Chapter 1
“Get away from the window,” James said behind me in a gruff voice.
“Why?” I turned around to face him, letting the heavy curtain fall back into place over the window overlooking the front yard of the property we’d just moved into minutes before. “I thought we were safe here.”
“We are,” he grunted, dropping onto a worn green sofa.
I grimaced at the dark stain on the cushion beside him. “I’m not so sure we’re safe from bed bugs—or whatever diseases live in that thing.”
He gave me a piercing glare. “You can’t expect the Ritz Carlton.”
“I’ve never stayed in a Ritz Carlton in my life,” I said, my tone sharper than intended. But this was the third safe house we’d rotated through in a week, and they seemed to be getting worse with every move. “My expectations aren’t that high. Strangely, I thought yours were.”
He scowled but kept quiet.
I closed the distance between us and perched on the edge of the peeling pleather recliner beside him. “Sorry.” When he didn’t respond, I placed my hand over his. “James.”
He turned to look at me, his face blank, neutral in that way I’d come to recognize—he wasn’t pissed at my criticism. He was worried.
I’d spent the past seven days with him, 24/7, and I’d started to learn his tells.
“We’re safe,” I insisted, giving his hand a squeeze.
At least we were safe at the moment.
We were on the run, hiding from Gerald Knox, who might as well be a ghost for all we’d been able to find out about him. All I had were scraps, and the most damning one came from his mother, Nicole.
Nicole had killed my mother, who’d learned about my father’s work as the Knoxes’s attorney. My father had helped Knox—and other shady businessmen—hide, bury, or sanitize money over the past two decades. And she’d been collecting proof.
A little over a month ago, my father had left her. But before he walked out, she told him about the file and threatened to make it public.
So, my father turned around and warned Nicole.
Nicole came to Jackson Creek under an alias and set up an “accidental” meeting with my mother. My mother had few real friends, and Nicole had offered a sympathetic ear. But it was all a play to find out what my mother knew. When Nicole couldn’t get it out of her on friendly terms, she’d escalated to threats. But my mother had still refused to hand the information over.
That’s when Nicole—helped by her son and his people—had killed her.
She’d staged it to look like an accident; my mother’s car had driven off the bridge outside of town. And my father had covered up for Nicole by fueling rumors that my mother had done it on purpose.
The evidence fit. He’d asked their family doctor to prescribe her antidepressants, which had been in her system at her time of death. And tongues were already wagging about the way my mother’s neat and tidy life had suddenly turned messy. She was a cautionary tale—a woman who’d taken pride in being better than everyone else.
The town had swallowed the whole story.
James and I did not, and we were able to retrieve the evidence my mother had collected and hidden away.
Before we’d gone on the run, we’d copied everything into a password-protected file on the cloud and locked the original documents in a safe in his office. I spent the first day on the run, digging through the files with a fine-tooth comb, looking for evidence to bring the Knoxes down.
Evidence that strongly suggested the Knoxes had a large-scale money laundering scheme. Was it enough to bring them down? Maybe not, but it would be enough for a law enforcement agency to get a search warrant to start connecting dots.
Once we realized what we were sitting on, we had one brief discussion about turning it over to the FBI, but we’d both quickly dismissed it. At least for now. Getting arrested would be too comfortable for them, not to mention, they were slippery enough to get bail and live their lives until they finally made it to trial years from now.
They needed to pay sooner.
But there was something else that made us hesitate. My mother had paperwork that tied the Knoxes to the purchases of properties James suspected to house criminal activity. One in particular stood out—a warehouse Knox had sold recently. A warehouse James thought played a role in human trafficking.
And apparently, James had been looking for information about a trafficking network in Little Rock. He wanted to pursue this lead, so we hadn’t mentioned bringing in the law since.
Still, I wondered if I’d made a selfish decision.
