Free Crazy Sweet by Tara Janzen Page A

Dylan Hart was there.
    She slowly came to a stop, only partway to her destination.
    Dylan Hart —now, there was a name to give a girl pause, to make her think.
    Hart. Yeah, definitely a name to get a girl’s attention, and maybe make her break out in a sweat, a cold sweat, because that’s what Hart was: cold.
    Hart knew about the white room. He’d been in an identical place on the island of Sumba , Indonesia , on the receiving end of one of Dr. Souk’s psychopharmaceutical concoctions, a drug known as NG4, but the NG4 hadn’t changed him the way XT7 had changed her. Hart had been a ruthless son of a bitch before he’d been messed with, and he was still ruthless, still cold, still hard. He only had one soft spot in his life, and it wasn’t her. Not by a long shot.
    The only reason Grant let her operate through SDF was because Dylan Hart had taken personal responsibility for her, and Hart had made it very clear where the lines on his responsibility lay, and he’d made it absofuckinglutely crystal clear where her responsibilities lay.
    She glanced down at the ring of keys in her hand.
    She was getting ready to cross one of Hart’s lines, and there were going to be repercussions. Big ones. Maybe deadly.
    Her gaze went back to Travis. She loved him too much to drag him down with her into this, to have him hunted by Hart, and Hawkins, and Creed, to have General Grant sic Kid Chaos on him, to ever put him in danger of being in Kid’s sights.
    It could happen.
    Depending on how successful she was in her quest, it would happen. She knew it. Hart hadn’t candy-coated the facts of her employment or of her termination, and SDF would not tolerate a rogue operator. The chop-shop boys broke a lot of rules, most of the rules, but the few they kept, they held dear. Their survival depended on it, and vigilantism had no place in their operating procedures or in their hearts. They were the good guys, and not a one of them doubted it, because not a one of them had ever killed outside the law. They’d all rattled the chain of command, but none of them had ever broken it. They acted under orders, and only under orders.
    She knew all this. She’d watched SDF in action. She’d read all the files. She knew the inviolate rules.
    And yet…and yet… she closed her hand around the keys, so tightly she could feel the sharp edges pressing into her skin, but not so tightly that they cut. She needed her hands tonight, to hold her guns, to hold her knives, the tools of her trade. The line had already been crossed. She’d crossed it when she’d tagged Royce’s walls with Red Dog 303, and there was no turning back.
    None. Not when everything inside her pushed her on. Not when she’d been forced to her knees more times than she could bear by the monster in her mind.
    If Hart wanted her after the deed was done, he was going to have to find her, and she wasn’t going to let that happen. Once she started running, no one would ever find her—no one, not even the angel, and he would look.
    Oh, God, he would look, except in the one place he wouldn’t want to find her.
    Shifting her attention back to the keys, she slipped them around on the ring. There was no other way. When she found the set she needed, she started forward again. The door on her safe was made of heavy steel, and after releasing the locks, she swung it open to reveal enough weapons and ordnance to pull off a small island coup.
    Her gaze instinctively went to her sniper rifle first. The Knight SR-25 semiauto was the most powerful and longest-ranged weapon she owned, but it wasn’t appropriate for the battle she saw shaping in her mind, the same battle she always saw, the one she’d war-gamed half a dozen times on the surrounding rooftops and in the alleys and the creek bed where she and Johnny Ramos, one of SDF’s mechanics, paintballed.
    The ACOG-scoped M4 carbine wasn’t going anywhere tonight either. She’d be facing a superior force in both numbers and firepower, and she