Then again, just as his number two had found his target, Matthias had also located the soldier he was after personally, and this long flight back over the ocean was because he wanted to look the man who had saved his life in the face for one last time—before the bastard’s corpse was buried.

He told himself it was to confirm that Jim Heron had indeed died.

There was more to it than that, though.

Even if he didn’t understand the whys . . . there was much more to this trip for him than that.

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 12

More than anything, Grier was furious at herself. As she pounded over to her Audi, weeding through the other cars and getting heckled by a knuck dragger or two, everything came into sharp focus: where she was, what she’d done earlier at the courthouse, who she was trying to save.

Isaac had broken that guy’s arm. In front of her and a hundred other people. And treated it with the same degree of shock and panic as someone hanging up a phone.

Like he did that every day.

And then he’d accepted money for it.

Coming up to her sedan, she got her key fob out and deactivated the alarm. And as she caught her reflection in the glass of the driver’s-side door, she thought of her brother.

The kind of wild buzz that had driven her to come out here reminded her of the night he’d died.

Grier had been the one to find his body and her resuscitation efforts had made no difference . . . because he’d been dead before she’d started them. But she’d kept up the pumping on his chest and the breathing into his mouth anyway.

The paramedics had had to drag her off his body. Screaming.

And the thing was, in death, as well as in life, he hadn’t cared about all her efforts to save him. He’d been transfixed by his final fix, a haunting look of ecstatic pleasure frozen on his pasty gray face, his driving addiction fulfilled.

Recklessness took a variety of different forms, didn’t it.

She’d always prided herself on being the responsible one out of the pair of them, the one who had excelled at school, and worked hard to get ahead, and never done anything that her parents would have disapproved of. She’d certainly never, ever tried illegal drugs. Not even once.