This time, everything’s different.

The bag he always kept packed was bigger now, held more sophisticated things, but a go bag was always the same, made the same feelings surface. There was a silence that wouldn’t go away. No matter what he did, no matter how many good things he accomplished, it would always be there.

His voice mail still blinked, the message from the private number as yet unplayed. He knew what it would say, who it was from. He’d already gotten a call the day after they’d returned from the island, the day after he’d killed his father.

The threat was so fucking real, and what was worse, he’d been waiting for it every single minute of every single day for more than ten years. Once he’d been on his father’s island again, he knew there was no going back.

He’d been caught on surveillance tape while there. His life would never be the same.

Now he picked up the phone and redialed the number he still knew by heart. All the messages that had been left for him daily had said exactly the same thing.

Welcome back from the dead.

Drew Landon picked up on the second ring. “Cutting it close, James.”

“Under the wire’s always been my specialty.”

“You disappeared after you fucked up my job a second time,” Landon told him. “Imagine my disappointment.”

“What do you want?”

“Work off your debt. If you’re as good as you used to be, you’ll work maybe five years.”

So fucking reasonable. “And if I don’t?”

“I can send every criminal you ever helped after you. Ever family member of every trafficker you ever took down will have your picture. And pictures of your team members. The deal I’m proposing isn’t so bad now, is it?”

“Haven’t you done enough?”

“I haven’t even started. But I’m a man of my word. Your friends will be safe. I trust you’ve been making arrangements while you’ve been ignoring my messages. The next step would’ve been a visit to your shop.”

Your friends will be safe.

Why should he trust Landon now? Just because he didn’t have a choice was the only answer he could come up with. “You didn’t keep Josie safe.”

“I never promised that. But I had nothing to do with Josie’s death, James. If I did, don’t you think I’d admit it? I’m outright threatening your team—obviously, I’m far from terrified of you.”

Maybe Landon had never been, but now he should be. Gunner would make damned well and sure of that.

Not that it had ever been the same. Not for long, anyway.

He slung the go bag over his shoulder and grabbed the file folder that held the contracts for the sale of the tattoo shop and the other properties. Dare and company had a month to vacate, and he had a job to do. One he never should’ve tried to get away from.

He promised himself he’d never try to again.

* * *

Avery hadn’t wanted to leave her room, not after Gunner’s rejection hours before. He’d just pulled away and stared at her. She’d never forget the look on his face, although she couldn’t quite place it.

Could she have misjudged this so badly? Or was he that freaked out by what had happened?

God, she felt stupid. Humiliated. And maybe she’d ruined any chance of him working for S8.

Would you really want to work with him if you couldn’t have him?

She wasn’t exactly in the headspace to answer that question. Maybe after coffee, which she smelled brewing. Maybe it was a peace offering.

It was just after seven in the morning. Sleeping in—or much at all—wasn’t happening these days. She was about to cut around the corner to the kitchen when she saw the note propped up on his favorite tattooing chair, her name written on it.

She went over to it, noting how quiet the shop seemed. She ripped the envelope open and found a note in his handwriting telling her that the shop and the surrounding building and garage had been sold. And that she needed to vacate within a month’s time.

She wavered between hurt and anger. The anger won out at first. She slammed one of his tattoo guns against the wall, watching it break in half.

You have a month to vacate.

Well, thanks for that. She’d take about a minute.

Although it didn’t work like that, because after the initial anger wore off, she realized that leaving Gunner would be like wrenching her heart from her body. Was it that easy for him?

She couldn’t bear to think that it was.

He had to have been planning this. His rejection of her last night made sense in light of that. She read through the note again, focusing on his last lines.

I can’t be a part of S8. I can’t be who you want me to be. Key’s a good guy. He’s good for you.

“He’s kidding me, right?” she asked out loud. He’d left her, the shop. The team. He’d waited until it had been just her here. The lease, the note, it was all for her.

And that’s why he rejected you last night. That’s why he’d been acting so oddly. This had been in the works for weeks. Maybe from the second they’d stepped foot back in Louisiana.

She wondered if it was because there had been blowback she didn’t know about, stemming from the murder of Richard Powell, an ex-CIA spy who nearly ruined all of their lives. But she knew Jem was still monitoring the situation. They all were. If something big had come up, vacation or no vacation, they would have gotten in touch.

Which meant Gunner chose to walk out of her life, wanted to get away from Section 8, and from her. This was a major statement and one she wasn’t taking too well.

And then she went into every single nook and cranny of the place, looking for clues. He’d left a lot of his stuff behind, presumably for the new owner to simply throw out.

She knew she’d neatly pack up his clothes. His books. The framed pictures of his tattoos. She’d put them all in storage for when he came back. But for right now, she sat in the quiet of Gunner’s shop, unable to stop thinking on the strange, sometimes miraculous and equally heartbreaking turns her life had taken in under a year’s time.

It started out with Avery and Dare trying to save themselves from a man named Richard Powell and ended up with them finding a new group who felt like family.

Section 8 had been assembled in the eighties, comprised of seven men and one woman who’d gotten dishonorably discharged from the military for many different reasons. Typically, for not being leadable enough, and one of those men was Avery and Dare’s father, Darius O’Rourke. S8 was charged with doing black ops missions for a handler they’d never met, and after one mission gone wrong, the original S8 was disbanded. But when their handler called them back together, disaster stuck and the original team, save for Darius and Adele, were killed.

After Darius and Adele discovered their mysterious handler was Richard Powell, they helped his stepdaughter, Grace, escape from his island. Powell in turn hunted down anyone and everyone who was ever associated with S8 and tried to kill them.

Unfortunately for Powell, he’d underestimated Darius’s children and Grace herself. Together with Dare, Grace, Jem, Key and Gunner, they’d taken down Powell.

Or rather, Gunner had. The fact that Gunner’s father was Richard Powell, who was also Grace’s stepfather and the man behind Section 8, was a twist none of them had seen coming. So Avery and Dare were legacies. The rest were guilty, as it were, by association with S8. And so the new Section 8 was born. At least until Avery took the practical measure of reminding them what they’d all been through, and how a future in such a group would not be easy. She was telling military men this, and Grace, a survivor in her own right, but it needed to be said. Coming off the high of a completed mission, coupled with the low of Darius’s death and learning Gunner’s secret, things were complicated, to say the least.

Six months, Avery told all of them when they’d gotten back to Gunner’s shop after burying her and Dare’s father, Darius. Six months to decide if they were truly in or out of the new S8.

She’d thought more than once about asking Dare what really had happened on the island when Powell was killed by his own men, but she’d stopped herself. It was more Gunner’s story than Dare’s, and she would wait for him to make the reveal.

She had a feeling she’d be waiting a long time, at this rate, anyway. She was haunted that she missed Gunner’s leaving, possibly by mere minutes. Gunner had been pulling away faster than any of them had been able to reel him in. And now he was running.

When Avery first met Gunner, she’d been running too, first from the police and then from the men Richard Powell sent to kill her.

Richard Powell, who’d been responsible for the deaths of both her mother and her father.

Richard Powell, the biological father of the man she’d fallen in love with.

Trying to reconcile Gunner to that monster who’d made sure she’d only met her father long enough to hold his hand while he died . . . it was impossible.

Grace was adopted by Richard Powell, but Gunner was his blood.

God, what a complicated mess, hampered by the fact that she was more worried about Gunner and what all of this had done to him. She knew he was nothing like Powell. She had a feeling he wasn’t as sure, and it was breaking her heart.

They’d grown close in a very short period of time. Danger and proximity often did that to people, but what happened between them was more than that. She’d never felt this way about any man before him. And she felt closer to understanding many of her mother’s decisions because of that.