1
No Introduction (Fuchsia)
Let’s get one thing straight.
This may be my story, but I’m no hero.
I’ve never been anyone’s hero, savior, personal shrink, bestie, or...the list could fill a phone book.
But you can be damned sure, if there’s something that needs to be done?
I’m your girl.
Maybe that’s how I wound up here.
Staring down the barrel of a gold-plated gun, the taste of adrenaline in the back of my throat, my knuckles throbbing from impact, while I stare down something worse than a hot date with death.
Leland Durham’s smug smile pointed at me. Right over the glaring black eye of a muzzle.
“Really?” I whisper, disdain dripping off my tongue. “Are the bullets at least twenty-four karat too?”
“Breathe another word and I’ll show you, witch,” Durham barks back.
I wonder how many people the once-illustrious CEO of Galentron has actually killed with his own filthy hands. His manicure says none recently. Still, he’s got me locked in a clear shot a drunken cowboy blinded in both eyes couldn’t miss, so...
So, I guess this is the part where I should probably put my hands up and beg for a few more years in paradise. This is where I should know the next roll of the dice won’t be kind when the pampered, vicious pig of a man leering with his little popgun has already deconstructed my life piece by piece.
That’s what any normal human being with a functional sense of self-preservation would do.
If you think that’s what I’ll do, you don’t know me very well.
My name is Fuchsia Delaney.
Before I was Fuchsia, I was Patty Brin.
Patty Brin never would’ve survived this. Poor, miserable thing.
But me?
Well.
Let me tell you how I got to be here.
Let me regale you because I think I deserve my clichéd 1980s flick record scratch opening scene.
Let me tell you why I’m smiling right now, even though old Leland’s got me cornered.
Alone, without a prayer.
Just me and him in the cabin of his sleek private jet, and a gun trained right between my eyes, my heart racing fast, the scent of hot metal over my shoulder from the shot he already fired, the slug still lodged in the wall and smoking from the force of impact.
And then let me tell you how I’ll walk out of here alive with this piece of scum dead at my feet.
Like I said...
This is my story.
And I may be nobody’s hero.
But I always, always win.
2
No Sugarcoating It (Oliver)
I shake my head at the stack of newspapers propped up in front of my snowy window at a small cabin outside Alberta.
Even after all these months, I cannot fucking believe what I’m reading.
Galentron, kaput.
Everything I helped put in motion.
By now, it’s the biggest, most scandalous international corporate downfall since infamous names like Enron and Lehman Brothers. Technically worse because the guys who were “too big to fail” yesterday were never responsible for the kind of atrocities Galentron had lined up.
My reflection in the frosty glass catches my single good eye, a tortured brown orb staring back. A brutal reminder of just how well I know what Galentron was capable of.
And what one conspicuously missing agent, Miss Fuchsia Delaney, tried so hard to prevent.
I still can’t believe no one’s seen her.
Hell, I still can’t believe my own intel, the best of the best, can’t find a hint of that wily, lethal, achingly beautiful slip of a woman I was once lucky enough to call mine.
Would she even recognize you now? a dark voice whispers in the back of my mind.
My leg tenses, the prosthetic spring below my right knee turning weirdly cold, even though it’s only a few feet from the roaring fireplace.
Would she forgive you after all these years?
After you left her in their clutches?
Could she ever find it in her cold, dead void of a heart to love anyone—much less you—again?
I’m snarling, tearing the cap off a half-drained whiskey bottle with my teeth. I take a burning swig for strength. It’s hardly my beloved Riesling, but for a heart shattered by the fist of an angry god, it’ll do.
“Enough, damn you!” I whisper to the empty room.
It’s a strewn mess of case files and contacts related to the grand fall of Galentron Incorporated. Everything I can barely keep up with that’s been rolling in since late last year, ever since she heroically paired up with those country boys in Heart’s Edge to bring down hell on a pack of demons.
Even as I slump against the wall, there’s a bitter, dagger-like ache in my heart that has nothing to do with the throat-scorching burn of booze.
It has everything to do with the tattered photo I sweep off the ottoman, knocking several folders over in the process.
It’s a special kind of torture staring into the luscious, pearl-eyed, porcelain-perfect face of the woman I wanted to call my wife fifteen fucking years ago.
I’d have done it, too, if Durham hadn’t made his move first.
If he hadn’t struck like a wolf, tearing me to pieces, and knowing he’d do worse to Fuchsia if I showed up on his doorstep again. If I let him know he hadn’t succeeded in taking me out.
This picture, it’s all I have left of her.
Everything except for that haunting folder buried under too many others to count, full of grainy pictures from Bainbridge Island, marked only by one word. MANDOLIN.
And it’s still more than she has left of me, considering the entire world believes I’m a dead man.
It’s times like this when I wonder if I am.
I’ve lived more like an anguished wraith, conducting my own hit-and-run raids on Galentron assets when I could, blocking them from more mayhem, always trying to dig up that one crucial piece of intel that would finish them once and for all...
Only to be beaten to it by the insane leak Clarissa Bell made to the world with the help of former Nighthawk Leo Regis, the beast once known as Nine. I may have had a hand in the data, but hell.
What am I doing now?
Still trying to pick up the pieces?
Still trying to find her, so I can finally show myself, so I can hand her that haunting folder stamped MANDOLIN along with my own dripping heart.
I’m in such a fucked up funk I barely hear my phone vibrate. One of the burners, I realize, which makes me drag my heavy weight off the floor and go flying across the room.
“Yeah?” I snap, scratching at my chin.
“Major? You’re never gonna believe this. We’ve just had a very interesting tip from the prison network. You know how they picked up Leland Durham a few months ago? Big scene in downtown Seattle, throwing him in handcuffs and everything—”
“Like I could’ve missed it. Everybody and their damn brother only saw it played a thousand times on CNN, Fox, MSNBC...” I don’t know where my guy’s going.
“Well, turns out, there’s a little more to that Durham than meets the eye...”
I wait for him to go on.
I listen to him talk.
I feel my fist flex like the head of a sledgehammer.
By the time he’s finished, I need to fucking hit something. It’s a good thing fifteen years of total hell have trained me in the art of patience.