Page 71 of Cold Light of Day

Autumn still struggled to believe her mother would have gotten involved with the person Dad described. He closed his eyes and released a ragged sigh. Autumn felt his pain slice through her too.

“She chose to give us another chance—for you and Nolan. I was desperate to fix our family, so I took all our money from savings and bought that ridiculous yacht, a foolish decision. I could never compete financially with the man she’d fallen for. But I wanted to try and offer a glamorous life—whatever it took to keep us together. She’d ended things with him, but he wasn’t the kind of man who would allow that. If he couldn’t have your mother, then neither could I.

“After that day, after she drowned, he swore that he would take you from me because I took the woman he loved from him. The night that you found me shot, he had sent someone to the house looking foryou. I tried to stop him. To take him down, but my lame arm...”

Oh, Dad.Autumn pulled up the man’s image from her cell and showed it to her father. “Is this him?”

“That’s his brother who works for him. With him.”

“Why now? Why all of a sudden?”

“His brother, Mateo Santos, was released from prison a fewmonths ago and will be running the operation for Rafael, and it appears fulfilling his past threats to me is a top priority.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this so I wouldn’t be blindsided? What about Nolan? Is he in danger too?”

Autumn hadn’t known about her parents’ issues. All of it weighed painfully on her heart, and she wanted to curl into a ball when she got home. But right now, she needed to see this through.

“As far as I know, he’s only after you. You... You look just like her.” Grief edged his words.

“If you intended to hide us when you left Topeka, why remain a police chief? You’d be easy to find. You’re not telling me everything, Dad.”

“I wasn’t hiding. Rafael and Mateo were finally captured and incarcerated, and I wasn’t worried about him coming after you. Not until recently. Running and hiding was no kind of life for you. I brought you to your mother’s childhood home, where you would know your grandparents, and for the last many years, I prayed this day would never come. That he would forget his threats and get over the past.”

Autumn’s heart jumped to her throat with her next question. “And what about Mom?”

He looked at her long and hard as if trying to learn if she already knew the truth, but he simply pursed his lips rather than tell her that her mother faked her own death to protect her family from the man she rejected.

But his response didn’t satisfy Autumn.

“Where is she?”

“I honestly don’t know, and I don’t want to know.”

Dad is lying to me, and to himself.

THIRTY

Grier walked out of the room, leaving Autumn with her father. He nodded at the officer at the door and made a beeline for the vending machine down the hallway, where he grabbed two black coffees.

He couldn’t stand to hear more. He already knew a bad man was after her, but the reasons for that were heart-wrenching. Her mother was still alive? Man, how long had she known? What did learning that kind of hard truth do to a person?

He didn’t have those kinds of family dynamics to deal with. He grew up in Indiana, but when he was nine, his parents died in a car accident, and he went to live with his aunt in Omaha. Then he headed off to college, and after his aunt died, he had no one else. So he got sucked into an obscure three-letter agency. He hadn’t told Autumn the truth yet because he feared putting her in even more danger.

Right now he was playing the wait-and-see game.

But she was on a truth hunt, and his time would come. For now he would let her digest what her father had shared, including the criminal’s name. That would go a long way in helping law enforcement take him down.

Again.

In the meantime, he handed off the extra coffee to the officer standing outside the hospital room door. “You can let her know I’m in the waiting area.” He gestured to the space at the end of the hall.

“Will do,” the officer said. “Thanks for the coffee.”

The agency had kept Grier’s wanted status under wraps and in-house, but he looked for them to go public with it soon. If they couldn’t bring him in quietly, then they would use other tactics. Now that the chief and Grier knew the name of the man after her and could share that with law enforcement, maybe he would be captured soon and Grier could disappear. Because if the chief was killed in all this mess—hisorher mess—he couldn’t live with himself.

Maybe he couldn’t live with himself anyway because he was responsible for Krueger’s death.

Krueger...his chest tightened. The man had sacrificed everything to help Grier. He never should have let Krueger try to secure the evidence to clear Grier’s name. And he shouldn’t allow the chief to help him either, but he wanted to protect her since she was entangled in someone else’s mess through no fault of her own.

---