Sergeant's Christmas Siege

by Megan Crane

  Because he’d watched Kate deal with all of her ghosts. He’d watched her walk away from old demons, and he’d watched her forge a new bond with Will, who was doing his best not to live up to the family traditions.

  How could he do any less?

  And when Kate and he were shown into a private visiting room, Templeton wondered how the hell she’d seemed so calm back in Alaska when she’d done this. Because he was about to come out of his skin.

  She sat next to him, looking cool and calm. She put her hand on his leg beneath the table, and Templeton instantly figured out how to take himself down a few notches. How to breathe.

  The doors opened, and a man came in. Templeton stood.

  Johnny Cross looked . . . like him. Tall. Big.

  With the same damned face.

  It hit him like a gut punch.

  Johnny looked at Templeton a good long while, like he was searching for breath himself. Then he slid his gaze to Kate, who smiled that cop smile right back at him.

  “Your wife?” Johnny asked, his voice deep like Temple­ton’s.

  “Not yet,” Templeton said, aware that they even sounded alike. “She’s not ready. But she will be.”

  Kate glared at him. But she didn’t argue.

  And Johnny Cross laughed. Loud and long and deep.

  Until Templeton joined in.

  “My God,” Kate said crankily, though her brown eyes were suspiciously bright. “There are two of you.”

  Templeton thrust out his hand, and his father took it.

  And he couldn’t say that he suddenly remembered those early years of his childhood. He wasn’t suddenly drenched in images of the two of them together.

  But it felt like a homecoming.

  “It’s nice to see you, Dad,” Templeton said. He looked his father in the eye. “I promise you, I’m going to get you out of here.”

  And Templeton was a man of his word. He kept his promises.

  He got Johnny out three years and two months later.

  And he married Kate a few months after that, on Christmas Day, right there in Grizzly Harbor where they’d met.

  “I love you,” she told him, smiling ear to ear.

  He kissed her the way he always would, deep and real. Forever.

  “Get ready,” he told her. “Because, next up? We’re making a family of our own.”

  She scowled at him, there in her white dress and snow boots with her hair down, the Christmas lights making her shine.

  “Absolutely not,” she told him, all trooper. And pissed-­off woman. “Carry on the Holiday nonsense? Never.”

  Templeton smiled.

  And that time, it took him nine sweet months.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks as always to the marvelous Kerry Donovan for being so much fun to work with, and everyone else at Berkley for supporting this series! I love writing it. And more thanks—all the thanks, always—to Holly Root for supporting me in all things.

  As always, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Lisa Hendrix for reading my manuscripts and finding the gaps between my research and actual life in Alaska. I’m also thankful to Nicole Helm and Maisey Yates, who read as I go and are usually responsible for me finishing.

  Most of all, I’m thankful to you for reading these books and loving Alaska Force as much as I do!

  Continue reading for a preview of the newest Alaska Force book,

  coming in Summer 2020!

  BOSTON

  TEN YEARS EARLIER

  Julia had already ignored her father’s summons as many times as she could. It was time to go back home or face the consequences.

  Or, knowing her father, both.

  Twenty-two-­year-­olds about to graduate from college should assert their independence. That was the excuse she planned to use when he lit into her about it, assuming he was in a mood to listen to excuses, anyway. Because he was going to be furious; there was no getting around that.

  No one was suicidal enough to ignore Mickey Sheeran for too long.

  Julia was one of the few people who dared pretend otherwise, and, filled with bravado while safely on campus and protected by university security, she’d decided to prove it.

  She was already feeling sick with regret about that as she turned onto her parents’ street in the unpretentious neighborhood outside of Boston proper that was filled with the “regular Joes” her dad claimed he admired as “true American heroes.” Julia knew that what he really meant by that was that all their neighbors were as in awe of him as they were afraid of him. Just the way he liked it.

  Most people were just plain-old afraid of him, Julia included.

  Moreso the closer she got to the house she’d grown up in and hadn’t been able to leave fast enough. And never seemed to be able to put behind her, whether she lived there or not.

  There wasn’t a single part of her that wanted to go back. Ever. And particularly not when she’d deliberately provoked him.

  Sure, all she’d actually done was ignore a couple of phone messages ordering her to leave her dormitory and come home. But she knew her father would view the delay between the messages he’d left and her appearance as nothing short of traitorous. She was expected to leap to obey him almost before he issued a command, as she well knew. He didn’t care that she had exams. He probably didn’t know she had exams.

  But Julia knew it was foolish to imagine her father was dumb. He wasn’t. It was far more likely that he knew full well it was her exam period and had waited until this, her final semester of college, to force her to take incompletes and fail to graduate. He was nothing if not a master at revenge-served-cold.

  Mickey hadn’t been on board with the college thing, something he made perfectly clear every time he sneered about Julia’s “ambitions.” He’d also refused to pay for it, and had gone ballistic when Julia had found her own loans and a job in a restaurant to help with costs.

  She still thought it was worth the bruises.

  Her sister Lindsey was fifteen months younger and had never made it out from under their father’s thumb. She still lived at home, grimly obeying his every command in the respectful silence he demanded, because females were to be seen, never heard.

  She’d even started dating one of Mickey’s younger associates.

  You know where that’s going to lead, Julia had muttered, under her breath, when she’d been forced to put in an appearance on Easter Sunday. Straight to an entire life exactly like Mom’s. Is that really what you want?

  You’re the only one who thinks there’s another choice, Lindsey had snapped right back, her gaze dark and her mouth set in a mulish line. There’s not.

  Julia had looked across the crowded church, filled with the people who came to Mass one other time each year, and stared at the back of Lindsey’s boyfriend’s head. She wished her gaze could punch holes in him.

  I don’t accept that, she’d said quietly. I refuse to accept that.

  Next to her, her sister had sighed, something weary and practical on her face. Julia had recognized the look. Their mother wore it often. Soon it would start to fade and crack around the edges, until it turned into beaten-down resignation.

  He’s not a nice guy, but at least it gets me out of the house and away from Dad every now and again, she’d said. That’s not nothing.

  Their brother Jimmy, the meanest of their three older brothers, had turned around from the pew in front of them. He looked more and more like Dad by the day, and the nasty look he’d thrown the two of them had shut them both up. Instantly.

  Sometimes Julia lied in her narrow cot in the dorm, squeezed her eyes shut so tight she expected all her blood vessels to pop, and wished. For something to save her. For some way out. For the limitless, oversized life her college friends had waiting for them, with no boundaries in sight. No rules. Nothing but their imagination to lead them wherev
er they wanted to go.

  Maybe she’d always known that she wasn’t going to get any of that.

  And maybe her father had been right to oppose her going off to college, because all it was going to do was break her heart. Worse than if she’d been a good girl like Lindsey and had done what was expected of her.

  Hopelessness only hurt if you were dumb enough to hope for something different.

  Julia couldn’t remember, now, when she’d first realized that her father was . . . unusual. That he was the reason the other children kept their distance from the Sheeran family. But she could remember, distinctly, the first time she’d googled her father’s name and found a wealth of information about him. Just right there, online. For anyone to see.

  She’d always known her father was a bad man.

  Still, it was something else to find all those articles detailing the criminal acts he’d been accused of over the course of his long career. She thought sometimes that a good daughter would have been appalled, disbelieving.

  But she’d looked at her father’s mug shot in an article from the front page of The Boston Globe, and she’d believed. She’d known. He was exactly as bad as they claimed he was, probably worse, and that likely meant she was bad, too. Deep in her blood and bones, no matter what she did.

  Every year they failed to catch him in the act, the bolder and more vicious he became.

  And the more she accepted that his DNA lived in her, too.

  Because if Julia was as brave as she pretended she was when she was across town on a pretty campus where she could squint her eyes and imagine she was someone else’s daughter, she would have called the FBI herself.

  But she wasn’t brave. She didn’t point the car in some other direction, drive for days, and disappear. Instead, she was obediently driving home to face her father’s rage. And the back of his hand. And whatever other treats he had in store for her.

  Her throat might be dry with fear and her heart might be pounding, but she was still doing what he wanted. In the end, she always did.

  All things considered, maybe Lindsey’s grim acceptance was the better path. Julia liked to put on a good show, but they were both going to end up in the same place.

  Her stomach was killing her. Knots upon knots.

  She eased her car to the curb, cut the headlights, and forced herself to get out into the warm spring night. It was a force of habit to park a ways down the block. There were always flat-eyed men coming and going from the house, and it would go badly for her if she inconvenienced any of them. And Mickey was never satisfied with small displays of strength when bigger ones could cow more people and show off his cruelty to greater effect.

  In his circles, the crueler he was—especially to his own family—the more people feared him. And fear was what made Mickey come alive.

  She leaned against the closed car door and pulled her phone out of her pocket. It was cold enough that she wished she’d worn more than T-shirt, but there was a part of her that liked the chill that ran along her arms. It would keep her awake. Aware.

  You couldn’t really dodge one of Mickey’s blows, but there were ways of taking it, and falling—that lessened the damage.

  She’d learned that lesson early.

  She pulled up Lindsey’s number and texted her, announcing that she’d parked and was about to walk in to face the music.

  Don’t come in, her sister texted back almost instantly. It’s weird in here.

  A different sort of prickle worked its way down the back of Julia’s neck and started winding down her spine. Her hair felt as if it was standing on end in the breeze, except there wasn’t a breeze.

  I’m coming out, Lindsay texted.

  Julia found herself holding her breath, though she couldn’t have said why. The night felt thick and dark suddenly, though she could see the streetlights with her own eyes. Something about that caught at her, and she moved away from the nearest pool of light to the shadow of a big tree. She stood there, keeping still. She put her back to the trunk, hoping that if anyone was looking they wouldn’t see her.

  And she tried really hard to convince herself that she was just being paranoid.

  But when her sister appeared out of nowhere and grabbed her arm, she bit her own tongue so hard to keep from screaming that she tasted copper.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered fiercely at Lindsey. “You scared the—”

  “You should go back to your dorm,” Lindsey said, and this time, there was something stark in her gaze. Too much knowledge maybe. Something unflinching that made the knots inside Julia’s belly sharpen into spikes. “And stay there.”

  And all the things they never talked about directly seemed to swell in the cool spring night. The truths that no one spoke, for fear of what it might unleash. Not just because they were afraid of Mickey and his friends who he often called his brothers but treated with far more respect, but because acknowledging a thing made it real.

  It had never occurred to Julia before this very moment how deeply and desperately she’d clung to the tattered shreds of her denial.

  She and her sister stared at each other in the inky black shadows of the ominous night, and she couldn’t tell anymore if it was the dark that threatened her or if it was the truth.

  Whatever was coming, there was no escaping it. Had she always known that? Whether it was this night or another night or twenty years down a road that ended up with her seeing her mother’s tired, fearful face in the mirror, this life she’d been so determined to imagine as a path she could choose had only ever been a downward spiral. To one single destination.

  Sooner or later, they were all going to hell. Or hell was coming for them. It didn’t matter which. She was going to burn either way.

  Julia wanted to throw up.

  But at the same time, a heady sort of giddiness swept over her, and it took her a second to realize what it was. Freedom, of a sort. Or relief, which amounted to the same thing.

  She reached out and laced her fingers through her sister’s, the way she used to do when they were little. Back when it was easier to pretend.

  “Come with me,” she said fiercely.

  And Lindsey looked as if she wanted to cry.

  “It’s too late,” she replied. Her voice was soft. Painful. “He asked me to marry him.”

  “You don’t have to say yes.”

  “I love that you think it matters what I say.”

  “All the more reason to come with me,” Julia said stoutly. “We can figure it out. We can . . . do something.”

  Lindsey’s smile pained Julia, like someone had prized her ribs apart.

  “Julia,” she began.

  But when hell came, it came out of nowhere.

  A bright, hot, terrible flash of horror.

  They were both on the ground, dazed and stunned, and Julia lifted a hand to her temples where she felt something sticky. But she couldn’t find her way to caring about it much. Something was wrong with her ears, her head. Something was wrong.

  Car alarms were going off up and down the street, there was a siren in the distance, and she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten to the ground. She pulled herself to her hands and knees, grabbing for Lindsey as she went.

  And they knelt there, hugging each other even though it hurt, and stared at the roaring fire where their childhood home had been.

  Their mother. Their brothers. Even their father—

  Julia couldn’t take it in.

  Lindsay made a shocked, low sort of sound, like a sob.

  And somehow, that crystallized things. With a wrench­ing, vicious jolt inside of Julia. Half panic, half resolve.

  She turned to her sister, and took her shoulders in her hands, ignoring the stinging in her palms.

  “This is the other choice, Lindsey,” Julia said, her voice harsh and thick and not her own at all. But sh
e would get used to it. She would grow into it. If she survived. And she had every intention of surviving. “But we have to choose it. Now.”

  About the Author

  Megan Crane is a USA Today bestselling and RITA-nominated author. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband.

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