As the old truck rumbled to life, she pulled out the phone Knox had given her and hit the number he’d told her to call.
A low voice answered. “Too early to be hearing from you, brother. This can’t be good news.”
“Hello . . . um, Razor?” She held the phone between her ear and shoulder as she gunned the gas and roared out to the road. “My name is Lenora Calhoun—”
“I know who you are. Tell me what you need, Leni.”
CHAPTER 28
Knox kept the Parrish man in the beams of the headlights as he drove up the length of the driveway. The urge to hit the gas and ram the conspiring bastard against the trailer and the tons of timber stacked on it was nearly overwhelming, but he kept a lock on his rage as he approached.
When the SUV slowed to a halt, Parrish strode up to the driver’s side. He rapped his knuckles on the glass from the outside, an invitation to roll down the window. “Dwight and Pop are waiting for you in the house. They’ll handle paying you the rest of your mon—”
The human’s expression went slack as the dark glass slid open and he stared into the face of a stranger instead of the paid killer he’d been expecting. Knox’s amber-hot irises and bared fangs sent Parrish back on his heels.
“Oh, fuck.”
Knox wrenched open the door, knocking the man to the ground. Parrish’s boots moved as if he was running even though his ass was planted on the snowy driveway.
Knox climbed out of the vehicle.
“Holy shit!” Parrish clambered to his feet and started sprinting away. He managed to fumble a pistol from the pocket of his jacket and pivoted to fire a wild shot. He missed. He fired a couple more, his skinny legs pumping as he fled for the cover of the outbuilding.
He didn’t get that far.
Knox flashed from his position a few yards behind Parrish to the space directly in front of him.
He didn’t waste another second’s effort or thought on the man. Grabbing his skull in both hands, Knox gave the fragile human neck a hard twist. The corpse dropped at his feet with a muffled thud.
At the same moment, Dwight Parrish burst out the side door of the house. He stood on the covered porch, a large semiautomatic pistol in his hand. “Jeb?”
Knox stepped out of the darkness and into the pool of light from the floods overhead.
“Jeb’s dead. So is the Hunter you hired.” He started walking forward. “You’re next.”
Dwight raised his weapon and shot off a seemingly endless hail of bullets. A few of them hit, though not enough to stop Knox. He stalked across the driveway, heading with deliberate purpose toward the house.
Dwight had about two seconds to decide between continuing his useless barrage of gunfire or running for cover. No surprise, the coward chose the latter.
On a panicked curse, he pivoted back into the house and bolted the door behind him.
Knox kicked it off its hinges and stepped inside.
He caught the flash-fire of a shotgun blast in the corner of his eye barely an instant before the spray exploded toward him. He dived out of the way, though not before he saw that the shooter wasn’t Dwight, but an old man.
Enoch Parrish.
The hunched, gray-haired patriarch of the family fled like a rat through the hole Knox had made where the side door had been. He let the scurrying bastard go—for now. Enoch wouldn’t get far.
First, Knox had some payback to deliver on the old man’s son.
He pounced on Dwight’s retreating bulk, taking him down to the floor. Flipping him over, he pinned him with his hand clamped hard over the front of Parrish’s throat. The instant his hands made contact, the bombardment of Dwight’s sins and ugly truths seeped through the connection.
The suffering of countless young women and girls.
Abductions. Sexual enslavements and imprisonment. Unconscionable physical abuse that had ended in murder too often for Dwight to keep an accurate count.
And while some of those sins were decades old, many of them were fresh.
