The devastating sound of the chopper leaving brought tears to her eyes. Gunfire and battle cries in a language she didn’t understand screamed into the chilly night. Her saviors had come for one of them, but not both. It didn’t make sense. They hadn’t tried to find her. She heard them show up, create hell, and leave after finding her counterpart—the only other American in this camp.

They have no idea I’m here.

That was worst case scenario because that meant they weren’t coming back. Big time bad news. Maybe she should have listened, stayed stateside, and handled her work headache differently. But, no, she needed an adrenaline rush. Needed to get her mind off everything at home that she wanted to avoid. And when a Middle East gun-tracking assignment popped up through black-op back channels, she’d hopped on a plane without even telling her friends.

Not that they would let her pull a stunt like this. Because… well, she would’ve been captured.

Hanging out with the elite gun-slinger types was problematic. Even if she was decent on the trigger, she wasn’t elite or even as good an operative as she thought. Her background was intelligence gathering. She was only a former ATF agent with a desire for something bigger and too much time on her hands. Pathetic. All she had was an ego that rivaled the size of this goddamn mountain, and—

Sugar. Shut. The. Hell. Up.

She shook her head, then rubbed her eyes. “You will survive. You are that good. Who the hell needs a military rescue?”

It’d been more than forty-eight hours since her dumbass partner had stumbled into enemy hands and she’d tried to rescue him. That hadn’t worked out according to plan, and she was tossed into a makeshift cell and given nothing more than dirty water and rock-hard bread. As a foreign woman, they could’ve done much worse to her—and that threat still loomed. But I can handle this. She could kill each one of her captors and walk off that mountain before she had any more woe-is-me thoughts.

Jeers came her way from her captors who’d survived the rescue operation, and her cage allowed no escape. She stepped away, feeling the earthen walls at her back and the lump at the back of her throat. She laid her palms flat against the cold dirt and dug her fingernails in. Two men approached, shooting into the night like it was Mardi Gras. Celebrating? Oh, yeah, because they still have me.

CHAPTER TWO

Jared wasn’t in the mood for any shit. Never was. But today, his alpha flare was on fire, as if he’d guzzled a six-pack of testosterone and chased it down with a pound of jerky. He would be at the firing range later, working off this… energy until his buzz died down.