She’d stopped to pick up some lunch and her mail, but she had jet lag and was too tired to eat or go through the mail. All she wanted to do was sleep, but she wanted to go to the mountain more. She’d finished up her project two weeks ago. It took a week to convince her superiors to accept her resignation. She’d been pleased with how hard they’d tried to convince her to stay, saying things like she was a natural for this line of work, she had keen instincts, a razor-sharp edge. In the end, she’d promised to be available for special projects suited to her particular talents.

Sam thought about the missions, the projects she’d worked on. A smile tugged at the corners of her lips as she thought about the last case she’d worked on. She remembered how stunned she’d been when her case supervisor told her they were taking on a middle-of-the-road HMO with thousands of dissatisfied members. Too many court cases where the customers lost their claims, their life savings, and, in some cases, their loved ones when medical care was denied. The legal system hadn’t worked for them. Three months of intense work with her new team, and the HMO had not only paid up, they’d paid up retroactively. It was amazing what the fat cats in charge of the bottom line were willing to give up when they looked down the barrel of a SIG Sauer. The kidnappings had gone off without a hitch. Men who were used to two-thousand-dollar suits, private Gulfstreams, three-hundred-dollar dinners, private schools for their children while others suffered or died were stripped to their skivvies, held prisoner, and denied even the basics of life. Because she was a CPA and knew how to crunch numbers, she’d been in charge of the distributions to the members of the HMO once the fat cats folded their tents. The best part, though, had been giving the fat cats back their expensive suits and handmade shoes, then leaving them in the jungles of Brazil to make their own way back to civilization.

Barbaric. Damn right, she thought. But wasn’t it more barbaric of those same men to deny a six-year-old girl the ability to live by denying her a bone marrow transplant? Someone had to make those people accountable, and Sam had been the one to do it.

Sam leaned her head back on the chair and closed her eyes. A minute later, she was asleep, her dreams full of Pappy and her return to the mountain. She woke twelve hours later with a crick in her neck and a mouth that tasted like sawdust and glue.

Suddenly, Sam was more alert than she’d ever been in her life. Today was the day she was going back to the mountain.

Where she now knew she belonged.

Back to her love, to Alpha, to Kyros.