who’d beaten him, torn him.

But apparently the monster preferred his coffee black. He headed straight to the door, not casting a look toward anyone. Whatever his thoughts, they had nothing to do with the sins of his past.

Perhaps they had only to do with the sins of his future.

“. . . speak to your supervisor. I have never—”

“No,” Ethan said. The monster could not be allowed to leave. He could not be allowed to torture others.

He could not be allowed to dominate Ethan’s life any more through recalled horrors.

Another customer said something to him, but the words—if they were words at all—could not penetrate his wall of rage.

Ethan needed to stop him. Stop the monster. Kill the monster.

He dropped the stuff he’d been holding—a tiny pitcher for the steamed milk and the spoon through which to sift it—and was deaf to the sound of them hitting the floor. People looked at him, though. Raven at first looked confused, and then she looked frightened.

“My God, Ethan, what’s wrong?”

Ethan said nothing. There wasn’t time. The monster was on the loose, out in the world, preying on other people. On other children.

Raven tried to step out in front of him to stop him—how could she know?—but he shouldered past her. He moved fast, not quite a run, but close to it. Fast enough to catch the attention of every pair of eyes in the shop.

As he passed the pastry case, he snagged the knife they used to cut bagels. It had always been the wrong style for slicing bread, with a straight edge instead of a serrated one, but they’d learned as a crew that if you kept a straight edge sharp enough, it would cut anything.

The whole rhythm of the shop changed as he emerged from behind the counter with the knife. The old lady with the thermos put it down on the counter and collapsed into a fetal ball on the floor, covering her head and yelling, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

In a distant part of his brain, Ethan felt bad that he’d scared the poor lady—all she’d wanted was a little customer service—but in the readily accessible portion of his brain, he didn’t give a shit. Maybe next time she wouldn’t be such a bitch.

The crowd parted as Ethan approached the door with his knife. He didn’t slow as he reached the glass door, choosing instead to power through it as if it weren’t there. The blast of autumn air felt refreshing after the stuffiness of the coffee shop. Invigorating. Head-clearing.

Where is he?

The shop lay in a suburban strip mall. There weren’t many people milling about, but this was lunch time, so there were more than a few. The monster could only have gone but so far. He had to be here somewhere.

He saw a guy from a Subway sandwich shop chatting on the corner with a hot girl from the quick-quack medical place next store. She wore a checkerboard scrub suit that strained in all the right places. Ahead and to the left, a lady in a red jacket carried a take-out order from the ribs joint. (“You bring your appetite, we’ll provide the bib.”) Beyond that lady, tail lights flashed on the back end of a pickup truck, followed by the white reverse lights.

Shit, he’s getting away.

He stopped himself from chasing, though, because he knew that the monster wouldn’t be in the pickup. It was too far away. He wouldn’t have had time to get that far.

Ethan pivoted to look the other way. He stepped around the corner of the coffee shop to look past the drive-through traffic.

There he was.

The monster walked easily, as if not a care in the world, on his way to the rest of his day.

Ethan took off at a run. He’d changed a lot, too, in the past eleven years. His shoulders had broadened, and he’d grown to six-two. The monster no longer had a chance of holding him down with a hand on his chest and a knee in his belly.

The monster had no chance of winning this fight.

Ethan ran at a full sprint, closing the distance in just a few seconds. When he was only ten or fifteen feet away, the monster seemed to awaken to the danger and turned.

Good, Ethan thought. Get a good look at me you son of a—

The monster led with a punch that came from nowhere and caught Ethan with withering force just in front of his ear. Light flashed behind his eyes.

But Ethan still had the momentum, and the collision took both of them to the ground between parked cars. The monster’s head sheared a side-view mirror from its mounts, and then pounded hard against the pavement.

They landed in a tangle, with Ethan on top, in the command position. As his vision swam from the punch and the fall, he knew that quick action meant survival. The monster bucked beneath him, trying to throw him off. The guy didn’t seem scared at all. He seemed angry. If he got free—

Be quick about it.

Despite the squirming and writhing, Ethan’s right hand was still free, and it still grasped the knife. He raised it high.

In that instant, the monster seemed to understand what was going to happen.

In the next, Ethan drove the blade through the monster’s left eye and into his brain.

“All units in the vicinity of the Antebellum Shopping Center, respond to the report of an assault in progress. Code three.”

Detective Pam Hastings pulled her microphone from its clamp on the dash and brought it to her lips, keying the mike. “Detective One-four-three responding.” With the white mike still in her grasp, she used the first three fingers of her right hand on the rocker switches to light up the grill lights and their counterparts in her back window. She cranked the siren switch all the way to the right—to the Wail setting.

Known throughout the Braddock County Police Department as a lead-foot (with the Internal Affairs reports in her record to show it), she didn’t think about the future paperwork as she mashed the accelerator to the floor and let herself be thrown into her seat back as the 305-horsepower Ford Police Interceptor accelerated from cruising to holy-shit-fast in zero-point-few seconds. In that same amount of time, at least four other units likewise marked responding. Nothing drew a crowd of cops quite like violence in progress.

Pam didn’t know where the other units were coming from, but she knew that she was only a quarter-mile away, and that almost certainly meant that she would be first on the scene.

“Units responding be advised that we’ve received multiple calls on this. Callers report a man in the parking lot next to the Caf-Fiend Coffee House with a knife in his hand. One victim appears to be down.”

That raised the stakes. If the callers were right—and when multiple callers had the same story, the situation was almost always as reported—Pam was at best cruising into the middle of an attempted murder in progress. At worst, well, there was no ceiling on what the worst might be. She used her right thumb to release the snap on her thumb-break holster. If she was going to need her weapon, she was going to need it quickly. Milliseconds counted.

Peripheral vision became a blur as Pam pushed the speedometer to its limit down Little Creek Turnpike, switching the siren to Yelp as she approached intersections. She’d learned over her thirteen years on the job that if you move with enough conviction—whether on foot or in a vehicle—people will get out of your way.

As Fair Haven Shopping Center whizzed past her on the left—a blur of colorful signage and logos—she lifted her foot off the gas to prepare for the hard left onto Pickett Lane, named after a Civil War loser who led thousands of his men to slaughter at the Battle of Gettysburg. She couldn’t live with the irony of dying on a road named after such a man. She tapped the brakes, but didn’t jam them, taking the turn twenty miles an hour faster than the intersection was designed for, but a solid fifteen miles an hour slower than her tires could handle. Her seat belt kept her from being launched into the passenger seat.

The ass end of her cruiser tried to kick out from her, but Pam wrestled it back in line with gentle pressure on the wheel. The casual observer wouldn’t have seen even the slightest fishtail.

Straightaway. The engine growled as she pressed the accelerator to the floor. Up ahead, as far as she could see, the traffic somehow knew to pull over. She saw cars in the median, a truck up on the curb on the right. This was the part of the job that she loved more than any other.

The Antebellum Shopping Center was now in sight, ahead and on the right, and she slowed. It was one thing to get to the scene quickly; it was something else to rush into an ambush. Because weapons were involved, county protocols required that she wait for backup. But because someone was in the process of being murdered, she decided to disobey the rules. The fact that the murderer had a knife and she had both a .40 caliber handgun and a 12 gauge shotgun within easy reach made the decision a little easier.

Pam cut her siren and slowed to twenty miles an hour as she turned into the shopping center. She pulled the mike from its clamp again and keyed it. “Detective One-four-three on the scene.”

“Four-four-seven. Hold what you’ve got. I’m ninety seconds out.” That would be Josh Levine, a cool kid with a big heart and a bigger crush.

Pam opted not to reply. A crowd had gathered in the parking lot outside the Caf-Fiend Coffee House, naturally forming the kind of semicircle that directed Pam’s eye to the threat. The closest gawkers beckoned her forward, while the ones who were farther away continued to stare and point at the hazard.

“The situation is critical,” Pam said into the radio. Translation: I’m triggering the backup protocol’s exception clause. “Other units expedite.” Translation: Run over anybody in your way if you want a piece of the fun.

She threw the transmission into Park, kept the engine running, and stepped out of the cruiser.

“He’s up there!” a lady yelled. “Shoot him!”

Pam ignored her. In fact, she ignored everything but the events she saw play out before her. With her Glock 23 at low-ready, she approached carefully yet steadily, sweeping her eyes left and right, vigilant for an unseen threat, perhaps an accomplice. She tried to focus on her tactical breathing—four seconds in, four seconds held, then four seconds to exhale. It made all the sense in the world when she learned about it in the classroom, but it was pretty damned hard to do in real life. The combined energy from all the people watching her created its own form of heat.

Crime scene gawkers were a funny lot. Roughly a third of them thought you were a God, a second third thought you were Satan incarnate, and the rest didn’t give a shit. They were the ones with the cell phone cameras. She saw three on her periphery, one of which hovered in the air at the end of a selfie stick. Of the thirty or so people who had gathered, none of them had pressed forward to help the victim or to confront the attacker. That was her job. The crowd’s job was to film it and to offer criticism after the fact.

She’d nearly made it to the front when she caught her first glimpse of the gore. Two cars were painted with it, as was a tall, rail thin, terrified young man in the apron of a Caf-Fiend barista. The kid seemed confused. His artificially blond hair dangled in his eyes as he looked at the knife in his hands. It was as if he wondered where the knife had come from.

Pam raised her Glock to high ready and rested the front sight at the center of the attacker’s chest. “Police officer!” she yelled. Her voice cracked a little. She hoped it wasn’t obvious to anyone else that she was in way over her head. “Put the knife down or I will shoot you!”

The attacker held out his free hand as if to ward her off. “No!” he said. “I’m not the killer. He’s the killer. He’s a kidnapper. A rapist, and a killer!”

“Put the knife down!”

“You don’t understand. I’m the victim here. He’s . . .” The kid’s face seemed to clear, and he looked at his hand. At the blood. “Oh, my God.” Then he looked at the bloody man who lay motionless at his feet. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

Pam moved her finger lower on the trigger guard. The experts all agreed that inside of twenty-one feet, a man with a knife could kill a cop before the cop could pull a firearm from its holster. Correcting for the fact that she was scared shitless, but that her gun was already trained on the bad guy, a finger only a quarter inch from the trigger pretty much canceled out that research. If he took a step toward her, she was going to blast his heart out through his spine.

“Listen to me!” Pam yelled. Her voice was firm and strong this time. “Put the knife down and lie down on the ground.”

“I’m the victim!”

“You’re the victim with a knife,” she replied. “You’re putting me in danger, and you’re putting all these other people in danger, too. Put the knife down. Do what I tell you, and then I’ll listen to your side of the story.”

In the distance, the sound of sirens crescendoed. One of them would be Josh Levine. If he thought she was in mortal danger, he would shoot before talking.

The assailant didn’t move.

“What’s your name?” Pam shouted.

The kid seemed confused. Perhaps it was the ordinariness of the question.

“Your name,” Pam prompted. “What is it?”

“Um, Ethan. Ethan Falk.”

Pam lowered her weapon a few degrees. “Nice to meet you, Ethan Falk. I am Detective Hastings, and I am here to arrest you. Whether you’re innocent or guilty, victim or perpetrator, is not my concern. All I know is that right now, there’s a man on the ground at your feet, and you’re standing over him with a bloody knife. What would you assume if you were in my position?”

“It looks bad, doesn’t it?”

The comment struck Pam as funny and she smiled. “Yes, it looks bad. So how about you put the knife—”

“But I didn’t do—”

“Listen to me, Ethan! Do you hear those sirens? Those are other cops, and when they arrive, they’re going to see you still standing there with a knife. They’re going to see the blood, and there’s going to be many more guns pointing at you. You don’t want that. Please just drop the knife and—”

He dropped it. The knife landed flat on the victim’s belly. Baby steps.

“Thank you, Ethan,” Pam said. “Now, keeping your hands where I can see them, I need you to step forward into the road—”

Just then, a Toyota driven by a soccer mom in a pink top sped down the parking lot aisle that separated cop from felon.

“Jesus,” Pam cursed. “Really?” Refocus. She stepped out into the roadway and pivoted to her right, keeping more or less the same distance between herself and her suspect.

“Four-four-seven is on the scene.” Josh Levine had arrived.

Pam’s portable radio was out of reach while she was covering the killer. She wished she could tell everyone to come in easy. To her suspect, she said, “Ethan, I need you to take two giant steps forward into the street and lie flat on your face, your hands out to the side.”

He seemed to be caught between reality and someplace else.

“Come on, Ethan, I know you can do it.”

“Don’t shoot me.”

“I won’t shoot you if you don’t threaten anyone. Come on, two big steps forward, and then just sprawl on the ground. We’ll get past this one step, and then everything else will be easy.”

Josh Levine burst out of the crowd on Pam’s left, Mossberg shotgun pressed to his shoulder. “You heard her!” he shouted. “Get on the ground! Now!” He pressed in three steps too close, ruining the safe zone that Pam had been trying to create. “I said now!”

“Josh, shut up!” Pam shouted. The words were out before she had a chance to stop them. But once out, they needed to be followed up. “I’ve got this. Step back.” She was distantly aware that she was making some great video for the cell phone crowd.

“Look at me, Ethan,” she said. “Not at him, at me. He won’t hurt you. But do you see how nervous you’re making everyone?” She dared a couple of steps forward, if only to earn the frightened glances that were going toward Levine. More sirens approached, and more units marked on the scene. The entire Braddock County Police Department would be in the parking lot soon.

Ethan took two exaggerated steps forward, taking care not to step on the body, and ostentatiously avoiding the stream of blood, to stand in the middle of the street. If the Toyota had come by then, he’d have been launched over the hood. He walked with his hands out to the side, cruciform, his finger splayed.

“You’re doing great, Ethan,” Pam said. “Now, I just need you to—”

Levine rushed him. With the shotgun one-armed into his shoulder, he closed the distance in two or three quick strides. Grabbing the back of the kid’s shirt at the collar, he kicked his right foot from underneath him while driving him forward and down. Ethan barely had enough time to get his hands out in front to prevent his face from being smashed into the pavement.

With the kid down, Levine kneeled on the small of his back and pressed the muzzle of the shotgun against the base of the kid’s skull. “I’ve got him!” he announced. He used expert technique to cuff the kid.

Pam’s shoulders sagged. She holstered her Glock and approached the two men on the ground. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said when she was within easy earshot. “I had this under control.”

“Yeah, but I have him under arrest,” Josh said. “You’re not going anywhere,” he said to Ethan Falk.

Anger boiled in Pam’s gut, but she swallowed it down. The kid had been one hundred percent compliant.

Josh cocked his head. “Are you pissed?”

“You didn’t have to hurt him,” she said.

“You know he killed a guy, right?”

Pam didn’t answer. She helped Ethan to his feet and Mirandized him. She did her best to ignore the citizens who crowded her as she escorted her prisoner to Levine’s cruiser, and she didn’t acknowledge any of the other officers. It was the damn cameras. She just wanted to be out of their range.

“Watch your head,” she said as Ethan lowered his butt into the backseat.

“Detective Hastings?” They were Ethan’s first words since he’d been pressed into the pavement.

Pam made eye contact.

“That man kidnapped me when I was eleven years old. You look it up. It was terrible. He was a monster. I’m sorry for what I did, but he was . . . a monster.”

Just from his tone, Pam believed him. “Okay,” she said. “Make sure you tell your lawyer. And the prosecutor if you decide to talk to him. The FBI will have a record of your rescue, and that will surely help. We’ll talk again in a little while—”

“But I wasn’t rescued by the FBI,” Ethan said.

“Then how did you get away? Did you escape?”

Ethan shook his head. “No, I was rescued, but not by the FBI. I was rescued by a guy named Scorpion.”

“Who?”

“That’s all I know. His name was Scorpion.”

“That’s not a name.”

“Of course it’s not a name. But that’s what he called himself. He saved my life.”

The Sleeping Genie Motel seemed to get its own joke. Nestled behind a strip mall in an unincorporated stretch of Route 1 between Woodbridge and Quantico, Virginia, the seedy low-rise 1960s-vintage motor court had a reputation. Let’s just say that precious few of the genies in residence did much sleeping, and that the rooms turned over two or three times on a good night.

Jonathan Grave had seen places like this in every military town. The forty-dollars-per-night marquee was a dead giveaway. He’d fail a lie detector if he swore he’d never frequented such a place, but it had been a long, long time—back when most of the promiscuity-related diseases could be cured with penicillin.

“Hey, look, Dig,” Boxers said, pointing through the windshield as they cruised into the crumbling parking lot. “The genie wants you. She’s winking.”

Indeed, the circle of neon that made up the busty sign’s left eye had started to wear out, and it looked for all the world like she was flirting. “I’m saving myself for that special genie,” Jonathan said.

“Looking like that, she wouldn’t have you anyway,” Boxers said. In deference to the daylight hours, Jonathan had done what he could to change his appearance. His nose was slightly larger than normal, and he sported teeth that gave him an overbite. A specially designed T-shirt gave him a paunch that wasn’t real, and he wore a pair of taped-up glasses over his normally blue eyes that were now brown. In general, people overestimated the capabilities of face-recognition software, and nine times out of ten, if police interviewed the people with whom he and Boxers interacted, all they’d remember was the tape on the glasses and sheer size of Boxers, who’d similarly altered his features. In general, Jonathan hated disguises, but sometimes, they were the smart move.

Jonathan waved his hand to the right—at the edge of the lot closest to the highway. “Pull over here while we work things out.” He lifted his portable radio from where he’d placed it on the center console and pressed the Transmit button. “Mother Hen, Scorpion,” he said.

He knew that Venice Alexander would be monitoring everything from the office in Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia, about fifty miles to the south and east of here. She pronounced her name Ven-EE-chay, and she was the person every NSA recruiter would sell his left arm to add to his staff.

“Go ahead.”

“Do we have any stronger confirmation on the room number?”

Islamist nutjobs had snatched nine-year-old Mindy Johnson, a congressman’s daughter, from the parking lot of a shopping mall north of here in Montgomery County, Maryland, and had declared that any attempts to contact the police would result in her execution. The bad guys wanted $1.3 million in cash to get her back. Her father—Congressman William H. Johnson of Massachusetts—had opted to invest in Jonathan’s services instead. Mindy had been visiting her father for the weekend, and had been on her way home from hanging out at a theater in Rockville, where she’d seen a movie with friends.

Apparently Congressman Dad knew neither that she had gone to a movie nor that she hadn’t come home. The first he heard of it was when the kidnapper contacted him at work.

Reaching out to Jonathan was a difficult thing to do, what with all the blind e-mails and cutouts that made him nearly impossible to find. The fact that the congressman had been able to do so within the first eight hours of his daughter’s kidnapping told Jonathan that the guy had leveraged some inside information. This was not the first time Jonathan had done work for very important people in Washington.

That initial contact with Jonathan had been nearly eighteen hours ago, and in the interim, Jonathan and his team had been working all angles to find the kid. As often was the case, the big break had lain buried in the electronic metadata that piloted e-mails through cyberspace. With that head start, followed by a lot of phone calls and shoe leather, they’d narrowed the options down to this motel. They had everything but the room number.

“Nothing much has changed since we last spoke,” Venice said. “I’m ninety percent sure that this is the right place. And if that’s the case, then I am eighty percent sure that they’re in room one twenty-four.”

Jonathan looked to Boxers for an opinion. At six-foot-huge, Boxers, who was born Brian Van de Muelebroecke, was hands-down the largest, most intelligent, and most lethal person Jonathan had ever known. “What say you, Big Guy?” Jonathan asked.

Boxers rumbled out a laugh. “Eighty percent stacked against ninety percent. I can’t do that math in my head, but it sounds an awful lot like a guess.”

Jonathan agreed. Given the stakes, if only from the firepower they were about to bring to bear, they needed better than that.

“Okay, I copy,” Jonathan said into the microphone.

“Does that mean you’re about to go hot?” Venice asked.

“I’ll let you know when I do,” he replied. He looked across the console. “We need more, don’t we?”

“You’re the boss,” Boxers said. “But if I were the boss, I’d want more.” Big Guy had a special way with non-deferential deference.

Hostage rescue was a delicate balance of finesse and violence. Methodical research and stunning speed. It left no room for mistakes. Cops could get away with raiding the wrong house and killing the wrong people because they had friendly prosecutors in their corner. Jonathan had friends, but not in those spaces. Besides, he didn’t know if he could live with himself if he killed an innocent.

“We need eyes on,” Jonathan said.

Boxers eyed him. “We need world peace, too. And let’s throw in eternal sunshine. The devil is in the details of getting it.”

Jonathan had an idea. “Find me a liquor store.”

Boxers laughed again. “Are we going to have a party?”

“Sort of,” Jonathan said. Sometimes it was more fun to be cryptic than to be forthcoming. “This is a military town. How far can the nearest booze vendor be?”

“You forget that you’re still in the Commonwealth of Virginia.” The state ran all of the liquor stores—and had just raised the tax to be paid on top of the sales over which they had a monopoly. Without the worry of competition, the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Board put liquor stores however far apart they wanted, and charged whatever they pleased.

Boxers cruised their recently purchased, old and smelly SUV out of the parking lot, and back down Route 1 in search of the familiar red, white, and blue sign of an ABC Store. This POS vehicle would be dumped when the mission was done, and they would drive back to Fisherman’s Cove in the Batmobile—Boxers’ name for the heavily customized and armored Hummer that was their real transportation. It never made sense to let security cameras see your getaway car.

The liquor store resided in a strip mall that looked just like every other strip mall on that stretch of highway. “You’re really not going to tell me what you’re up to, are you?” Boxers asked as he nosed into the space.

“I’m going to make myself stink,” Jonathan said, and he let himself out. Inside the store, he chose a pint of cheap bourbon, and paid in cash. Back in the vehicle with Boxers, he said, “Okay, let’s go back and see the genie.”

“Not until you tell me what you’re doing.”

Jonathan winked at him. He stripped the cap off of the bottle, pulled his shirt away from his body and poured about half the contents down the front of his chest.

“What the hell?”

“I need to smell like a drunk,” Jonathan said.

Big Guy winced and raised a hand to his nose. “Well, that’ll do it. Jesus. Why?”

Jonathan explained while they drove back to the Sleeping Genie.

Ethan went through the motions as if in a dream. A nightmare. His bruises had all congealed into a single body ache. Once they had shoved him into the back of the police cruiser in the parking lot, right in front of Raven and so many of his coworkers who had all filed out to see what the commotion was about, they shut the door and left him there for what felt like an hour. He wondered if maybe that was all about setting the humiliation hook as deeply as possible.

He tried to ignore reporters’ camera lenses as they were pressed against the window. But he couldn’t miss the look that Raven had in her eyes when they locked glances. Her gaze cut him like diamond on glass. It was a look of utter disappointment, of betrayal. She broke the look off after an instant, but for Ethan the damage was done.

So many faces stared at him. T