“Hello, honey, I’m right here,” Carmen called toward the phone.
“Aunt Carmen, do you think you could ask Mom’s doctor to send her medical records to Dr. Tanner? Just so she has everything she needs if Mom has any issues?”
June sighed and rolled her eyes. “Sweetheart, I’m sure I won’t need all this fuss.”
“Mom.” Willa’s voice took on that firm tone that reminded June exactly where her daughter had inherited her stubbornness. “Your accident was serious. I’m sure both Aunt Carmen and your doctor have told you that recovery is going to take time. So yes, we need Dr. Tanner to have your information just in case.”
Carmen reached over and patted June’s hand. “She’s right, and you know it.”
“Fine,” June conceded. “I’ll have Dr. Restrepo send everything over.”
After they hung up, June sat in the quiet of her kitchen, feeling something she hadn’t experienced in years: anticipation for something other than work. For the first time since the accident, she wasn’t thinking about cases, deadlines, or the mountain of paperwork waiting for her return.
Instead, June was thinking about salt air and her daughter’s laughter, about grandchildren she saw too rarely, and about returning to a town that had become like a second home over the past twelve years. Sandpiper Shores had a way of wrapping itself around you with its small-town warmth and genuine people who remembered your name from visit to visit. She thought of Lucy Tanner’s welcoming smile at the clinic, of Margo’s perfectly brewed coffee at Teacups Coffee Shop and Bakery, of the way the whole community came together every year for a hero’s memorial honoring four brave fallen firefighters. Maybe a few months in Sandpiper Shores wouldn’t be a punishment after all. Maybe it would be exactly what she needed to remember who she was when she wasn’t being a lawyer. The thought both thrilled and terrified her in equal measure. June could spend the next few months just being a mother and grandmother.
2
HOLT
The warehouse district at three in the morning felt like a graveyard of broken dreams and forgotten commerce. Holt Dillinger crouched behind a rusted shipping container, his earpiece crackling with the quiet voices of his team as they moved into position around the supposedly abandoned building that had taken them eighteen months to locate.
Forty-six years.It had been forty-six years since his father walked out of his architecture office for the last time, three bullets in his chest from a punk who thought Richard Dillinger had seen too much of the wrong thing at the wrong time. Forty-six years since fifteen-year-old Holt had sworn over his father’s grave that he would find the truth.
“Alpha team in position,” came the whisper through his earpiece.
“Beta team ready,” followed another voice.
Holt pressed his back against the cold metal of the container, feeling the familiar weight of his service weapon in his hand. His heart was steady, his breathing controlled. This was what he’dtrained for his entire career, what every case, every profile, every sleepless night had been building toward.
Marcus Volkov wasn’t just another criminal. He was the ghost who’d haunted Holt’s dreams for decades, the shadow at the edge of every investigation. The man who’d killed Richard Dillinger and then disappeared into the underworld so completely that most people believed he was dead.
But Holt had never stopped believing. Never stopped following the breadcrumbs of evidence that led from Miami to New York to Philadelphia and finally here, to this rotting warehouse where Volkov’s father, Victor Volkov, had built his empire on the bones of good people’s lives.
“Remember,” Holt spoke quietly into his mic, “Volkov is mine. Nobody takes the shot unless I’m down.”
“Copy that, Boss,” came the unified response.
Holt moved toward the building, his footsteps silent on the broken asphalt. The structure loomed above him, six stories of crumbling brick and shattered windows that had once housed some long-forgotten manufacturing company. Now it was a fortress of crime, protected by men with guns and loyalty purchased with blood money.
The intelligence had been solid. Volkov would be here tonight, conducting business with his lieutenants. Planning their next move in a war that had consumed countless innocent lives over the decades. Tonight, it ended.
Holt slipped through a gap in the chain-link fence, his team moving like shadows around the perimeter. They’d rehearsed this operation a dozen times, planned for every contingency. But plans were fragile things when bullets started flying.
The side door yielded to Agent Martinez’s lock picks, and Holt found himself inside a maze of corridors that reeked of mildew and decay. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, casting everything in a sickly green glow that made the graffiti-covered walls look like something from a nightmare.
“Second floor,” whispered Agent Chen through the comm. “There are three heat signatures in the northeast corner.”
Holt’s pulse quickened. After all these years, all the dead ends and false leads, Marcus Volkov was less than fifty feet away. The man who’d stolen his father’s life, who’d shaped Holt’s entire existence around the pursuit of justice.
The stairwell was a death trap of rusted metal and rotting wood, but Holt navigated it with the careful precision of someone who’d spent decades learning to move through dangerous places. Each step brought him closer to the moment he’d been preparing for since he was fifteen years old.
“Movement on the third floor,” came Martinez’s voice. “Looks like there are lookouts.”
Holt paused, pressing himself against the wall as footsteps echoed above him. Two men, talking in low voices about shipments and schedules. Violent criminals conducting ordinary business, unaware that their world was about to collapse.
“Take them quietly,” Holt ordered.
The sounds of the takedown were barely audible through the walls. His team was good, the best the Bureau had to offer. They’d followed him into this personal crusade because they believed in justice, in the idea that these violent criminals needed to be neutralized by being led off in handcuffs and standing trial in a courtroom.
