She sprinted down the long hallway toward the front door. But running in beach sandals was awkward and after only a few steps, she lost her balance and tumbled to the floor. She scrambled to her feet again, minus one flip-flop. The sound of lumbering footsteps behind her made her whole body fire with adrenaline.
She was just reaching out for the doorknob when she felt a hard shove slam her forward into the door. Between that and her momentum, she smashed roughly into it and slumped to the floor again, gasping for breath. Before she could get back up, she felt something wrap around her neck.
She tried to slide her fingers underneath it. But she couldn’t get any leverage and the man was twisting it tight as he yanked her back down the hall away from the door. She collapsed on top of him, sending them both to the floor hard. But he didn’t let go.
Between the surge of adrenaline, getting the wind knocked out of her, and now being choked, Prissy felt her entire body screaming even if she couldn’t do it out loud. She swung her elbows down, trying to hit her attacker in the ribs long enough to make him loosen his grip. But she could feel herself starting to lose consciousness and knew that her blows weren’t having much impact.
It can’t end like this!
The thought popped into her head as spotted lights began to consume her vision. The idea scared her enough to force one last, desperate attempt to shake herself free. But by then, it was far too late.
CHAPTER TWO
Jessie Hunt stood up from the kitchen table without visibly wincing.
She collected everyone’s plates and walked over to the sink to rinse them off. As the worst cook in the group, she had escaped dinner prep duty. But that meant she was the official dishwasher. Normally it was a fair tradeoff. But since suffering her latest wounds, bending over the sink was a challenge. Putting dishes in the dishwasher was often cause for silent tears.
She still felt the sting where the skin on her back had been burned three weeks earlier. But she managed not to let it show. Neither her boyfriend, Ryan, nor her half-sister, Hannah, seemed to notice that she was still in considerable pain.
She’d suffered the burns while rescuing a woman from a disturbed man who’d abducted her and intentionally released her days later only to come back to her home intent on killing her. Jessie and the woman had barely managed to escape the burning house. Since then Jessie had been on leave from the LAPD, first stuck at the hospital and now in her own condo.
She knew it didn’t have to be that way. She had lots of pain medication. The doctor had instructed her not to lower the dosage for a month. But she’d started weaning herself off it a week ago, partly worried about becoming dependent. But there was another reason too. She needed to stay alert.
On the day after Jessie was burned, while she was recovering in the hospital, her ex-husband, Kyle Voss, was released from prison. This was the same ex-husband who’d been incarcerated in the first place for murdering his mistress, trying to frame Jessie for the crime, and then attempting to kill her when she found out.
And yet somehow, the prosecutor in Kyle’s case had recently confessed to improper conduct involving the mishandling of evidence. Of course Jessie knew the “somehow.” Kyle had made friends with a prison gang associated with the infamous Monzon drug cartel. Subsequently, cartel members had threatened the prosecutor’s family. Jessie was sure of this. Her FBI agent friend, Jack Dolan, was equally certain. Unfortunately they couldn’t prove it.
So, while Jessie lay in a hospital bed recovering from burns, a judge released Kyle Voss into the community, even apologizing to him in court. Kyle was his usual charming self at the time. He held a press conference admitting he was “far from a perfect person” and that he planned to turn over a new leaf, including starting a foundation to fund charities that helped wrongly convicted prisoners.
What Kyle didn’t admit to—what Jessie knew but couldn’t prove—was that while he was in prison, he’d undertaken a campaign to destroy Jessie’s life and reputation. It had started with small things, like having a cartel member knife her car tires. It escalated to planting anti-psychotic drugs, anonymously calling social services to claim she was abusing Hannah, whom she had custody of, and hacking into her social media and posting racist and anti-Semitic rants. That last maneuver, despite being unmasked, was still having lasting impacts on Jessie’s work relationships and the public’s perception of her.
It culminated with an anonymous flower arrangement sent to her hospital room saying the giver would be seeing her soon. Considering that Kyle had already tried to kill her and had told a prison informant that he wanted to “gut her like a pig and bathe in her warm blood,” Jessie decided a little less pain medication was worth the discomfort if it kept her vigilant.
It helped that her boyfriend, who’d recently moved in with her and Hannah, was a decorated LAPD detective who looked like he could take a charging bull in a wrestling match. Ryan Hernandez, the top investigator in the department’s Homicide Special Section (HSS) unit, was six feet tall and two hundred pounds of solid muscle. Jessie sometimes felt like she was dating her personal bodyguard, though it didn’t look that way right now.
“Comfortable?” she asked as he moved over to the couch and lay down on it with his bare feet on the arm.
“Very,” he said before teasing her. “You getting those dishes sudsy enough?”
“You’re about to find out how sudsy they are if you don’t take your smelly feet off the arm of my couch.”
He complied without a word, though he did stick his tongue out at her. She tried not to grin.
In addition to having the tough guy in the food coma around, it was also reassuring that her apartment was essentially a vault. It had been designed that way when she was being hunted by her own birth father, a serial killer named Xander Thurman, who had decided that she would either join the family business or be a victim of it.
So she’d gotten a place in a building with retired cops as security guards, a 24/7 monitored, gated parking lot, and security cameras in every hallway and public space. But that was just the beginning.
She was one of the few residents—all in high-profile jobs—who lived on the secret thirteenth floor, which was unknown to most people in the building. It could only be accessed via stairwells from the twelfth or fourteenth floors, hidden behind utility closets.
In addition to all that, Jessie had set up her own elaborate security system for the condo, including multiple locks and alarms. The one advantage of having been married to a murderous but wealthy and successful financial advisor was that when she divorced him, she became independently wealthy herself.
Despite all those precautions, she knew that Kyle, a sociopath who had fooled her for a decade, was wily and relentless. He had almost gotten away with murder. He had negotiated his way out of a long prison sentence. She wasn’t going to underestimate his ability to circumvent her security precautions.
“You up for dessert?” Hannah asked her from the dinner table, pulling Jessie back into the present as she rinsed off the last of the dishes. “I made pear tarts.”
Jessie was full but didn’t want to upset the tenuous good vibes of the evening.
“I’m about to burst but I could try a small one,” she said, getting a satisfied smile from her half-sister.