Page 117 of Under Arthur’s Protection

Everyone on the call went quiet.

“Small RIB coming out from the seaward side, just inside the fog line. Six aboard.” He exhaled once. “One of them’s struggling. Yellow jacket, Arthur. She’s wearing a fucking yellow jacket.”

The jacket I’d dug out of my mother’s closet because Gwen’s coat was in her luggage in France.

No!

“They’re in the fog now. I lost them,” Lance said.

I ran.

I took the stairs three at a time, the railing the only reason I stayed vertical. “Where’s the drone? Lance, talk Tristan onto that boat. We need eyes.”

“Working on it,” Tristan said. “She’s slow in this wind.”

I launched from the last flight and sand grabbed my shoes. I almost pitched sideways before the boulders at the entrance. The temperature dropped, salt and trapped water hit the back of my throat, and the waves gave a muffled boom somewhere beyond the rock. “Gwen!”

A couple flattened themselves against the cave wall as I passed.

“Gwen!” I braced myself against the sides of the cave, bouncing off them as I splashed through puddles and fought for footing on the rocks. But I couldn’t slow down.

She was in here. She had to be in here. It had to be someone else in a yellow jacket.

“Gwen!” I slipped, landed hard on my good knee, and scrambled upright.

I’d told Gwen I’d be back in five minutes. But the goddamn drone turned it into fifteen. Fifteen fucking minutes!

I ran past the ledge where I’d set the sword case. Empty.

Past the flat section she’d been gridding when I kissed her and walked out. A flashlight sat on the cave floor, its beam thrown across wet slate.

I kept running. Kept slipping. Kept splashing in the pools. The cave narrowed, then widened. Dim daylight grew ahead until I came out the seaward mouth onto rocks the tide was reclaiming.

“—copy? Arthur, do you read me?”

Waves slapped across the lower shelves. No boat. No engine. No sign she’d ever been here. Fog sat on the water thirty feet out, a wall with nothing behind it.

Gone.

She was gone.

“I read you.” My throat tried to close around the rest. “They got her.”

“Excuse me?” A woman edged out from behind an outcropping, soaked to the waist, arms wrapped around herself. She flinched when I turned on her. “Were you with that woman? Brown hair, yellow jacket?”

“Yes.” I put out a hand and pulled her up onto the drier rocks. “Did you see what happened?”

“There were five of them in the boat.” Canadian accent, her teeth chattering around it. “Three came inside. They had a mean look about them, so I hid back here. They carried her out. Her and a black case.” She swallowed. “I already called the police. Gave them descriptions.”

Lance, Tristan, and Galahad were talking on their end, but none of the words were the ones I wanted to hear. None of them had Gwen’s location.

I pulled out my phone and scrolled through old photos. Task Force Legacy. The range day in Mazar-i-Sharif. The group shot in Balkh, sixteen men in front of a Humvee. I found Rick in the back row, zoomed in, and turned the screen toward her. “Was he one of them?”

She studied the photo. “He was the one with the case. He was smiling.”

Of course he fucking was.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. How was I going to find her? What was going to happen to her? I squeezed my eyes shut and forced out the words to my team: “It was Rick.”