Cars passed through the intersection, clearing my way to cross as a shadow separated from the back of my van, melting out from beneath the rear bumper and rising to full height before taking off down the street at a rapid jog.
Someone had been under my van. Doing what, I had no idea. Planting a tracker, maybe? Chills erupted over my entire body.
“Hey,” I yelled, taking off after them, my eyes locked on their dark form as they turned a corner and disappeared, leaving both me and my van behind.
Not knowing exactly what my plan was, I picked up the pace, determined to catch up. Just before I reached my van, a roar of heat and sound struck me, lifting me off my feet, throwing me back into the narrow alley opposite where my van had been. In an instant, the van I’d built from bare metal into a home was gone. In its place was a fireball.
The heat licked at my skin, the air acrid with smoke. Thoughts skittered across my mind.
I should move.
The gas tank might still blow.
Who would want to blow me up?
I didn’t have any answers. The best I could do was a crab walk deeper into the alley, far enough that the heat from my burning van didn’t threaten to set me alight. Myface stung, the rain dripping down my skin, falling in pink drops onto my hands. I was bleeding. I noted it absently, along with the cold wet of my jeans.
I didn’t know how long I sat there watching the shell of my home burn. Everything I owned was in there. I had my backpack, like I always did, with my wallet, passport, and tablet. I had my phone. That was it. Everything else was in the van. My clothes. My computer and podcasting equipment. The award I’d won for helping to solve Hillary Atkins’s murder. The collar from my childhood dog, which I’d kept as a good luck charm. All gone. I’d run every wire in that van, sanded each piece of wood for the paneled ceiling. It was insured, but…
My brain wouldn’t work. The light from my burning home flickered, illuminating the street and the opening of the alley. Sirens wailed in the distance, and in a split second, the little I knew about my case flashed through my mind. Emily Shaw. Car bomb. The phone calls. That itch between my shoulder blades. And now my home, blown up.
I had to make a choice. I could stay there, wait for the police and the fire department, like I was supposed to. But I couldn’t forget Emily Shaw’s unsolved murder, closed so quickly. The cold flutter in my gut started up again as the sirens drew closer. I was alone. And right now, whoever blew up my van might think I was dead. If I stayed and waited for the police, they’d know I wasn’t.
I could ask the police to protect me… As soon as the thought formed, I shoved it away. Too risky. I didn’t know who to trust. And sitting there, the rain dripping down my face, soaking into my clothes, the sirens wailing louder and louder, I knew there was only one place I could go.
I wobbled to my feet, slowly backing away from the mouth of the alley and the sight of my burning home. I hadto find a place to hole up for the night. Somewhere I could go unnoticed. Stay off the radar. Stay alive long enough to get to the only lead I had. Because there was no fucking way I was walking away from Emily Shaw’s murder. Not now.
Not when I was pretty sure whoever had killed Emily had just tried to kill me, too.
Chapter Two
ELI
“If he was coming back, he’d have turned up by now.”
Ryder’s words landed between us like a stone, sinking the mood in the room. What had started as a simple team meeting had taken a turn. Cooper Sinclair, my new boss, sat at the head of the conference table, looking at the rest of us, a light of amusement in his icy blue eyes at Ryder’s flat tone.
He was amused because, in my opinion, he still wasn’t quite sure how he’d ended up with the team from Creed Global folded into his own company, Sinclair Security. Neither were we. The team—consisting of me, Ryder, Miranda, Maddox, Wren, and Shade—had worked for most of the last decade under the leadership of one Silas Creed. Creed Global wasn’t all that different from Sinclair Security. Not really. We handled similar business: protection, investigations, and, as the Sinclair Security website put it, problem-solving. It was just that Creed Global solved problems with a little more edge than Sinclair Security. We worked in parallel lanes. And while we’d always shared mutual professional respect, that was it.
Then Silas had disappeared, telling us only that he’d sold Creed Global to the Sinclairs, and we should move over there and take orders from Cooper, while Silas tied up some loose ends from his old life. He’d dodged all our demands for more information, promising that he’d be back. That was months ago. Since then, there’d been no sign of Silas Creed.
If he was coming back, he’d have turned up by now.
Ryder’s words ping-ponged in my head. The amusement left Cooper’s eyes once Ryder’s flat tone penetrated. Leaning forward, Cooper tapped the tip of his pen on the conference table, drawing all eyes to him, before he said, “You don’t know that, Ryder.”
Ryder didn’t reply. Shade leaned forward to catch Ryder’s gaze, her dark, sleek ponytail sliding over her shoulder. “Silas has gone undercover for longer than this. He told us to trust him. If we don’t know what he’s doing, we can’t assess if it’s taking more time than it should.”
“I don’t buy it,” Maddox said in his low rumble. “Loose ends can be slippery, but there hasn’t been a trace of him. I looked. I asked Emmett to look—” He flashed a glance to Cooper, maybe waiting for a protest, but Cooper only gave him a short nod.
“Emmett didn’t find anything either?” Cooper clarified.
“Nothing,” Maddox said with a quick shake of his head. “Neither did Lucas.” Lucas Jackson ran the hacker division and was a genius with a keyboard. He’d been the best at Sinclair until Emmett signed on. Maddox was good—maybe as good as Silas. I knew my way around a computer, though explosives were more my thing. But Emmett? Emmett was the guy everyone went to when they knew what they needed was out there and they justcouldn’t fucking find it. Emmett could find almost anything. But he hadn’t found Silas.
“So, what are you saying?” I asked Ryder. “You think he took off on us, or you think he’s dead?”
Miranda flicked me a worried glance. I avoided her eyes. I knew why she was worried. From me, you were more likely to get a joke than a blunt confrontation, but I never minded laying it out when I had something to say. And I didn’t see the point in avoiding reality. Because Maddox was right. Silas going undercover for a few months wasn’t out of the realm of possibility—especially if he was tying up unfinished business from a life he’d walked away from decades before. But to do it and drop out of sight so completely? That didn’t fit. There were any number of ways he could have communicated with any one of us and still stayed off the radar. A simple proof of life would have been enough. If he wasn’t going to contact us because we were practically his fucking family, he at least should have done it because it was company policy.
I’d been over it in my head, going in circles trying to come up with an explanation, and kept ending up at the same conclusion. The only reason Silas wouldn’t have contacted us was if he couldn’t.
