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KYLE THOMAS ARMSTRONG ABBOT
Four years ago...
“COME CLOSER SO I CAN see you. I’m not going to bite. I don’t have enough teeth left, and I’m hardly contagious. You’re as safe with me as you’ve always been, Kyle. Now, come here.”
If Lucinda Bruce was contagious, her condition would be easier to bear.
She wouldn’t be suffering because a psychopath’s family had become collateral damage in the man’s war with the right side of the law. Her wounds wouldn’t be about his kidnapping her younger son as payback. She wouldn’t be fighting for her life because she’d defied her police lieutenant husband and gone after the man who’d taken their child on her own.
Years had passed, years during which her fierce resolve had inspired those around her.
Finally, she’d found him.
But she’d gotten too close.
Kyle pushed up from the corner of the dark hospital room where he’d been hunkered for the past hour. Hunkered in the corner was the position he’d been in as a skeletal ten-year-old when Lucinda and Jeb had entered his foster home and legally removed him from the system.
Then not so legally changed his name and groomed him for a life in black ops.
He’d lived with the others the Bruces had chosen: kids abandoned, mistreated, some on the streets, none with family, all with a higher than average IQ. They’d been educated and trained off the grid, then they’d enlisted. With Jeb pulling strings, each had served a single tour that had taken them places most servicemen never went... or wanted to go.
Kyle had been discharged four years ago and had spent the time since righting wrongs conventional solutions—lawful solutions—had failed to correct. No one knew. No one would ever know. And that was the point. He and the others were Jeb’s personal enforcers.
They’d seen more damage and destruction in their twenty-eight years than most people saw in a lifetime. Emotional damage. Physical destruction. They’d suffered the same. They’d expected to. It was part of their covert existence. Part of being invisible.
Being nobody.
Looking over their shoulders was as natural as drawing breath. But that was their life.
Not Lucinda’s. Never Lucinda’s.
She squeezed his hand, her fingers cold, her grip surprisingly resilient for a woman who’d endured what she had. Then again, only a strong woman would’ve stayed alive this long. If she didn’t pull through... He choked back the emotion in his throat. A tear fell to his hand. Another onto Lucinda’s. Making circles with her thumb, she rubbed them until they were gone.
“Promise me you’ll leave this alone. Let Jeb handle it. Please, Kyle. Promise me.”
Kyle said nothing. He didn’t have to. Lucinda knew what his answer would be.
It was a promise he would never make because the woman asking had raised him better.