Page 5 of Freeing Lark

That was the part Hoot didn’t like.

A helmet was supposed to protect the man wearing it. This one erased him.

The dark visor gave nothing away. No eyes. No emotion. No hesitation. Just an empty stare measuring anyone who dared challenge it. The crest above the helmet rose like a blade, a reminder of the Praetorian guards who had once stood beside emperors, sworn to protect the powerful.

A hell of a symbol.

Too perfect.

Hoot had spent enough time around operators, politicians, and contractors to know that people chose symbols for a reason. They wanted you to see what they wanted you to see. Honor. Strength. Protection. A shield between the innocent and the dangerous world outside.

But sometimes the shield was just another weapon.

“Depends what’s behind the mask,” he finally answered.

For the first time, Calloway’s expression changed. Only for a second. But Hoot saw something there. It wasn’t anger or offense, but recognition. Like maybe Calloway understood the question better than he should.

“We’ll find out soon,” Calloway said before walking away. Hoot watched him go before following suit.

As Hoot stood and slung his rifle, Bullet fell into step beside him. “You really think life keeps score?” he asked picking up the thread of their earlier conversation.

Hoot stared toward the mountains beyond the wire. Jagged black silhouettes against a sky beginning to surrender to dusk. He honestly didn’t know the answer. He’d spent too many years surviving one mission at a time to figure out whether the universe kept ledgers.

But sometimes... usually in the quiet moments before an operation... he wondered whether every trigger pull, every decision, every life taken—even the necessary ones—left invisible marks somewhere. Maybe on a soul. Or maybe on a conscience. Maybe nowhere at all.

Deep down he hoped Voodoo was right. But he feared the kid might be.

And somewhere deep inside, in a place he rarely acknowledged, Hoot couldn’t shake the feeling that if karma really did exist... She wasn’t just the bitch everyone called her. She was patient. And patient hunters always caught up eventually.

CHAPTER 2

Karma was a bitch.

That was undeniable.

However, in Lark Meadows’ humble opinion, an even more malevolent force delighted in twisting the threads of fate. A bitter curse formed in her mind for that spiteful being as she stared at the empty space where her boat had been. As far as she was concerned, Murphy and his so-called law could go take a long walk off of a short pier.

Murphy’s Law stated, “Anything that could go wrong will go wrong.” Unfortunately for Lark, it was a law that controlled her life more often than not. Some might say she was cursed. Some might call it a bit of bad luck. Others could blame karma.

But Lark knew better. She wasn’t a bad person. There was no reason for karma to be after her. Things happened too often for it to be karma’s retribution.

Curses only lived in fairytales. And as much as she liked a good story, she knew with absolute certainty that she didn’t live in a story.

Bad luck was a possibility, but Lark was superstitious and tended to avoid instances that could cause luck to go either way.

That only left Murphy and his decree.

She’d looked it up once. In 1949, a team at Andrews Air Force Base were tasked with developing a project to assess the human response to rapid deceleration. Captain Edward Murphy was assigned the responsibility of designing the safety harness for the human test subject. The final design had sixteen sensors that measured G forces acting on the subject. There were two ways those sensors could be configured, one right and the other wrong. During the test, all sixteen sensors had been configured the wrong way. Thankfully, the test subject had miraculously survived.

The twatwaffle, Murphy, had passed the blame to the technician who had installed the harness saying in a derogatory tone, “If there are two ways to do something and one of those ways will result in disaster, he’ll do it that way.” Those words had become the original iteration of the law. The test subject had been responsible for condensing it into its current, familiar form.

Unfortunately, knowing the history behind the law hadn’t done anything to help Lark avoid its effects in her life. Hence her current predicament. The universe had a personal vendetta against her. Not in a dramatic, lightning-striking-from-the-sky kind of way. That would have at least been interesting.

No, the universe preferred subtle sabotage. A coffee cup that somehow tipped itself onto her favorite sketch. A paint tube exploding at exactly the wrong moment. A printer that jammed only when she had a deadline.

Murphy’s Law wasn’t just a saying in Lark’s life. It was practically a roommate.

Which was why she shouldn’t have been surprised when she stepped out of the brush to the small bit of empty shoreline on the island in the middle of Bell Creek and realized she had a problem.