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placate both the old gym rats who liked working out in a place that had no machines as well as his new clientele who loved the “authenticity.” And felt like they were getting a better workout if an old man who looked like he could have been an extra cast from Rocky yelled at them during it.
    “Construction starts next week,” Wilson said as they rounded the corner to the gym. “Where you going to move?”
    TK sighed. Her arrangement with Sal was teaching parkour, mixed martial arts, and self-defense classes in exchange for free room and board at the gym. It was the only way to keep a roof over her head since she’d separated from the Corps and returned stateside, when, after eight years of Uncle Sam seeing to her care and feeding, homelessness had become her new reality.
    “Not sure.”
    “I thought now that you got that gig with Beacon you might move into a real place.”
    “I’m still work-for-hire, which doesn’t work out to so many hours a week. But there’s some hotshot retired FBI agent coming on board. They’ll decide if I get to stay on full-time.” And if she got a chance to do what she really wanted to do: get into the field and out of the damn office.
    “That must suck. Getting all spit and polish for a new CO.”
    “Tell me about it.” Resentment bled into her voice, but Wilson was right: it did suck. Having to prove herself over and over again. And she’d read up on this FBI chick, Lucy Guardino. The woman had been with the Bureau for fifteen years, would no doubt expect her new team to genuflect and worship at the altar of rules and regs. TK had had quite enough of that, thank you very much. Fellow grunts, she’d die for her team. But that respect was earned, not commanded.
    In the past six months, she’d done good work for the Beacon Group, including identifying a decades-old John Doe body and finding a missing person who had been living under an assumed name. It was what the Group was all about: solving cold cases and bringing justice—and some sense of closure—to the families left behind. TK had surprised herself by enjoying the work, but she wanted more. She wanted to tackle the real cases, the unsolved murders, the stuff nightmares were made of. At least for normal people.
    For TK, after what she’d been through in Iraq and Afghanistan, murders that took place years ago didn’t hold a candle to her own night terrors. But studying them, along with working out and devouring language tapes, helped to keep her mind occupied with anything but the all-too-real horrors that were her memories.
    Wilson held the door open for her—the closest thing to conceding her victory today that he’d ever give her. “Worse comes to worse,” he said as he followed her into the cavernous space that stank of machine oil, sweat, and testosterone, “you can always bunk with me.”
    “In your dreams, Army.” She laughed to soften the blow, but living with someone, anyone, especially a man, was out of the question. She’d rather go back to the streets. Alone.
    Maybe there was a reason why TK couldn’t run a parkour course any way except to flat-out win...because the last time she’d trusted someone, she’d lost. Lost everything.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
Chapter 4
     
     
    BEACON FALLS, THE hamlet where the Beacon Group had their headquarters, was an easy drive from Lucy’s home on Pittsburgh’s Southside, especially since she could take back roads winding over the hills of West Mifflin.
    Twelve minutes after leaving her house, she was heading up the drive that led to the large Queen Anne on a bluff overlooking the gorge above the Monongahela River. For centuries the people who lived here—first Iroquois, then the French, and eventually British colonists—had outposts here, lighting bonfires each night to warn others of the treacherous waterfalls that waited, invisible, around the sharp bend of the river.
    Lucy parked her Subaru between a BMW motorcycle and a Volvo in the small paved