Page 7 of Sinner's Salvation

Chapter Two

“What do you think,Lieutenant Gunn?”

US Army Intelligence officer Lieutenant Evander Gunn watched the security camera screens, taking in the body language of the two people in the small holding room. He struggled to keep his own posture neutral and his expression impassive. He was feeling anything but.

The woman was covered in blood, her own.

She sat on the bloodstained gurney as if she were reclining on her living room couch. She was tiny, maybe five feet tall, with a slim build and long brown hair done up in a fancy braid. Some of her hair had escaped its confinement and haloed around her head. Especially at the back.

A half smile curved one corner of her mouth upward, as if she knew something no one else knew, and that knowledge would fuck someone up. It made him want to grab some popcorn and settle in for a great show.

Her features were regular, even pretty, but it was the force of her personality that made her striking, even on the black and white, grainy screens.

The guy sitting on one of the two chairs in the room, young, fit, and with an openness to him that made you want to grab the other chair and chat, was an FBI agent. He was wearing a suit covered in blood spatter. More blood soaked the fabric around his left arm. As Evan watched, he saw blood dripping from his arm onto the floor.

The woman should not be walking around, talking, and knocking out an experienced soldier as if he were nothing more than a door to slam shut. He’d been shown the body camera footage of her being shot in the head. The gun had been within a foot of her when it went off. The bullet had obliterated the back of her skull.

“She should be dead,” Evan answered, in a flat tone. Hot, hard anger surged through his body in a deadly wave, pulling all the solid ground out from under his feet. Disgust twisted his guts and vocal cords into knots.

The first video he’d been shown had been her execution. The second, her waking up as if nothing had happened. As if she hadn’t been murdered, then come back to life. And now this asshole next to him was planning to do it again and again until he figured her out or killed her permanently.

What the asshole didn’t know: Evan had seen this woman before. Many times. He’d never gotten closer than the view through a pair of binoculars or security camera footage, but he knew her.

He’d seen her confront some very bad people, once when she had to kill a man in self-defense. She did it with her bare hands.

But she hadn’t played with the guy or tortured him. She’d been fast and efficient, and the guy hadn’t known what hit him.

Exactly like she was in the stories his grandfather told him about her. From WWII. He’d thought his grandpa had lost his mind when, on his deathbed, he’d told Evan that she was an immortal vampire. He’d been sure she was the granddaughter of the French resistance fighter who’d saved his gramps’ life, not the woman herself.

It took the man standing next to him a couple of seconds to understand that Evan wasn’t going to add anything else to his observation.

“Do you recognize her?” the man asked.

“Anna Breznik,” Evan said. “Slovenian, Minister of Culture and the president of a small private financial institution. Head of the Breznik Family. She’s been investigated for a variety of corporate crimes, but no concrete evidence has ever come forward or been found.” He turned his gaze on the man standing next to him. In his mid-fifties, balding, and in need of a gym membership, Gerry Ledger was the Counterterrorism Coordinator for Homeland Security.

“Why am I here, Mr. Ledger?”

“Have you met Anna Breznik, Gunn? In person?”

“No, sir. I’ve observed her in the past for a variety of reasons, but never met her face to face.”

“What reasons?” There was more than idle curiosity in Ledger’s voice. This was his operation, and it wasn’t going exactly the way he thought it would.

“There was enough intelligence to indicate a terrorist threat at last year’s World Finance Banking Symposium in Lithuania to set up robust monitoring of the attendees. She attended. My team and I intercepted and stopped a man who’d strapped a suicide bomb to his chest before he could get into the venue. Because of the rumors of her family’s involvement in organized crime, she was one of the people we had on our radar as a possible target or collaborator with the bomber.”

“What did you discover?”

“We couldn’t find a connection between her or her family and the bomber. He was connected to an anti-immigrant conspiracy theory group. We ended up helping the Lithuanians arrest a dozen people from three countries.”

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