Chapter One
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Nash McKenna drove as if his life depended on it. Or rather as if her life depended on it. Because it sure as hell did. She could be dying right now.
Caroline.
He tried to shut out the images of her being attacked. And failed big time. So, he just kept up the bat out of hell pace, speeding toward her place in the Texas Hill Country.
Normally, this would have been a scenic trip, threading his SUV past the chalk-white bluffs, the clear water creeks, the mineral springs, and the fields crammed with spring wildflowers. There was no way for him to enjoy the view now though. Not when there was so much at stake.
He had to get to Caroline before the killer did.
Had to.
His phone vibrated, and like the other messages he’d received in the past ten minutes, this one immediately loaded on his dash monitor. “Status?” he muttered, saying the single word of the text aloud.
The question was from his boss, Ruby Maverick, head of Maverick Ops, an elite team of former military and law enforcement officers who handled everything from life and death investigations to personal security services.
In this case, the personal applied. Man, did it.
Because Caroline was Ruby’s daughter.
Caroline was other things, too. Again, personal stuff. But Nash couldn’t think of that now either. He just kept driving and took yet another turn that would get him closer to her.
“Reply to text,” he instructed his AI program that he recently renamed Oz for the movie that’d had both entertained and scared the crap out of him when he’d been a kid. “I’m two minutes out from Caroline’s place.”
One hundred and twenty seconds wasn’t that long, but it would likely feel like a lifetime or two to the normally unflappable Ruby. To say things were strained between Caroline and her was like saying the ocean had a drop or two of water in it. Still, Ruby loved her daughter, and this threat had to be clawing away at her.
Ruby would have no doubt wanted to make this trip herself, but she was hours away on a business trip in Austin. Nash had just returned from an assignment and had been at his place. Since that put him only about twenty miles from Caroline’s, he’d been the one Ruby had tapped to come after Caroline hadn’t responded to multiple phone calls and texts.
Nash had sent some of those texts to her. He’d made a couple of calls, too, that had gone straight to voicemail. Normally, that wouldn’t have made him curse a blue streak. Or get twisted up with worry. Then again, he didn’t normally make a habit of calling Caroline, but this was nowhere close to a normal situation.
The county cops were on the way to her house, too, but they had been even further out than Nash. Added to that, the dispatcher had apparently told Ruby they were short-staffed and would be sending out only one deputy.
No way had Ruby wanted to trust her daughter’s safety to a single cop. Hell, she would have probably sent out an entire platoon or police squad if she could have managed it.
Nash felt a little relief when he saw Caroline’s mailbox. Her address was on the side, and it had a small red, orange, and purple sculpture on top.
A phoenix.
He knew it was the name of Caroline’s blown glass studio. A studio that just about everybody, including him, considered to be the textbook definition of out in the sticks. She was a good half mile from her nearest neighbor, and while he normally didn’t consider that a bad thing, he did right now.
There’d be no one to hear her scream.
No one to come running to try to help her.
That gave Nash a vicious gut punch feeling and added a spike to the urgency building inside him that in no way needed more spikes. The urgency was already sky-high and bordering on panic.
Her house finally came into view. It was snuggled in between a bunch of trees and a pasture with a pond. The house itself was small, one story, white, with dark green shutters. But the building next to it was the size of a barn.
Caroline’s work studio.
That’s where he parked, and the tires skidded to a stop over the loose gravel surface. Nash immediately drew his Glock, bolted from his SUV, and raced toward the door of the studio. He yanked it hard enough to cause the muscles in his shoulder to protest, and then he cursed.
Because it was locked.
“Caroline?” he called out.