“Coming right up,” Steady said, but Mac stopped him before he could fish the bottles of Honkers Ale from the sea of ice. Part of Dagan couldn’t help but grieve the lost opportunity for a frosty brew. Because, unfortunately, the last blessedly numbing drops of Lagavulin had worn off right about the time he was chasing Mr. Timberlands down the street.

“We’re gonna have to pass on the suds, folks,” Mac drawled while simultaneously trying to bat Delilah’s administering hands away from his side. From out of nowhere—or maybe from out of one of the saddlebags on her Harley—Delilah had produced a travel pack of tissues, and she’d been doing her best to tend to Mac’s stab wound ever since. It’d been Dagan’s experience that most women took the Boy Scouts’ always be prepared motto to heart.

“And while we’re on the subject,” Mac continued, flashing Delilah a look of utter exasperation when she refused to quit dabbing at his injury all while making tutting noises like an old Jewish grandma, “we need you guys to put a lid on this little celebration, too.”

Holy fuckballs, do those two have it bad, Dagan thought. And it was his heartfelt belief that should Mac ever wise up and stop wearing his ass as a hat—he knew Mac’s history, knew just how sordid it was, but the guy gave new meaning to the phrase once bitten twice shy—then Dagan would have the honor of bearing witness to another fairy-tale ending.

“What? Why?” Becky asked. Then she noticed Delilah’s ministrations. “Whoa.” Her chin jerked back. “What the hell happened to you, Mac?”

“Delilah stabbed me,” Mac deadpanned.

Delilah sputtered like a backfiring motor as Boss hooted with laughter, gleefully slapping his knee. “And I’m sure you totally deserved it!”

“I most certainly did not,” Mac harrumphed, crossing his arms over his chest, his brows angled down his slightly crooked nose.

“Of course you did,” Ozzie declared. “You have, after all, been taking those penis-enlarging pills recently.”

This time it was Mac’s turn to sputter. “I most certainly…what the hell are you talkin’ about?”

“The fact that you’ve been a bigger dick to Delilah in the last handful of months than ever before,” Ozzie asserted, his eyes sparkling with mischief. The whiz kid turned to bump knuckles with Steady as a dull roar of laughter competed with the snap and crackle of the fire. Dagan couldn’t help it, despite this night and the horrendous anniversary it observed, he felt his lips twitch. Ozzie had a biting wit that was equally amusing and annoying, depending in large part on whether or not you happened to be the one on the receiving end of his rapier repartee.

“Shut the fuck up, Ozzie,” Mac growled. Dagan wasn’t surprised to discover the ex–FBI agent had fallen into the Ozzie’s Sense of Humor is Annoying group on this particular occasion.

Ozzie quickly replied with, “Seriously, though, Mac. Just give me ten minutes alone, and I might be able to help you remove that giant stick from your a—”

“Ozzie.” Mac’s eyes were drilling into Ozzie with so much force it was a wonder the guy didn’t spring a couple of leaks from the set of through-and-throughs in his head. “Don’t push me tonight.”

“All right,” Ozzie capitulated, sighing dramatically. “We’ll just leave it where it is then. All safe and secure.”

Mac opened his mouth to respond, then snapped it shut again, shaking his head. “Look, folks. We don’t have time to—” He sucked in a hissing breath when Delilah hit a particularly sore spot. “Ow! Damnit, woman! Will you leave off, already?”

“And let you bleed out?” she yelled back, her pretty green eyes overly bright even in the dim light cast by the fire. “I’ve already stood by and watched one man bleed to death because of something I did! I’ll be damned if I stand by and watch it happen again!”

A stunned silence settled over the group as everyone looked on in fascinated horror while one of the toughest women they knew went ahead and lost her shit. It started out slowly, with just a slight wobble of her lower lip. Then her stubborn chin followed suit. Finally, her chest heaved once, and it was game over. The waterworks exploded like a main pipe had busted.

Mac looked stunned for all of a half-second, before his big, Irish face caved in on itself and he yanked the flame-haired bartendress against him, hugging her tight and muffling the sounds of her pitiful sobs into his chest. So, Brendan hadn’t been joking about Delilah’s trouble in dealing with her friend’s recent murder. And that, combined with the overpowering and stone-cold terror she’d been feeling all day, had finally gotten the better of her.

“Shh, darlin’,” the big Texan crooned, rubbing a hand down her hair and kissing her tenderly on the forehead. “Shh, now. There’s no need to—”

“Zoelner?” Boss snagged Dagan’s attention. The man’s craggy face was pulled down into a fierce frown, causing the scar cutting up from the corner of his mouth to pucker angrily. “What the hell is going on?”

And as jovial as the party atmosphere had been just seconds ago, that’s how somber it was now. It was as if someone had flipped a switch. Flick! On to off. Go to stop. Green to red.

Hell, even Ozzie appeared pensive.

“Delilah’s uncle is missing,” he informed the group. The collective gasp was so strong, he thought it was a wonder the fire didn’t instantly flame out from lack of oxygen. “And she’s depending on us to help her find him…”

* * *

Cairo, Illinois

“What happened?” Qasim ibn Hasan barked into the phone, turning to watch as two of his most loyal men lifted the body of the dead American from the rotted wood floor. It’d only been a half dozen hours, but the corpse was already starting to smell, fouling the air inside the dank and musty abandoned building, making it nearly impossible to breathe.

Not that he wasn’t used to the stench of rotting flesh. He’d been fighting jihad for well over a decade. And living with the stink of the dead and dying was just part of that struggle. But, still…filthy American pigs. Filthy murderous American pigs…

“I was interrupted during my search for the woman’s address,” came the reply from Haroun, his second-in-command. And that was another thing that irked Qasim about the Americans. Why did some of them insist on using post office boxes instead of physical addresses?

Haroun’s hunt for and abduction of Delilah Fairchild would’ve been so much easier had their extensive Internet search turned up her place of residence. All Haroun would’ve had to do was break into her house or apartment while she was at work, wait for her to arrive home, and incapacitate her before delivering her straight to Qasim. As easy as one, two, three, as the Americans liked to say.

Unfortunately, counting to three had not been their destiny…

“Then you must find a way to take her away from her workplace or en route from her workplace to her home,” Qasim instructed. “Those are our only other options.”

“But they are not,” Haroun said, instantly piquing Qasim’s interest.

“No?” he asked, his lip curling with disgust as his men carted the remains of the old Marine by him. When the light from the low-burning kerosene lanterns revealed a drop of coagulating blood falling from the body to the dusty floor, barely missing the toe of his shoe, he frowned at Sami and Jabbar.

“Idiots,” he growled, jumping from the cheap plastic chair they’d managed to scrounge up from the wreckage of this sad, forsaken town, “mind where you are going with that lump of filth.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sorry, sir.”

After Charles Sander died of a heart attack within hours of beginning his interrogation and torture, Qasim had wondered if perhaps he’d been sent on a fool’s mission. If perhaps Allah himself wasn’t laughing down at him for thinking he could accomplish what so many of his brethren over the years had not. But then, just as he was howling over his lost leverage—he’d intended to use Charles and Theodore against one another, torturing one to make the other talk—he’d opened Theodore Fairchild’s wallet to discover what would undoubtedly be the ultimate chink in the man’s armor. Photographic evidence of a girl—a niece Qasim had discovered after a quick Google search—whom Theodore had raised as a daughter. She was just the bargaining chip Qasim needed to make the old Marine give up the information stored inside his head. And it was at that moment that he began to think that qadar, or Fate, had once more swung in his favor…

Praise Allah! This might actually work!

“Shall we just drop the body next door?” Jabbar asked, straining under the weight of Charles Sander and looking peculiar in his Western-style clothing.

“Take him far enough away so that his stench does not reach us,” Qasim instructed his men. Then he turned back to the phone conversation. “What were you saying?” he asked Haroun, lamenting the fact that Jabbar had inadvertently smashed Theodore’s cellular phone during the struggle to apprehend the man. Because how much simpler would this whole situation have been had they been able to send Delilah Fairchild a text message from her uncle’s phone instructing her to come to Cairo. After all, that exact plan had worked so well using Sander’s phone in order to get Theodore here…

Such is life, he sighed pragmatically. Allah gives us obstacles to overcome in order to make the victory that much sweeter. And just as soon as he had his hands on Delilah Fairchild, he would be victorious. And it would be very, very sweet.