“I can take care of myself.”

As Isaac went to leave, Jim snagged his arm. “You know you can’t do this alone. Don’t be an asshole.”

There was a long moment.

“What are you thinking, Jim.” The guy’s pale eyes were haunted. “You were out. You were free. You were the one who got away. Why would you go back into the hellhole?”

Jim led with a logic that the other man could believe in—and something that was also the truth; just not the only one. “I owe you. You know that. I owe you for that night.”

Jim Heron was exactly as Isaac remembered him: big, jacked, and nothing but business. The blue eyes were the same, the blond hair was still mostly buzzed off, the face was freshly shaven as always. He even had a Marlboro quietly smoldering in his hand.

But there was something a little different, some kind of vibe that was just . . . off, though not in a bad way.

Maybe the lucky bastard had taken to actually sleeping at night, as opposed to keeping a gun in his palm and waking up at every sound.

God, when he’d heard Heron had pulled out of XOps, he’d never expected to see the man again—either because Matthias rethought the soldier’s bye-bye-birdie card and put a bullet into his think tank or because Jim wisely stayed away from anyone and anything that had to do with his former life.

And yet here he was.

As Isaac stared into the guy’s eyes, he found himself believing, as much as he could, that Heron had come to help because of that debt created in the land of sand and sun. Besides, if the SOB had wanted Isaac dead, that would have happened long before any of this conversating had gotten rolling.

“If I’d come to kill you,” Jim murmured, “you’d be on the ground already.”

Bingo.

“Okay,” Isaac said. “You hold my shit while I fight. We can start there.”

Well, didn’t that call out the fuck-no in the guy’s face. “You can’t get in that ring. Between the flyer I saw and the arrest, you might as well have a GPS tracker shoved up your ass.”

“I need the money.”

“I have cash.”

Isaac glanced over by the exit and realized that there were two big men hanging by the door. When they raised their hands in greeting, he asked, “They with you?”

Jim seemed surprised. “Ah, yeah. They are.”

“You starting your own crew? Going freelance?”

“You could say that. But we were talking about you and how you’re not fighting.”