Page 41 of Her Forbidden Mountain Man

No vehicles follow. That means nothing. A professional team wouldn’t sit directly behind him. They might be waiting near the highway or tracking the SUV from a second location.

I look at the photograph on my phone again. The scarred man’s face fills the screen. Bald head. Heavy shoulders. Flattened nose. And that scar. It begins at the corner of his jaw and curves upward toward his left ear. Too smooth for a knife wound. Too wide for broken glass. A burn, perhaps, or shrapnel. I know him.

The certainty has bothered me since the market. I’ve seen that face before, but not recently. He was younger. Thinner. Maybe he had hair. I stare at the image until my eyes ache. Nothing comes.

I cross to the wall of books and pull down a locked metal box concealed behind an old field guide. Inside are the pieces of my former life I couldn’t bring myself to destroy. Photographs. Passports issued under names that never belonged to me. Encrypted drives. Paper files that officially don’t exist.

I carry the box to the table and unlock the bottom compartment. Doug thinks isolation has made me delusional. Seven years ago, he would have trusted my instincts without question. If I said a man was watching us, Doug checked the exits. If he saw a threat, I reached for my weapon. We didn’t waste time asking if the other was certain. That trust kept us alive.

I don’t know when it died. Maybe the night he saw me looking at Sophie. Maybe earlier. I insert one of the drives into an offline laptop and enter a password I haven’t used in three years. Folders appear across the screen. Names. Dates. Operations.

I search through surveillance photographs first. Smuggling networks. Mercenaries. Arms brokers. Men who moved weapons across borders and sold them to anyone willing to pay.

The scar belongs to someone connected to that life. I know it. I open photographs from our final five years in the field and examine them one by one. A Serbian trafficker. A former intelligence officer from Belarus. A mercenary commander who sold anti-aircraft missiles to insurgents.

None are right. Hours pass. The fire burns down behind me. Daylight fades outside, turning the wet forest gray. Wind strips leaves from the maples and throws them against the windows.

My eyes begin to blur. I force myself to continue.

The photograph could be buried inside a field report rather than a surveillance file. I open the archive and search by physical descriptions. Scar. Facial injury. Male, thirty to fifty. Hundreds of results appear.

I refine the search. Left jaw. One file remains. I open it. The photograph takes several seconds to load. The moment it appears, memory slams into me. His name is Viktor Sava.

Seven years ago, he wore his dark hair shaved close to his scalp. He was leaner then, but the scar is unmistakable. It curves from the corner of his jaw to his ear, a pale ridge left by shrapnel from an explosion in Kosovo.

Occupation: private security.

Actual occupation: enforcer.

I scroll through the file. Viktor worked for Anton Markovic. My blood turns cold. I lean back, staring at the name.

Anton Markovic wasn’t merely an arms dealer. He was one of the most dangerous men Doug and I ever pursued. He moved military-grade weapons through Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South America. He armed militias, terrorists, and anyone else who could meet his price.

We chased him for eighteen months. The operation ended in a farmhouse outside Prague. I haven’t looked at the report since.

I don’t need to.

Every second remains burned into my memory. Rain against a rusted roof. Gunfire tearing through plaster. Doug pinned behind an overturned table while rounds struck the wall above his head. Markovic shouting from the second floor.

We ordered him to surrender. He answered with an automatic rifle. He had six men inside the farmhouse, including Viktor. They opened fire before we crossed the courtyard. We took cover and returned fire because the alternative was dying where we stood.

It should have ended when Markovic ran out of ammunition. Instead, he brought his daughter downstairs. Anya.

She was eight years old. Her photograph is in the file. Dark braids. Red coat. A shy smile for the school photographer. My stomach twists. Markovic held his own child in front of him with one arm locked around her body. He pressed his pistol beside her head and backed toward a rear exit.

Even now, I hear Doug telling everyone to hold their fire. I see Markovic dragging her down the steps. I hear Anya crying for her father to let go. Then one of Markovic’s men fired from the second floor. Everything broke apart.

The windows exploded. Doug took a round through his vest and went down. I returned fire toward the landing while another agent shot at Markovic. A bullet struck Anya. I never knew whose. No one did.

Markovic dropped his weapon and gathered her into his arms. She died before the medics reached the farmhouse.

He blamed us. He blamed Doug most of all. Doug commanded the operation.

I scroll to the interrogation transcript. Markovic’s words appear halfway down the page. You took my child. One day, I will take yours.

My pulse thunders in my ears. How did we forget that?

We didn’t. We catalogued the threat, assigned protection to Doug’s family, and buried Sophie’s identity behind layers of security. But Markovic went to prison. His organization fractured. His accounts were seized. His men disappeared or turned on each other.