Page 1 of Sinner's Salvation

Chapter One

Gerry Ledger, CounterterrorismCoordinator for Homeland Security, rubbed his hands together, a huge grin on his face.

Things were finally coming together.

He could hardly wait until he had all the evidence neatly obtained and documented. The hardest job was already done, capture of one of the most dangerous women on Earth. Which he’d done himself. His informant had been correct. Surprise could be used as a deadly weapon.

Now he just had to get her to talk.

How large was their group?

What were their limitations?

How could he use them as assets?

Did they already have members of their group in the US government? All his life, he’d been underestimated by everyone. His father and older brother had never thought he would amount to much. But he’d been a sheriff’s deputy for four years before quitting to work for his brother’s election campaign for Congress. As one of his brother’s aides, he’d gotten to see the underbelly of politics in Washington DC. Gotten to see and learned to navigate it.

When his brother, who was hard on crime—domestic and international—left Congress to become the Secretary of Homeland Security, he’d offered his little brother the post of Counterterrorism Coordinator. He’d said it would keep Gerry busy and out of trouble. He could be a hero for once. All he had to do was rubber stamp the operations brought to him by his team. Operations that his brother had already been briefed on and approved.

Gerry noted the people who reported back to his brother, and kept a smile on his face, but he knew who to trust and who he couldn’t.

He’d kept the number of Homeland Security people who knew about this particular operation small, several newer agents and a couple of politicians who thought like him, who had goals like his.

Then he’d contacted Army Intelligence for help. They didn’t normally have anything to do with operations on US soil, but he’d asked for a favor, and they’d agreed to send someone. They’d even let him use a small guard team and a couple of rooms at Fort Hamilton base in New York State.

Gerry approached the room where the woman was waiting, bloody from the bullet he’d already put in her. A bullet that should have killed her, but she wasn’t dead. In fact, she was healing so rapidly it was almost like...magic.

Whatever fueled that magic was going to belong tohim. Yeah, he was going to be a hero. One so large and powerful he’d be sitting at the Resolute Desk inside the Oval Office.

***

The bitter acrid scentin the air was Anna Breznik’s first clue that all was not well. The mixture of bleach, alcohol, and blood—a lot of blood—scratching the inside of her nose and scraping her tongue.

The rest of the world was dark and silent, as if she were at the bottom of a deep cave, cold and alone.

That...wasn’t right. She’d been unable to shut out the world for so long its insistent presence often caused physical pain. Headaches and ringing in the ears were common. She’d tried resting in a sensory deprivation chamber, but the issue with that was you had to trust other people with your safety. She could count the number of people she trusted that much on one hand.

This quiet, dark place would be a pleasant escape from the relentless white noise of the world if it weren’t for that horrible smell.

She took in another breath, sorting through the scent. There were two more notes to it. Sulfur with an edge of sweet plastic.

Gunpowder?

All those notes of the odor added up to one thing:Violence.

Her stomach clenched, twisted, and attempted to turn itself into a black hole. Quiet and dark were two things she couldn’t indulge in while hostility hovered on the edge of her senses.

Anna pushed to hear or see something, anything, and discovered her eyes were closed. How had that happened?

She had no memory of closing them or entering a place where all those pieces of the scent might be found. Didn’t remember anything after...getting into a limo to return to her nephew Yvgeny’s hotel in New York City. Yvgeny, though he acted like a fresh-faced youth, was also fastidious. His hotel staff would have dealt with such filth immediately.

She had been inside the long vehicle, FBI Agent Brian Stettler seated next to her, stiff and silent, like a prey animal who knows a dangerous predator is too close. Across from her had been...a man who’d identified himself as a member of Homeland Security. His identification had been legitimate, but...

Anna paged through her memories, usually in perfect chronological order, and found holes where something should have been, but wasn’t.

That didn’t happen. Not to her. Not to someone who’d been changed by a virus hundreds of years ago into something more than human. Normal people would call her a vampire, but she hated that name. It implied she was created by magic.

An idiotic notion.

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