Second Chance Redemption (GUARDIAN PEAK SECURITY #4)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

PRIEST

I'm already awake. Haven't slept more than three hours straight in six years, and tonight isn't breaking the streak.

My cabin sits at the far edge of Guardian Peak's property line, a mile past Wolfe's place, tucked against the granite face of the mountain where the tree cover is thickest. I chose it for the isolation.

For the silence that lets me hear a branch snap at two hundred yards.

The alarm is a soft pulse on my phone. North sensor, quadrant six. Could be a deer. Could be a black bear pushing through the scrub pine looking for easy calories.

Could be something else.

I roll out of bed in one motion, feet hitting cold wood floor. The Sig is already in my hand from the nightstand. Muscle memory. Twenty years of waking up to threat assessments means the weapon is an extension of my arm before my brain finishes cataloging the sound.

Cargo pants. Boots. Black thermal. No lights.

My phone buzzes again. Sully's system flags the motion signature as bipedal. Human. Single contact, moving slow along the fire road that dead ends at my access trail.

Nobody comes up here. Deck knows better. Wolfe would have texted first. The rest of the team treats my cabin like it has a quarantine sign nailed to the door, which is exactly how I want it.

I pull up the thermal feed on my phone. One heat signature, maybe five foot six, moving with the uneven gait of someone who doesn't know the terrain.

Stopping every few steps. No vehicle heat signature on the road behind them, which means they either walked from the main compound or parked far enough back that the lower sensors didn't catch it.

Training says hold position. Assess. Identify.

Something older than training, something that lives in my gut, says move.

I slip out the back door and circle east through the trees.

No moon tonight. Cloud cover dropped in around midnight, and the Nevada mountains go ink black without stars.

My boots find the familiar path without light.

Six years of walking this ground means my feet know every root, every loose stone, every place where the pine needles thin to bare rock.

The fire road comes into view through a gap in the pines. I press against a lodgepole trunk and wait.

Footsteps. Unsteady. The scrape of gravel under shoes that weren't made for mountain trails. Breathing that's trying to be quiet but is too ragged, too fast.

Whoever this is, they're scared.

The figure rounds the bend thirty yards below me. Small frame. Dark jacket pulled tight. Messenger bag across the body, clutched with both hands against the chest like it contains something worth dying for.

Then the clouds break, just for a second, and moonlight catches the face turned up toward my cabin.

Every thought in my head stops.

Blue eyes. Dark hair falling out of a clip. A jaw I traced with my thumb a thousand times in a room with no windows, in a city I can never name, during operations that don't exist in any file.

Iris Blackwood is standing on my fire road.

My body goes cold. Then hot. Then cold again in a way that has nothing to do with the mountain air and everything to do with the fact that the last time I saw this woman, I told her we were done.

Told her the work was too dangerous, that proximity to me would get her killed, that whatever we had was a liability neither of us could afford.

I said those words in a hotel room in Prague while she stood there with her bag already packed because she'd known.

She always knew what I was going to do before I did it.

The best analyst I ever worked with. The only woman who ever made me forget the rosary tattooed on my wrist and the sins it represents.

That was seven years ago.

She's thinner now. I can see it even at thirty yards. The jacket hangs on her shoulders where it would have fit snug before. She stumbles over a rut in the road and catches herself, and the way her hand shakes when she pushes hair from her face tells me this isn't a social call.

Iris doesn't scare easy. I watched her sit across from a Syrian intelligence officer for nine hours without blinking. Saw her walk through a market in Kabul twelve minutes after a car bomb with dust in her hair and steady hands. Fear is a language she learned to silence a long time ago.

The woman on my road is afraid.

I step out of the trees.

She freezes. Her hand goes to the bag strap. Not for a weapon. To protect whatever's inside.

"Iris."

My voice comes out rough. I haven't said her name out loud in years. Used to say it in my sleep, according to Mace, who heard me through the cabin wall during a team meeting that ran late. He never brought it up again. Smart man.

Her chin lifts. Those blue eyes lock onto mine, and even in the dark, even after seven years, the recognition is instant. No hesitation. No squinting to confirm. She knew exactly whose mountain she was climbing.

"Jax."

Nobody calls me that anymore. Priest or Stone to the team. Priest to the world. Jax died in that Prague hotel room along with every soft thing I ever allowed myself to feel.

Hearing it from her mouth brings the dead man back to life so fast it hurts.

"Who's after you?"

Because I don't need to ask why she's here. Iris Blackwood doesn't appear at a black ops operative's remote cabin at four in the morning for conversation. She's running. Running to the one person on the planet who can make someone disappear into a mountain range and stay gone.

"Volkov's network." Her voice is steady but thin. "They've been burning the list. Everyone who worked Meridian. Connor's dead. Walsh is dead. Beckett went dark three weeks ago and nobody's heard from him."

My blood temperature drops another ten degrees.

Meridian was a joint CIA operation. Off book.

The kind of mission that doesn't leave paper trails because paper trails get people indicted at The Hague.

Six analysts and four field operators ran it for eighteen months.

I was lead operative. Iris was senior analyst.

And now someone is killing everyone who touched it.

"When did you know?"

"Six days ago. Connor's death made the wire. I ran the pattern. Pulled everything I could before I scrubbed my systems." She touches the messenger bag. "It's all in here. Every thread I could follow."

Six days. She's been running for six days with classified intelligence in a messenger bag while people who want her dead close in behind her.

"You should have called me sooner."

The look she gives me could strip paint off a Humvee. "I called you seven years ago, Jax. You didn't answer."

Fair.

I close the distance between us and take the bag from her shoulder. She resists for half a second, fingers tightening on the strap, then lets go. The weight of it tells me she brought hard drives. Probably encrypted. Probably enough to burn half a dozen careers and bury twice as many bodies.

"Come inside."

"I'm not staying long. I just need you to look at what I have and tell me if"

"Iris." I stop walking. Turn. She nearly runs into my chest because she was following closer than I expected. Close enough that I can smell her. Coffee and something clean, like soap. Simple. The same. "You're staying."

Her jaw tightens. "Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Go into operator mode. I don't need a handler."

"You need a safe house and someone who can keep you alive." I hold her gaze. "I'm both."

She stares at me for three full seconds. I watch her run the calculation. Risk assessment. Threat matrix. Probability of survival with and without my help. Iris was always faster at the math than anyone gave her credit for.

"Fine," she says. "But we're going to have a conversation about Prague."

"No, we're not."

"Yes, Jax. We are."

She walks past me toward the cabin. Her shoulder brushes my arm and my entire nervous system fires like I grabbed a live wire.

Seven years. Seven years of silence and distance and telling myself I did the right thing, and one brush of her jacket against my sleeve demolishes every wall like they were made of wet cardboard.

I follow her inside.

The cabin is sparse. One room, open plan.

Bed against the far wall, kitchen along the east side, woodstove in the center, two chairs, a bookshelf, a rug Cade gave me last Christmas that I never asked for.

My laptop on the table next to a Bible with a cracked spine and a coffee cup I washed three hours ago because I couldn't sleep.

Iris takes it all in with one sweep. She was always good at reading a room. Reading a person. Reading me.

"This is where you've been."

"For six years."

She doesn't say it looks lonely. Doesn't say it looks sad. Just nods once, like the room confirmed something she already suspected.

"Sit down," I tell her. "I'll make coffee."

"I don't want coffee. I want to show you what I found."

"And you will. After you eat something and stop shaking."

Her hands go still at her sides. Deliberately. Controlled. But I already saw it. She knows I saw it.

"I'm fine."

"You're running on adrenaline and you haven't eaten in at least twelve hours. Your pupils are dilated, your breathing is shallow, and you nearly fell twice on a flat road."

"You were watching me."

"I'm always watching." The words come out before I can stop them. Too honest. Too close to the truth I've been choking on since Prague.

Iris sits down at my table. Pulls the messenger bag onto her lap. Looks up at me with those blue eyes that know every classified kill, every blown cover, every prayer I've whispered to a God I'm not sure is listening anymore.

She doesn't look away.

I turn to the stove and put the kettle on.

This is going to destroy me.