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Chapter One
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Someone was killing him.
Jericho McKenna was well aware that was happening even though his head was pounding from the hard hit he’d taken and from the blood loss. Though it didn’t take especially clear thoughts or a full 10.5 pints of blood in his body for him to figure out one thing.
He was about to die if he didn’t do something now.
The trouble was—the something that he needed to do wasn’t immediately on his mental radar. Bottom line: he was screwed six ways to Sunday.
His would-be killer had tied Jericho’s hands and ankles. Had managed to disarm him, too, though that was only because Jericho had been unconscious at the time of the disarming.
So, no weapons.
No way to use his rather superb hand-to-hand combat training he’d gotten in the military.
Hell, the SOB had even taken Jericho’s lucky slingshot. A simple but effective little gadget that could be used to distract and rattle somebody’s brain.
Or even kill.
After all, it’d worked just fine in the famous David and Goliath showdown. His would-be killer had likely realized its potential and had removed it with the other stuff. The Kevlar vest, the three knives, the Sig-Sauer, and the two-inch-long Swiss mini gun that Jericho kept in his boot holster.
Along with no fighting tools, Jericho knew he had other marks against him. Massive ones. He had a deep cut on his shoulder, had been bashed on the head, popped with a stun gun, and sucker punched in the kidneys. Added to that, his bindings weren’t doing shit to stop him from bleeding out.
Hell in a big-assed handbasket, he didn’t want to die here.
Not in this makeshift grave that the asshole killer was digging out in the middle of nowhere Texas. And he sure as hell didn’t want to die until he had stopped the killer from killing again. At that moment though, he just had to figure out how to pull off a miracle.
Despite the bone-grinding agony it caused, Jericho tried to wrench the zip ties off his hands. Cops used the darn things for a reason. Because they were plenty effective in restraining bad guys.
But he wasn’t a bad guy.
In fact, as an operative at Maverick Ops, an elite security group, he often did good things, such as stopping asshole killers just like this one. And rescuing people. Saving lives. Now it was time for the lifesaver to save his own butt.
Jericho kept up the twisting and wrenching of his wrists. Kept up the thinking, too. Trying to work out anything that would help him. If he could just get a hand free, he could throat-punch the killer and then make a run for it so he could regroup and ambush.
But that didn’t happen.
The killer quit digging the grave and gave Jericho a fierce kick. Jericho tried to steel himself up and anchor his heels and elbows in the ground. Tried to stop himself from moving.
And he failed.
He dropped down hard into the grave, the impact causing breath-robbing pain to shoot through his body. He figured he had only seconds before the killer put an actual shot in him. A bullet that would end everything.
That didn’t happen.
For a couple of seconds, the grave-digging asshole stared down at him through the eye slits of the black ski mask. Then, without speaking, the killer moved.
The shovel full of dirt landed right on Jericho’s face.
Chapter Two
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Three Days Earlier
Jericho figured he’d have to sleep for a week just to put a dent in this bone-deep exhaustion. Some missions took a lot out of you.
