Instinct Unleashed Titan Chapter One
chapteR oNe
Virginia snorted. The last thing she’d say about her death was that it was “without issue.” There were plenty of issues. Not the least of which was that she hadn’t died at all.
She’d been forced to fake her death to escape a worse fate. One her ex wanted to provide. Her best friend always said her taste in men was awful. Gaelynn didn’t know how right she was.
She snorted again and threw the newspaper to the side.
She wasn’t allowed to bring any of her electronics with her.
Not her phone, laptop, or even her Kindle.
To say she was bored was an understatement.
The US Marshals handling her case finally relented and bought her a newspaper.
Just her luck, it contained her obituary.
She wondered who’d written it. Not like she had any family left to take care of the task.
Someone at the marshals’ office, surely.
It had been two weeks since she lay in a roadside ditch, expert makeup covering her naked body while a man took evidence photos and reminded her after each one not to move. Like she wanted to wallow in the mud.
The photos were impressive. She looked bruised and battered, cuts covering her arms and thighs. Defensive wounds, scrapes from trying to escape—the makeup artist had thought of everything.
She should have stayed in the trailer park. Diner waitresses didn’t worry about hit men hired to kill them, did they? She didn’t think so.
Her supposed assassin came through the door of the wood cottage where they stashed her. The safe house was small and remote, but tidy and well-stocked. Mike grinned at the discarded paper.
“I see you found your obit.”
“Died without issue.” Virginia shook her head. “As if.”
“They mean you don’t have kids.”
“I know what they mean. Doesn’t make it any less snort worthy.”
Mike was middle-aged, built like a tank, covered in tattoos, and moved with lethal grace. He looked every bit the assassin he played undercover, but the scary facade hid a lovely gentleman.
“Have you checked in with Cathy?” Virginia leaned back in her chair and watched the warm glow erupt from Mike’s face like it did every time they talked about his wife.
“Not yet. I want to check the perimeter before I call.”
Daniel, the last of their little party, came in through the back door, stomping snow off his boots and sending the temperature inside the cabin plummeting.
“Shut the door!” Virginia yelled, huddling further under the multitude of blankets she’d piled on.
A fire roared in the grate and the guys complained on the regular about the heat, but she was Southern born and raised and couldn’t imagine a colder place than the mountains in March.
It would take her a month to thaw out after this. Maybe three.
If she’d known where the safe house was, she might’ve just waited for Ex Douche Nozzle to find an actual assassin. Death was only slightly less preferable than being cold.
She heard Daniel moving around behind her before a heavy coat dropped into her lap. She looked up in confusion and caught a tense look shared between the two Marshalls.
“Put that and your boots on. We’ve gotta move.”
“Move, as in, go outside?” Virginia stared at the puffer coat slowly sliding off her legs. “In the cold? I’m in my pajamas.”
Daniel sighed. “We need to move. Now. I don’t care if you’re naked under those blankets, just get up and get your shoes on.”
The sound of Mike cocking his gun broke through the fog of confusion.
She jumped up, thankful she’d been sleeping in long underwear under her flannel pajamas, and shoved her fuzzy sock-clad feet into the hiking boots they’d gotten for her after the arraignment.
She quickly named them “bitch stompers” and had to admit they were a better footwear choice than her normal Converse.
Her two round-the-clock guards had made other adjustments to her clothing, including replacing the laces on the bitch stompers for elastic ties.
She grabbed the puffy coat off the floor and zipped it, fastening the velcro tabs and raising the hood. She stood as close as she dared to the fireplace, hoping to store some heat before they had to go outside.
“Did he find us? Where are we going?”
Mike shushed her questions and held up a hand to Daniel. For once, her mouth obeyed her brain and stayed quiet. They left the cabin slowly, both of the guys gesturing, Virginia lost to their communication.
They led her directly away from the back of the cabin, deeper into the woods.
That wasn’t good. They had parked the car in front of the cabin.
Maybe they had another mode of transportation hidden.
How long would it take to get there? How far would she have to hike?
The cold was already seeping in through her flannel pants and boots.
She was about to ask when she heard the not-so-distant sound of an explosion. She craned her neck around. A black cloud of smoke rose over what used to be the cabin. Flames engulfed the building. She gasped and tripped, but before she hit the ground Mike hauled her up by her upper arm.
“Keep moving. Don’t look back.”
His deep rumble in her ear helped her concentrate. Instead of panicking, she focused on putting one foot in front of the other. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, she repeated to herself.
When the local police first told her that her then-husband was trying to kill her, she laughed them off.
She couldn't imagine the skinny, balding man whose greatest goal was being welcomed into high society masterminding a murder for hire plot. It took seeing the footage of her ex soliciting a hit man and spewing venom about her to convince her there might be an issue. Even then she couldn’t really believe it, but when the twatwaffle pulled out a wad of cash for a down payment on her death, the danger she was in hit her like a baseball bat to the stomach.
She left with the police immediately, and they shuffled her between agencies for several days before she landed with the US Marshals.
They staged her death and delivered proof of her demise to the ex.
He bought it, hook, line, and sinker. He was in jail within an hour of handing over the final payment to the fake assassin—Mike.
Virginia thought it was over.
Even with all the evidence against him, the judge denying him bail, and him being in prison, he continued to be a threat.
Word got out that he was trolling the jail for anyone with connections on the outside who might make sure she was dead. The idiot had even threatened her in jailhouse phone calls. Everyone knew they recorded and monitored those. How he’d managed a criminal empire was beyond her.
Not that she’d known anything about that, which was ironic.
The whole reason he wanted her dead was because he thought she knew how he ran the business.
He thought she could bring the whole thing crashing down around his ears.
She wished. Maybe if she actually knew something, she wouldn’t be so afraid.
Fear gave way to anger when she heard the call recordings.
As soon as Mike and Daniel had her settled in frostbite cabin, she asked Mike to teach her self-defense.
He did his best in the short time they’d had.
Daniel tried to teach her some too, but she hadn’t taken to him like she had to Mike.
He was more standoffish and kept to himself.
She and Mike had bonded over card games and stories of her friends and his wife.
He even promised to invite her to dinner at his house when all this was over.
It was one of a long list of things she looked forward to doing.
With his tutelage, she was fairly confident she could shoot what she was aiming for.
She had a couple of well-practiced self-defense moves memorized.
She could throw a proper punch, and he pointed out the best places to hit a larger offender.
He’d drilled her on the concepts of “run, hide, fight” and “slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”
She still wasn’t ready when a gunshot made pieces of bark fly off a nearby tree.
Daniel swung and returned fire while Mike pushed her into a crouch.
“Keep moving. You’re doing great. Stay low.”
Her heart was beating in her throat and a low buzz had taken up residence in her brain, but she followed his directions. Partly because he kept a hand on her shoulder, both guiding and pushing her forward.
After another minute of gunfire that felt like a year, Mike overtook her and yanked a cover off a vehicle she hadn’t seen before. The tarp had completely camouflaged the truck underneath.
She looked under and around for the road but didn’t find one. Dimly wondering how they’d gotten it so far into the woods, she climbed into the backseat and flattened herself on the floorboards like she’d been taught.
The driver’s side door opened and shut with a bang that made her jump. The engine roared to life.
“Wait! Where’s Daniel?”
“Leading them away from you. He’ll meet us at a rendezvous point.”
Virginia focused on forcing air into and out of her lungs, her breathing loud in the confined space. She felt the truck slip to the side and bit her knuckle to keep from crying out. Mike needed to focus on driving, not reassuring her.
Pings echoed off the side of the truck.
“Stay down!” Mike yelled, the truck swerving like he was on a slalom course.
She heard him curse before an impact threw her into the side of the truck. Metal screamed around her, and she covered her head with her hands.
“I need you to sit up, Virginia. Sit up and take this gun.”
She peeked between her fingers and saw the glint of dark metal. Numb, she grabbed the gun, checked the magazine and pulled back the slide to chamber a round.
“Do you think you can fire at them through the window?”
Until that moment, she didn’t know how dire their situation was. He never would have asked her to reveal herself if it weren’t. She nodded before realizing he couldn’t see her. “Yes.” Louder, she repeated, “Yes, I think so.”