Chapter 1
Vonn
“Nash!”
Silence.
Rain pelts my skin, and fat drops roll down my cheeks, soaking my shirt.
Batting aside branches in the overgrown front yard of the Gabriel Mansion, mud sucks at my boots as I march onward.
“Nash!”
Holding still, I quiet my breathing, listening with more than just my ears. It’s too dark to see with the heavy storm clouds blocking the last of the late afternoon sun.
There is no sound or any indication anyone is there, but I tilt my head to the right, slip my hand into the waistband of my jeans, and draw my Sig Sauer.
And I stare into the thick bushes, trying to see through the darkness at the person I know is on the other side of that tree.
Nance, Nash’s housekeeper, said a man was out here looking for his wife. Byrdie had run up to her room to escape whatever dark fate that had followed her here. I’d found her white-faced, panicked and shaking, with her tote bag ready to flee.
Thumbing the safety off my gun, I lift it in a two-handed grip.
As the rain lashes me, plastering my t-shirt and jeans to my body, it’s quiet.
Too damn quiet.
My mind prompts me to turn to the house. To Byrdie. She was so damn afraid that someone was here to hurt her, but it isn’t safe to leave an enemy alive this close to her. I’m out here to make it safe for her, and I intend to do just that.
A twig snaps, a bush sways, and my finger finds the trigger, but I don’t press down.
Not yet.
“Nash!” I call out. I don’t blink as I wait to shoot or to dive to the ground, depending on who steps out from behind that bush and whether they have a weapon in their hand.
“Vonn?”
Releasing my tension in a soft exhalation, I thumb the safety back on. I’m lowering my gun to my side when Nash steps out from behind a tree.
His eyes slide from me to the gun and back to me again. He swallows so hard I track his Adam’s apple bobbing. “How close did I just come to having my head blown off?”
“What happened?” I tuck the gun back into the waistband of my jeans, not answering his question.
"That close, huh?” His eyebrow rises, a sign he did not miss my avoidance. “Someone was trampling around out here. I followed the sound. Heard a gunshot, and I ducked. There was another one a bit later, but it was farther away.”
“I heard it inside.” I peer around the forest, which takes up most of the front of Nash’s mansion.
It’s overgrown with no gardener to work on it after we buried the last one in the backyard for daring to put his hand on Byrdie. It doesn’t feel right. I couldn’t say why, how, or where this wrong feeling is coming from, but it’s not safe out here. “Let’s get inside. I need to check on Jessica.”
I almost slipped up and called her Byrdie. She told me her name when I won her trust, and I swore I would keep it a secret until she was ready to share it with Makhi and Nash.
My steps are steady as we retrace our steps to the house. I left the back door partially open to investigate the gunshot I heard while I was up in Byrdie’s room, so I lead Nash back to it. In sneakers, Nash slips and slides over the mud-slicked ground more than I do in the lace-up black boots I always like to wear.
The heavy rain continues to lash us both, and we’re shivering and cold, our clothes soaked through as we enter the house through the back door.
It’s as quiet inside as it was outside.
Other than the rain we drip all over and the muddy footprints we leave on the dark hardwood floors, there’s nothing to suggest anyone has been in the house except us, yet it feels wrong.
