Page 53 of Echo, the Sniper (Men of PSI #2)

I Only Need One

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N ATIVE COLORADAN OR not, it was way colder than I thought it was going to be.

Hunched into the oversized hoodie and hands balled up inside of its cuffs, I walked down the snowy drive a good fifty to sixty feet, far beyond the reach of the cabin’s lights, then veered off sharply to the left and into the tree line at a dead run.

Far in the distance I could see light through the trees.

Excellent. In my mind, light equaled civilization.

Civilization meant I could find a physical address where I could be picked up via a rideshare company and driven to Denver International Airport.

I had no clue where I wanted to go; I was just determined to get on the next damn flight out of here.

Away from Echo.

Away from Mary Jane.

Away.

Clouds of silvery vapor burst from me as I stumble-ran through the trees.

Snow hid all sorts of dangerous things like rocks and branches beneath its pristine surface, but I kept pushing myself without letup.

I wasn’t foolish enough to think Echo wouldn’t be alerted when I didn’t return in ten or fifteen minutes.

That window of time was all I had to make my escape, so no matter how my lungs began to scream for me to stop, to freaking breathe , I pushed relentlessly toward the glow of lights through the trees.

As I did, the calf-high snow got packed into my shoes with every pounding step.

I didn’t notice it at first; adrenaline had me feeling nothing except the need to escape.

But as I made my way deeper into the woods, the melting snow soaked into my socks, and my face and fingers began to hurt with the bitter, biting cold.

It was poetic, really. That first night that I’d met Echo, I had courted a case of frostbite.

Now here I was at the end, doing the same thing.

At the end.

Agony ripped through me. Not the physical kind that was starting to pinch at my frozen feet and fingers.

No. That one errant thought betrayed what I felt in my heart of hearts before I was ready to face it.

Echo and I... We were irrevocably broken.

Done . We had to be. I was running from him through an unknown forest to some random light in the dark and calling it a plan. Why?

Because I was desperate to get away from him.

Because I was afraid of him.

If that wasn’t done , I didn’t know what was.

I no longer trusted him, and I couldn’t love someone without trust. Dane had shattered that part of me. Knowing that Echo was no longer worthy of my trust was sheer agony. The love I had for him... it throbbed and bled into my chest like a wounded animal. It felt like it was dying.

I wanted to die with it.

My eyes burned with unshed tears just as my toe snagged on something buried in the snow, and I faceplanted into the white stuff.

Luckily it broke the worst of my fall, though my knee came into contact with something hard buried just beneath the surface.

I couldn’t have stopped the grunt of pain if my life depended on it before I struggled to my feet and tried to assess the damage through a tear in my jeans.

Blood.

It looked black in the ambient light reflecting off the snow, and I carefully moved the joint with a grimace of pain.

Not broken, since I could move it—another fun fact I’d learned while being married to Dane—so I gingerly put some weight on it.

It held without too much pain, but now I had to worry about leaving a blood trail that Echo—or any predator in these woods—could easily follow.

Outstanding.

Trying to catch my breath, I leaned a numb hand against an icy tree trunk and tried to focus on the source of light, which I could now see was nothing more than an SUV parked and idling on what appeared to be a backroad.

Far off in the distance—like three to four miles—were more lights dotted on the snowy mountainside.

But there was no actual structure that I could call from to be picked up.

That meant I had two choices—go back, or push my luck and hope I didn’t freeze to death while trying to reach those faraway lights.

Decisions, decisions.

Turn back and talk to him , came that annoying voice, this time stronger, more demanding. Better to know what his story is than just assuming the worst.

But I’d learned the hard way that the worst was always what happened to me.

With my crappy luck when it came to relationships, I now knew I was never going to be destined for happily ever after, or happy endings.

I just got... endings. Endings where I wound up bleeding and broken and knowing there was no safe harbor for me.

Not unless I made one for myself.

That was what was so hard to forgive Echo for.

He’d made me believe I could have a happily ever after.

That he was my happily ever after. The way he’d looked at me when I’d admitted I loved him was so beautiful—as if he thought he was the luckiest man on earth—was one of the most profound moments of my life, because that was when I truly believed I mattered to him.

That my love had worth. That I was his happily ever after.

Bitter agony clawed inside my chest at the realization that it was all just a lie, and those stupid tears came back with a vengeance to clog my throat.

This was my life now—a choice of running and never putting to rest the pain of Echo’s betrayal, or staying and talking it out, where he might have a simple explanation, or turn into a monster and force the offshore account’s information out of me before leaving my body in some random ravine to be scavenged by wolves.

Then again, death would be preferable to the pain sitting like an elephant on my chest, a pain that wouldn’t go away because despite everything, I still— still !—loved him.

He could be a monster. Or he could be the version of Echo that he’d shown me.

As I stood there, watching my breath vapor into the night I began to realize one thing. I had to know if that Echo was real. I couldn’t live with this pain of not knowing who he really was.

I had to know.

Slowly, I turned away from the lights, just able to see the snowy path I’d made to get here. All I had to do was follow it back—

“Well,” came the shock of an unfamiliar man’s voice no more than twenty feet from me. “In all my years of tracking down people who didn’t want to be found, this has got to be the luckiest break my career’s ever seen.”

I snapped around, zeroing in on a tallish man framed in the trees, whose frame was either blockish, or made to look that way thanks to an ill-fitting light gray parka.

His hair, possibly a pale strawberry blonde, looked almost white in the snowy gloom, his eyebrows disappearing completely in the poor lighting.

Bad lighting or not, I could see the excitement in his sharp eyes, and his smile seemed almost Joker-esque.

What the hell.

“Who are...” The words dried up as another man joined the first. A pear-shaped man in a tan coat, his receding hairline now so far back on his head it could officially be called balding, and narrow, too-close eyes that haunted my nightmares.

Dane .

The blood drained out of my body. I swayed, the edges of my vision turned fuzzy, and in a dim way I realized I was on the verge of passing out.

I sucked in a huge breath, hoping the icy air would somehow revive me, but dear God, the reality of being confronted by my abusive and formerly-dead husband was so mind-bending I would have thrown up if I hadn’t already done so.

What the hell was happening?

“Told you I knew she was around here somewhere,” the man gloated to Dane.

“The pics they sent showed it was snowing, but there was only a small pop-up snow squall in this area at that particular timestamp. There are only two B-and-B rentals within that squall area, and only one that’s totally wood inside and out. And voila ! Here she is.”

Those damn pictures.

Oh, well. At least I got to flip Dane off before he murdered me. Yay, I guess.

“What do you want, applause that you’re able to adequately do the job you’ve been trained by the government to do?

” Dane’s cutting tone was straight out of my nightmares, and I had to lock my jaw to keep from whimpering.

“And what career are you talking about exactly, Gary? Haven’t you realized you’ve already burned that shit down? ”

“If the payout’s as good as you say it is, I’m good with that.”

Gary. As in Gary Schuller, Dane’s handler from the US Marshals Service, and obviously proficient in tracking down fugitives from the law.

Or in my case, a fugitive from Dane.

“Let me guess. Gary Schuller?” It was ridiculous, the amount of satisfaction I took in their twin expressions of surprise.

Huh. Apparently my profound lack of cowering at their unexpected appearance hadn’t satisfied their expectations.

“And the payout you’re talking about. That wouldn’t happen to be a dirty bribe my former husband promised you, would it? ”

Dane’s smile became a feral bearing of teeth. “You’re my wife until I say otherwise, you stupid bitch. Know your place.”

“You’re the stupid bitch if you think you’re anything but a dead man to me.

.. and to everyone else on the planet, at least from a legal perspective,” I shot back without missing a beat.

Know your place . God, how I hated that phrase.

“It still amazes me that you chose to have yourself so publicly declared dead. Oh, yes,” I added when Dane’s small eyes widened.

“I know all about your deal with PSI to ‘kill’ you right in front of me. For once, your laziness in making audio files and uploading them without encryption bit you in the ass, because I heard every last detail of your plan.” And I was still shattered by it.

“Thanks to your own stupidity, everything you once legally had is now and forever out of your reach.”