LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER ONE

      MAN DOWN! ZACCOE’S DOWN!

      The flashbacks had to stop. They came at him in the middle of the night when he was ready for them. They came at him in the middle of the day when he wasn’t.

       Fall back! Get him to the Bradley!

      Gavin Savitt jerked from the clutches of sleep. Colors bled through his eyelids. He could hear civilian life. Better, he could hear the soft wash of waves against the shore and the chatter of wind chimes, the kind that hung from the eaves of his father and stepmother’s bayside bed-and-breakfast. There was laughter, far off. Gulls crying overhead. He tasted sunshine on his lips.

      The soothing sounds of the half of his childhood that had been good and whole and stable should’ve brought the unrest to a standstill. Should’ve obliterated it. It was fear that made the flashbacks hang around. The fear was all too real these days and had been his since his final deployment as a navy SEAL six months ago.

      It was fear that he would open his eyes and the civilian world would be less clear to him than the assault of vivid memories from another world.

      Funny that he hadn’t contemplated how stark and colorful those dreams were before his last mission, the one that had robbed him of half the visibility in his right eye and all of his left.

      Gavin took a moment to quell the anxiety, to manage the fear, even if he couldn’t kill it any more than the flashbacks.

      He braced himself, stomach tightening. Then he opened his eyes and confronted the odd blur of light and shade, the merging of shapes. He picked a fixed point out of his right eye to study...

      The white house was like a beacon on a hill. Hanna’s Inn spread prettily, overlooking Mobile Bay. Even Gavin could see the proud and regal way it held itself up—columns, balconies, long narrow panes that glistened as the sun shrank from its high post. The winding paths through the gardens...he knew them by heart. Just as he knew the sand skirting the kempt lawn curved in a crescent shape to follow the slope of the Eastern Shore. Beneath its peaks and tumble-down kudzu-lined valleys, the beach formed the watery border of Fairhope, Alabama, the small town that had called to Gavin for most of his life.

      He’d ignored that call, returning to Fairhope only out of necessity. However, nothing could compete with the inn that his father saw to alongside his stepmother, whose family it had belonged to for generations.

      A smudge detracted from Gavin’s focal point. It was black and willow-slim. As he fixed on it instead of the inn, he frowned. It was getting closer, if not bigger, and he was definitely in its line of fire.

      He knew only one person in the world who wore neck-to-toe black in July in the south.

      Gavin sat up in the hammock and placed his bare feet in the thick grass his father tended well. There was a catch in his neck and his muscles were taut as wires. He had learned how to snatch his mind out of the dreams, but his muscles rarely followed suit.

      He’d sought the hammock and the company of waves for relaxation to break the vicious cycle of PTSD, even if only for a short while.

      He might’ve been able to do it if he hadn’t given in to fatigue and dropped off.

      Smoothing his hand over the outer edge of his thigh, he wiped the damp from his palm. Oh, great. Night sweats were turning into day sweats, and the first person to find that out was potentially the last person he wanted to know.

      “Have you seen a dog?” Mavis Bracken asked as she bore down on him in her combat boots.

      He offered her a lazy salute. “Freckles.”

      In spite of his limited field of vision, he knew she scowled. She’d hated the nickname he’d given her as a youngster. The dark speckles on pale cheeks made her stand out in a sea of faces. While his father, Cole, and stepmother, Briar, ran the inn, Gavin’s half sister, Harmony, had become bosom pals with Mavis, the daughter of the florist next door. Mavis was always younger—always aloof.

      Some would say she was odd—those same people called him a loner.

      With their close ties to Hanna’s, the flower shop, Flora, and the two families that had grown tight between the establishments, Gavin had always felt that he and Mavis shared similar experiences; they were both outsiders.

      “You don’t look too good,” she observed.

      He tried to release the tension ball inside him. It didn’t work. Gavin passed a hand over the back of his shorn head. “Hard to shave when you can hardly see a mirror.”

      “That’s not what I meant.” Mavis paused and he felt her. His toes rolled in on themselves and a shimmy went through the fine hairs on the back of his neck. Mavis had a way, an eerie way that spoke of something otherworldly. She saw people in ways others didn’t understand.

      She was downright spooky, and he felt far too raw to be the center of her attention. “You’re looking for a dog,” he repeated.

      “Yes.”

      “What kind?”

      “He’s big,” she provided. “Black. Goes by the name Prometheus.”

      “You’re kidding.” When she didn’t answer, his lips parted. “Right?”

      Familiar sarcasm flooded Mavis’s voice. “Well, I thought Killer was overdone.”

      “Prometheus.” Gavin shook his head. “Because that’s not over the top.”

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