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  Copyright © 2013 Shunta Montgomery

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  Publisher’s Note:

  Mine’s to Kill is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, event or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Special Thanks

  Thank you, Barb, for catching the mistakes I missed. Your assist with editing has been wonderful.

  Thanks to all of my readers for showing your support for my work by buying and reading my books.

  Books by Capri Montgomery

  Shadow Hills Returns: Breaking Point

  Shadow Hills Returns: Obsession’s Curse

  Forged in Fire

  The Funeral Planner

  Hiking for Danger

  Shadow Hills Returns: Family Ties

  Providence

  Shadow Hills Returns: The Cost of Love

  The Sixth Sentinel

  On the Line

  Inferno

  When the Heart Breaks

  In Love Before Christmas

  Killing Hannah

  On Thin Ice

  Warriors of Persia

  Sworn to Secrecy

  Explosive: Deadly Connections

  Betrayal of the Dove

  Vendetta

  Shadow Hills: M is for Murder

  Seducing the Bodyguard

  Shadow Hills: No Valentine

  Shadow Hills: Fallen Hero

  Fahrenheit

  Secrets and Lies

  Returning Sheba

  Saints and Sinners

  The McGregor Affair

  Dream Walker

  The Geneva Project

  The Admiral’s Daughter

  Dangerous Obsessions

  Watch Over Me

  And Many Others…

  Coming Soon

  The Art of Deception (BBM Line)

  Trouble in Paradise (Tahitian Heat series)

  Chapter One

  Autumn Kitsap stood there listening to the woman in uniform insult her. Although she couldn’t say she was listening much. She had bigger issues to tend to than listening to some woman wearing Army colors condemn her for her weight. She would never understand mindless petty women, maybe that’s why all of her friends were men.

  “I can hear part of the conversation. It’s definitely Farsi,” she mumbled into her hidden microphone as she smiled as if she were talking to the military personnel sitting at the table in the roadside diner. Of all the days to have military men show up it had to be today.

  She laughed again as if somebody had said something funny. “I know right,” she said loud enough to make it appear as if she were just chatting with the group. “Waiter is suspect,” she mumbled with a smile on her face.

  “Would you like to have a seat?” A waitress approached her. “Your friends already ordered.”

  “Oh no. I just met them,” she said as she kept an eye on her surroundings. “I just have a thing for a man in uniform don’t you,” she winked at the waitress all the while keeping the pleasant smile on her face.

  “Absolutely,” she giggled, flipping her shoulder length blond hair and walking away. She went back behind the counter and mumbled something to the man working in the back.

  “I think my cover is still safe,” Autumn mumbled with a smile on her face. “They’re definitely talking about a bomb. The target is a…I can’t hear it; there’s too much background noise. Would somebody shut that whining brat up,” she mumbled.

  “What’s going on here?” The one they had called Borne looked at her. She smiled and nodded to him.

  “We’re going to have to make a move; if they get out of here we won’t get them. There’s too many civilians to botch this up in here so we have to do it right...” She looked at the one man with the long flannel shirt on. “Something’s not right,” she surveyed her surroundings. “Gun!” She knocked the military woman down and the others took cover. They were getting ready to open fire on the Army personnel sitting there beside them.

  She pulled her own gun and started shooting, hitting one while everybody else ducked and screamed. “I have a piece in my boot, grab it and start shooting,” she told the woman beside her.

  “What?”

  “You’re Army aren’t you? Do you just run your mouth or can you shoot?”

  The woman finally got the point, went for Autumn’s right boot and pulled her piece. “There’s another one in the left,” she told the guy next to her who seemed to be assessing getting to one of the men himself.

  When more people started coming from the back she knew they were in trouble. “I need backup! Nobody told me the whole diner was a sleeper cell. Get me some guns in here now!” She fired off a few more shots. “Two just went out the back! One in a blue flannel shirt and black jeans. The other in a black shirt with black khaki pants. Do not let them get away or you won’t be able to stop them.” She yelled in between firing more shots. One of the Army men bolted out the back behind them. “And an Army guy wearing his uniform is in pursuit so don’t shoot him.” She said as she fired a few more shots.

  “What’s your position?” The voice rang out in her ear.

  “I’m pinned down. I need guns in here now!” She fired a few more shots before sliding another clip into her piece. “No. I can’t go. I’ve been hit!” She yelled between bullets. She briefly caught the woman looking at her wound.

  “Crap,” she mumbled.

  Autumn knew she was losing blood. She had taken a bullet in her side when she pushed the woman out the way, but now was not the time to worry about her injury. These guys were a top priority for the Homeland Security Special Reconnaissance team and if they didn’t catch them they would kill a lot of innocent people. She hated fanatical people, but if it was one thing they all had in common be they religious fanatics, nationalist fanatics, or political fanatics was their world of crazy that didn’t leave room for anybody to live safely. She wouldn’t have that in her country. America was her home, born and raised, and she would not let anybody come in and ruin it.

  When the SWAT guys and her remaining team poured in the battle ended in a blood bath while somebody pulled her out. She saw the woman who had been taunting her beside her and the look in her eyes told Autumn that she, too, was concerned about the amount of blood she was losing.

  “You stay with us,” she said. “You don’t get to die, soldier.”

  Autumn smiled. “I’m not a soldier.”

  “You are today.” She said as she held on to her hand. They loaded Autumn into the back of the wagon and the woman rode with her. The last thing Autumn remembered was somebody telling her to keep fighting. After that there was nothing.

  When she came to she was in a hospital bed and her team was in the room. That didn’t surprise her. It would take an act of God to keep them out of the room when one of their own got hit. “Did we get them?” Those were her first words.

  Jackson Tate looked down at her with a s
mile. “Yeah, we got them. They’re all dead, but we got the USB he had with their plans on it. Cells are being taken down now.”

  “Good. Any of our own get killed?”

  “Not a one, thanks to you. The soldiers are fine too in case you want to know. One of those Army guys tackled the guy in the flannel shirt otherwise we would have missed him. He was moving too fast.”

  “Glad we got them.”

  “I’m glad you’re alive.”

  She nodded. Why was she always the one to go into the lion’s den? Because she was the smallest and the only female and the one who appeared to be the least threatening. She was five feet even, one hundred pounds dripping wet and nobody took her seriously so she was never seen as a threat. She was just the kid, as most people thought, who should have been on her way to her first day in junior college. Well, their ignorance was her gain because she had put in her time and brought down a lot of terrorists, domestic and foreign. She was thirty-six and had done work with the Secret Service as one of their undercover plant agents, and a little with the CIA, but mostly she had worked her way up the ranks in Homeland Security from the moment she got her foot officially in the door with the agency.

  “You guys are going to miss me,” she said.

  “I wish they would leave you where you are,” he mumbled.

  She smiled the best she could. “Oh, I don’t know, being transferred to the Special Conditions Witness Protection Program might be good for me. Less likely to get shot,” she almost laughed, but the pain stopped her. Their director had told her once this mission was over she was going into the newly setup Special Conditions unit of the Witness Protection Program—not that she wanted to, but she didn’t have a choice. A lot of the newly special teams were still forming, but her section of the Homeland Security program had been operational for nearly five years now. Even with the new additions for special situations they were still ahead of the game. It had been their unit that had inspired more specialized smaller units in a few of the government agencies. Now she had to go over to the SCWPP and try to help them get their stuff together. Oh yeah, she was really looking forward to that—not.

  She would be going into the unit in the lead position, which would of course usurp the authority of the present lead, but he would just have to get used to it. From the initial meeting he seemed upset, yet professional. She would try to find a way to ease everybody into the transition, but they were all adults and she wouldn’t do any hand holding. They could accept the change or hit the door. This wasn’t what she wanted either, but it was the hand the people in charge had dealt and so they would have to play it. She would still have to put in her time keeping watch over people in the program, but for the most part she was there to get the unit on track. Three witnesses turn up dead within such a short time of the start of the program and they should have known changes would be coming. What none of the members had been told yet was that Candice Helgreen, the overhead director of the specialized unit, had suspected a leak from the inside. There were twenty members on the team, they had started with twenty-eight, but when the witnesses were murdered so were the agents protecting them—all except one, Special Agent, Huck Lancaster. Huck was the current link between the agents on the team and Candice, but the bullet that hit his knee had put him on limited duty since he now had to walk with a cane. He seemed happy just commanding, but now he wasn’t even really going to be doing that. She was going to be the direct link to Candice because Candice had said the person they brought in was the only person who hadn’t been on board when the witnesses were murdered.

  She wouldn’t try to take over. She still wanted Huck to handle as much as she could delegate to him, but there would be some things he wouldn’t be able to know about. He was a dedicated agent with fifteen years experience and he was being pushed to the back with a replacement, so she knew that wouldn’t sit well with him. She figured he had to know it was coming after the third victim, a mother of three, was murdered in their safe house that nobody supposedly knew about. The agents guarding her were murdered as well and the three children ranging from ages two to six were killed too. That murder had apparently shaken the apple tree and as Candice had said, heads were going to roll. Autumn didn’t know anything about those cases because it wasn’t her field to follow, but Candice had assured her that just made her perfect to take over the assignment. “I still expect you to guard and protect,” she had said. “I know you know how to do that because you did that stint with the Secret Service.”

  “Oh, no,” Autumn had said. “I was on the president detail only temporarily. I was there for a month at most and then I was back in Homeland Security.” She tried to remind her of how brief her stint with the Secret Service had been. She wasn’t happy about that either, but she understood the necessity after the entail the Homeland Security had received they couldn’t be sure just how far up the chain the conspiracy went and so they decided to use an outside man—or in her case woman—to go in undercover. While she was protecting the president in a less than leadership capacity she was also doing her job to decipher who the traitor was. She had allowed herself to be used because she was young and stupid. She wanted to help her country and for some reason she hadn’t thought past this one assignment. She hadn’t thought about the fact that if they used her once they would use her again. That’s why when she had a chance to go to one of the special operations units for Homeland Security she took it. She figured she would be stuck with the basic details for the team even if that required a little undercover work that would be fine so long as she stayed put. She should have known it was too good to last.

  “You still did it. They still trusted you enough to bring you in when they weren’t sure who to trust. I’m talking about the president here,” she said in a raspy tone. “They don’t just let anybody guard the president, undercover or not, so that tells me you’re one to be trusted. I need you for this position so like it or not you don’t have a choice. You’ll do this, and do it well. Only difference between the last time and now is you most likely won’t be going back to Homeland Security,” she had smiled. The wrinkles around her eyes telling her age more than the silver in her hair. “I think I’m going to keep you for myself.”

  Those were the words that sealed Autumn’s fate and she knew once she went into this assignment she wouldn’t be getting out. Nobody left anything Candice put them in unless she allowed them to leave. Autumn wanted to stay with Homeland Security; it’s where she spent the greater part of her career. She was seventeen when her father gave her the choice of the military or college because he said she was going down the wrong path and he wouldn’t stand for it. He was right and she knew that. She knew hanging out with her friends on Friday nights while they got drunk or stoned wouldn’t end well for her. She didn’t drink and she didn’t smoke pot, but she was there. Her father had drawn the line in the sand when she got picked at the party the police raided. She had two choices and she wanted neither. Fortunately for her community college was the place where she found government work. She had gone to pick up a college application and they were having a job fair so she sat down with some guy from the FBI and the next thing she knew she was practically ready to sign away her life. Her father wasn’t exactly thrilled, but he liked the fact that she would “gain some discipline,” as he had said. “I know you’re angry with your mother,” he said, “but you can’t let her steal the life you could have.”

  She wasn’t just angry with her mother, she hated her. Fannie was a Brazilian hellion. She had married Adam Kitsap and brought misery to his life and Autumn’s life before running off with her lover when Autumn was ten years old. Two things Autumn could be happy for was that her father named her, and that her whore of a mother had left her behind. Autumn refused to learn Portuguese because she didn’t want anything to do with her mother. The things she couldn’t control were her dark tanned skin like she had been born into the Brazilian sun, or the long silky hair that fell to her mid back, or even those dark long eye lashes that her
mother had. Fortunately for Autumn she had taken her father’s gray eyes, but it was still mixed with a darker softness that set her apart even from him. No, the only thing Autumn could control was not learning the language of her mother because if she didn’t learn it then she could deny her, she could deny the woman who had broken her father’s heart and abandoned her.

  Instead of learning Spanish or French in school, Autumn learned sign language. In her mind deaf people were the only people in this country who didn’t have a choice in the language they spoke. It wasn’t an issue of learning English for them because they couldn’t hear. For them she wanted to learn their language. She wanted to be able to communicate with them. Perhaps she wanted that so much because she felt lost, and somewhat alone, herself.

  Once she joined the FBI they insisted she do college courses so she did and they paid for it so that was fine by her. Not even a year later the Homeland Security department recruited her thanks to something she caught while working for the FBI. She started at ground level and worked her way up to a moderately good position and then, years later, the special ops division was born and her skills plus her history with government work made her the lone female member of the new team. She was going to miss these guys. She didn’t want to leave them, but as Candice had so eloquently pointed out, she didn’t have a choice. She doubted that even at this stage they would allow her to quit, and on a lot of levels she didn’t want to quit. She just wanted to have a chance to go back to the team she had grown to know and love. “Oh well,” she sighed. She knew once she recovered she was going to have to go fulfill her new duties with a new team in a new special operations unit and she didn’t have a choice in that. The only thing to do was to honor her integrity and do the best she could with the hand they had dealt her.