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… and there she was.

What the—

It was unmistakably her. The gorgeous blonde in the tight dress, from the upper chambers of the palace. The one who’d seduced me. Who’d fucked me. Who’d fled with me.

The one who’d nearly put an ice pick through my neck.

“You…” I gurgled.

All eyes were on her now. Both the others — the guy whose ass I kicked and the tattooed crazy one — were staring back at her, expectantly.

“How did you get here?” the blonde asked. “How did you find me?”

I coughed again, involuntarily. White sparks of pain flared from the base of my skull.

“I wasn’t looking for you,” I winced. “I was looking for them.”

Now the guys looked at each other. Everyone was in the dark, apparently. Everyone except me.

“I know who you are,” I continued. “You’re Lieutenant Holden Serrano. SEAL team ten. First platoon.”

He stared back at me without flinching. I looked at his partner and went on.

“And you’re Randall Forrester, same platoon. Don’t know your rank, though. Got a little hard to keep track, your file being so thick and everything.” I squinted at him and sniffed. “You were demoted a bunch of times, weren’t you?”

“Four in total,” he smiled back at me, as if proud. “Unless I missed one.”

“The only thing you missed was an asskicking, like the one I gave your friend here. If you hadn’t blindsided me from behind, I—”

“He didn’t.”

My eyes shifted back to the blonde. She was in a long sleep shirt, her legs tantalizingly bare. Her silk-spun hair was tousled, like she’d been sleeping on it, or—

“That would’ve been me.”

I started to laugh at first, then stopped myself short. The look in her eyes told me she wasn’t lying. That… plus I remembered how fast she’d been with the ice pick.

“Well then… fuck me.”

Her blue eyes flared, wildly. Silently, they seemed to say: I did that, too.

Slowly I let all the air out of my lungs and checked my bonds again. I was tied far too well to escape. Expertly, in fact. Right now I was sitting on a low, three-footed stool — the type used by trainers in the corners of a boxing ring, between rounds. Which made perfect sense considering where I was, but was still totally baffling at the same time.

“So are you going to tell us who you are?” asked Holden. “Or are we supposed to just guess at—”

“Corporal Marcus Alvarez,” I interrupted. “Third Ranger battalion, retired.”

“Corporal?” snickered Randall. “That’s all you made of yourself, before—”

“I left, yes.”

Flexing my calves, I checked my ankles. They were tied even tighter.

Damned SEALs…

“So tell us Corporal,” spat Holden, as if the word tasted foul. “Why would you be looking for us? And what the hell makes you desperate enough to break in here in the middle of the night?”

“Alexander Kyrkos. He’s the one looking for you.”