Noble Warrior Read Free Page A

proved to be a remarkable student, and it wasn’t long before the military had a teenage warrior on their hands who could slide into house parties,
hip-hop shows, high schools, and hookah bars without anyone batting an eye.
    The fight against domestic terror had a new weapon: an underage war machine, perhaps the first of its kind. And Stanzer believed that before McCutcheon’s time was over his impact on those
that would seek to do America harm would become legendary. As far as the colonel could tell there was only one weakness—the memory of the girl. McCutcheon carried it around like an overpacked
suitcase.
    “You gotta slay that dragon,” Stanzer would say. “Cut its fucking head off and leave its carcass for the flies and rats.”
    “My dragon died a long time ago,” M.D. responded.
    “Being wounded and being a corpse are two different things.”
    “I’ll try to remember that,” M.D. said. “Then again, you know how I feel about murder.”
    No matter what Stanzer tried to explain to McCutcheon about the true, dark nature of the job, M.D. still continued to hold on to two nonnegotiable rules for himself when it came to his
participation in the Murk.
    Number one: no killing. Yes, M.D. was an expert in the art of hurt, but he refused to take another person’s life. Capturing them with a bit of stank on it? No problem.
    Number two—and this was the big one for M.D.: come summer, he planned to break cover, ditch the false Wit Sec identity that had been created for him—as a new-to-Nebraska homeschooled
student from Pittsburgh named Jarrett Jenkins—and go back to his true hometown, Detroit.
    Why?
    To see his girl.
    McCutcheon had been forced to leave her at a moment’s notice in order to make sure his mom and sister were safe, but Kaitlyn Cummings had never left M.D.’s heart. Sure, ladies had
been throwing themselves at “Bam Bam” ever since he was twelve years old—that’s what happens when you’re a hard-bodied underground celebrity cage warrior with long,
thick eyelashes and a six-pack of ripped, granite abs. But when it came to Kaitlyn, things were different.
    M.D. was sprung for her. Totally and completely. Kaitlyn was the girl of his dreams—smart, beautiful, took no shit—and he wanted her back. Desperately. The first month without her
was hard. The second torturous. By the end of month seven, not seeing her, not smelling her, not feeling the soft, tenderness of her skin burned in M.D.’s heart and grew into a rage.
    Time had not healed this wound.
    To their credit, the Witness Security Program owned an unblemished track record when it came to keeping those in their custody safe from harm. Literally, never once in the history of Wit Sec had
someone who’d come under federal protection ever been harmed or killed while under the active protection of the U.S. Marshal’s Service. Of course Wit Sec’s first and foremost rule
for achieving this was that a person could never return home; and while M.D.’s head might have said
yes
to his current arrangement on a moment’s notice in a high-pressure,
no-time-to-really-think-about-it situation, now that McCutcheon was actually having to live out the terms of the deal, he was dead set on breaking the contract. In fact, it had gotten to the point
where M.D. missed Kaitlyn so badly that he’d begun taking chances. Chances he hadn’t told Stanzer about. Chances that could have had immensely negative consequences.
    But these were prices M.D. was willing to pay. For the opportunity to be with Kaitlyn, no cost felt too high.
    Four times during the previous three months McCutcheon secretly slipped out of Nebraska and drove ten hours into Michigan to do some intelligence gathering on his girl. Essentially, he stalked
Kaitlyn. Not with any ill will, of course. Adding fuel to the fire, he still felt awful about the way he’d been forced to leave her as she stood less than twenty yards away crying,
“McCutcheon, McCutcheon!”
as he coldly