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Overnight, Hurricane Giselle slammed into Cuba with a vengeance.

It tore the island to bits from east to west. Even in a region accustomed to tropical storms, Giselle was a monster.

Death tolls were unknown, but television commentators speculated that hundreds or even thousands had perished.

The Cuban government declined to share details or let any foreign journalists into the immediate aftermath to report on it.

What little news did leak out painted a grim picture, however.

Alex turned off the TV. Katie was still asleep, so he used the time to get on his laptop to see if any of the feelers he’d put out on Operation Cold Intent had come back to him, yet.

Bingo. An encrypted email from C￥berE￥e, perhaps the top hacker he’d ever seen operate and his anonymous mentor since his first attempts to start hacking.

Alex ran their usual decryption protocol and got gibberish. He stared at the letters and symbols in surprise. He would suspect a failed message transmission were this not from C￥berE￥e. And then it hit him. He ran a secondary decryption protocol the hacker sometimes used.

Sure enough, a short message resolved itself on his screen. He stared at it in dismay.

Blondie and ThrεεWolvεs dead. Looks like murder. What the fuck did you get them into?

He knew the forces behind Cold Intent had killed Blondie. But they’d killed her boyfriend, too? Jesus. Who was doing this? And what in the bloody hell was Cold Intent? Why was someone killing to cover its tracks?

He messaged C￥berE￥e back, asking if the hacker had any specific idea why Blondie and her boyfriend were killed. Granted, hackers had lots of enemies if they were any good.

C￥berE￥e’s reply made him feel ill. Blondie must have been looking into something that had triggered the real-world attack.

Dammit. Blondie had been trying to figure out what Cold Intent was.

For him.

No matter how he tried to rationalize it away, Alex couldn’t escape arriving at the same conclusion C￥berE￥e had. Her investigation was responsible for the couple’s deaths. Which meant he was responsible for their deaths.

It was one thing to kill a stranger in the heat of battle. It was another to get a friend killed.

He sent a message back to C￥berE￥e.

Any idea if someone got their files?

The reply was immediate.

An ABC agency made a run at them. I downloaded everything and wiped their drives before the Man could get in. Some interesting shit, here. Who’s Cold Intent?

Aww, crap. He didn’t need dead hackers all over the planet on his account. Alex typed hard, as if he could transmit his emphatic warning through the keys, themselves.

The assholes who killed Blondie and ThrεεWolvεs. Be CAREFUL. They’ll kill you, too. And no, I don’t know who ‘they’ are. You need to leave it alone.

C￥berE￥e’s reply was succinct.

I’ll find ‘em. You kill ‘em.

He stared at the message speculatively. He’d long suspected C￥berE￥e was some sort of intelligence agent or at least a former one.

More than once, the hacker had sent Alex timely warnings about various government agencies being close to catching up with him and some of his more adventurous online activities.

What was fascinating about that short statement was that this person seemed to think Alex was capable of killing.

Hackers were criminals but rarely violent ones. Who was C￥berE￥e, anyway? Not that it mattered at the end of the day if the guy found Cold Intent for him.

Slowly, one letter at a time, Alex typed his response.

Done.

“Whatchya doin?” Katie asked from right behind him.

Alex jumped about a foot straight up in the air.

“Wow. I managed to startle the great spy, Alex Peters?” she crowed. “I win!”

He scowled at her as he stood up, sweeping her into his arms. “We’ll see about that.”

She laughed as he swept her off her feet and carried her back to bed. “You always have to win, don’t you?”

“Yup.”

It was nearly an hour later, and Katie had unequivocally declared him the winner in all things…loudly and passionately…before he finally collapsed beside her.

How she managed to take him out of his head to a place of pure feeling and emotion, he had no idea.

But he had no power to resist whatever it was she did to him.

God knew, he wanted to. He hated the loss of control.

His entire life was based around the concept of supreme self-discipline.

Success rested upon it. Hell, survival rested upon it.

He died a little each time she broke through his mental defenses. But man, it was a good way to go. Seductive. Addictive as hell.

Still. He would give just about anything for her not to be here with him, back in harm’s way. He couldn’t fight them all—André, Roman, Katie herself—but his gut was yelling at him that taking her to Cuba was a giant mistake.

“I’m hungry again,” Katie announced.

He had to smile. She sounded like a little kid who’d just come in from the playground, breathless and happy. “Shower, then food?” he suggested.

She leaped out of bed, laughing over her shoulder. “Last one to the shower’s a rotten egg!”

How could anyone be so damned innocent? Particularly given that she was highly intelligent and by no means na?ve. And getting less na?ve by the day around him.

She told him once that happiness was a choice. Was innocence a choice, as well? If so, he’d chosen long ago to forsake it. As for Katie…she clung to her innocence like it was armor against everything bad life threw at her.

He climbed out of bed more temperately and invaded her shower.

He’d just finished dressing and she was still in the bathroom blow-drying her hair when his cell phone rang. André.

“Hey, boss. What’s up?”

“You’ve got a charter flight to Inagua in two hours. From there, a boat will take you to Baracoa. A guide will meet you at the rendezvous point on shore and take you to the base camp that’s being set up for you.”

Baracoa . He swore under his breath. Roman’s intel had been accurate.

A sane man would tell André the Baracoa meet-up was compromised. But Alex was inclined to go ahead and show up where Roman expected him to. Maybe he could spot whatever was going on that had both the CIA and FSB so interested in Cuba all of a sudden.

“Got it,” he replied to André’s more detailed instructions, which he memorized in lieu of writing them down to be found by anyone else.

“Have a safe trip, Alex.”

Yeah. Right . “Thanks.” He hung up before more sarcasm could leak into his voice.

He looked up and spied Katie standing in the bathroom doorway. “Show time?” she asked.

An urge to lie nearly overcame him. To take her to the airport, put her on a plane and send her home. But not only had he promised never to lie to her, she could also sniff fibs a mile away. He sighed. “We’ll need to grab a bite to eat at the airport As soon as you’re ready, we’ll head out.”

Into what, he had no damned idea. But one thing he knew for sure. They were headed into something .

Katie watched the twin prop airplane that had been their ride lift off into the sunny blue sky, and then looked around at Great Inagua Island in dismay.

She’d never seen a more barren place. It was nothing but windswept dirt and rocks.

“I thought Caribbean islands were supposed to be tropical paradises.”

“Not if all the tree cover is destroyed by settlers and the ecosystem collapses and desertifies. Then they look like this,” Alex replied.

She shuddered. “It’s awful. Who lives here, anyway?”

“Workers at the local salt factory. About eight hundred of them.”

“Are they okay after the storm?” she asked in quick concern.

“They were evacuated by the salt company. We’re the only humans currently on the island.”

“Wow. We’re all alone on a desert island?”

He smiled reluctantly. “Yes. We’ll make our way to the shore on foot to catch our ride. I hope you’re up for a hike.”

Memory washed over her of the last time he’d asked her that. She’d had one-hour-old Dawn stuffed inside her coat while a war raged around them. She’d had no choice but to flee for her life, and Dawn’s, with him.

Aloud, she replied, “I’m always up for hike. Piece of cake.” She just hoped no wars were about to break out around them. She had a sneaking suspicion one might, though, before this was all said and done.

Alex took off across the pale dirt. The going was easy for about three minutes while they headed for the far end of the airstrip.

Then they reached a wall of ruined vegetation, twisted and flattened by Hurricane Giselle into a nearly impassable tangle of jagged wood, sharp-leaved foliage, and hidden rocks waiting to turn the unwary ankle.

Thank God she’d been working out like a maniac since he’d left. She was panting like a dog, but so was Alex. It took them something like an hour to cover a quarter mile.

“How far do we have to go in this stuff?” she finally broke down and asked him.

“Just over the ridge.”

Awesome. They weren’t far from the crest, now. Another fifteen minutes of carefully picking their way forward, and they topped the low rise.

The ocean and a blond beach stretched away in front of them. And praise the lord, this side of the ridge was bare of vegetation until the margin of the beach below. They made their way down the hillside relatively quickly with only sharp stones and treacherous slides of gravel to avoid.

But then they got to a literal wall, at least eight feet tall, of destroyed scrub trees, bushes, and random vegetative debris.

“How on earth are we supposed to get through this?” she asked. “Even if we had a machete, it would take hours to hack through all that.”

“That, grasshopper, is why man conquered fire,” Alex answered.

“Isn’t it too wet to burn?” she asked dubiously.

“Only one way to find out,” he answered absently as he commenced laying a fire at the base of the wall. The wind was still brisk in the lee of the hurricane and the fledgling flame blew out twice before it finally caught and held.