Page 2 of K-9 Confidential

Another shot filled the night. Closer than before.

“Charlie! Stop where you are!” Henry Acker’s voice cut through the night as clearly as one of the air raid sirens he’d had installed throughout town.

She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Because no matter how much her body wanted to, the moment she surrendered, she’d lose any chance of proving her father and this town had a hand in the terrorist attack that’d left four people dead.Ten years.She’d been an outcast for every single one, had left her sister to die here alone. No. She wasn’t going to stop. She was the only one who could fix this. Who could prove Erin had been murdered.

Charlie dared a glance over her shoulder to gauge the distance between them. Too close. Even in his late fifties, her father had kept himself ready for a war he’d prepared them to fight. The road inclined up, and the toe of her boot caught. She fell forward, hands out to catch herself.

Gravel cut into her palms and knees. The journal protected most of one hand, but the pain was still a shock to her system. She ordered her legs to take her weight.

A strong grip fisted the collar of her jacket and spun her around. She slipped the journal into her waistband a split second before she slammed into a wall of muscle. Forced to look up at the man she’d always feared. Feared to disrespect. To oppose. To disobey. Henry Acker had always been bigger than her. Harder. With no patience for the three girls he’d had to raise on his own. He pulled at her collar with one hand, leveling the rifle in the other straight toward the sky. “I told you what would happen if you came back here.”

“I was never good at following orders, was I, Dad?” She tried to wrench out of his hold. Only she wasn’t strong enough. She never had been. Not against him. “Never a good enough soldier for you.”

The dark brown hair that’d once matched hers had whitened to the point he could’ve subbed for Santa at the mall. Heavy bags took up position under his eyes, as though he hadn’t slept—not just in days, but weeks, months. Years. And she hoped like hell he’d suffered from whatever kept him up at night. “Hand it over. Whatever you took. I want it back.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Charlie rocketed her arm into his and thrust out of his hold. And he let her. She added a few feet of distance between them, but it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good. Vaughn, New Mexico, wasn’t some small town dying off from lack of tourism. It was a safehold. The birthplace of Acker’s Army, where outsiders weren’t allowed. This place? This was Henry Acker’s kingdom, and she was nothing compared to the resources he held.

“You didn’t break into your sister’s room for nothing.” Movement registered from her right as her father leveled the gun back on her. A shadow broke away from the tree line protecting her father’s property. Then another from the left. He was having her surrounded. Cutting off her escape. “The journal. Hand it over or these two will take it from you by force.”

Charlie took another step back. She could run, but there was no place in this world she could hide. Not anymore. “Why? Is it because you’re afraid of what Erin wrote about you? About this place? Are you afraid she might expose you for what you really are?”

“And what is that, Charlie?” He countered her pitiful attempt to add distance between them.

She couldn’t say the words. Couldn’t accuse him, no matter how many times she’d thought of his dark deeds. Of what he’d made her and her sisters do. Her voice shook. “I know Erin didn’t die in a hunting accident.”

“Enough! I’ve given you a chance to cooperate, but as always, I’m going to have to force my hand with you.” Her father’s jaw flexed under the pressure of his back teeth, a habit he’d always had when she’d dared to defy his command. “Get the journal and bring her to my house. We have a lot to talk about.”

The men waiting for her father’s orders, like the good soldiers they were, moved in. She was out of time, out of patience waiting for Henry Acker to do the right thing. To prove he cared about her.

“I’m not going anywhere with you.” Unholstering the small pistol stuffed on the front of her right hip, she took aim. At her father. Both men pulled their own weapons. “And I’m going to prove you had something to do with Erin’s death. No matter how long it takes, Dad. Because she deserved better than you. Better than this place.”

“You’re making a mistake, Charlie.” Seconds ticked by, each one longer than the last, as he leveled that bright blue gaze on her. “As always, you’re only thinking of yourself instead of your family.”

She took a step back, closer to the vehicle she’d stashed off the side of the road. Far enough away not to garner attention. One wrong move. That was all it would take, and she’d lose this game they’d been playing for so long. “Someone has to.”

Charlie moved slower than she wanted to go, prying the driver’s side door open. She lowered her weapon and collapsed into the seat as both gunmen ran to catch up. She started the engine as the first bullet punctured through the windshield. Low in her seat, she shoved the vehicle into Reverse and hit the accelerator, heart in her throat.

And knew Henry Acker was going to tear this world apart to find her.

* * *

“You’ve got tobe kidding me.” Former counterterrorism agent, Granger Morais, memorized the surveillance photos sprawled in a haphazard pile on the desk. It didn’t take long. He’d been studying this subject for nearly a decade. The chestnut bangs that framed an oval face, dark eyes the color of coal, a sharp jawline that always seemed to be set in defiance. Granger checked the date on the surveillance. Yesterday. He rifled through the rest of the stack. “Where did you get these?”

Ivy Bardot—Socorro Security’s founder and CEO herself—refused to give any hint as to how they were going to proceed with this new intel. This wasn’t Socorro’s case. His former life was coming back to haunt him, and she knew it. “Our source insideSangre por Sangresent them over an hour ago.”

Sangre por Sangre.A bloodthirsty cartel hobbling on its last legs thanks to the men and women of Socorro who’d put their lives at risk to stop the infection spreading through New Mexico. Bombings, executions, drug smuggling, human trafficking, abductions, torture—there were no limits to the kind of pain the cartel could inflict, and they’d done so freely up until a year ago. Before the Pentagon had realized the threat and sent Socorro in to neutralize it. Now the cartel lieutenants were running with their tails between their legs. Hiding.

Granger reached out to test the glossy surface of the photos—to make sure this wasn’t some kind of nightmare he’d gotten caught in for the thousandth time. Hesitation kept him from making contact. Ivy wasn’t FBI anymore, but there was a reason she’d risen to the top of the Bureau’s investigators in under a decade. She saw everything. He tensed the muscles in his right shoulder. “She wasn’t at her sister’s funeral three days ago. These were taken somewhere else. Who else knows?”

“You, me, our source.” The weight of Ivy’s gaze refused to let up. She was studying him, trying to break through his armor and get something that would tell her he was too invested in this, and hell, she was right. But he wasn’t going to give her anything to use against him. “And we picked up radio chatter from Henry Acker.”

The name sucker punched him harder than he expected. Henry Acker had a tendency to do that in the counterterrorism world. The unspoken decision-maker of a small angry militant group out of Vaughn, New Mexico was a man with his fingers in a lot of pies, but not a whole lot of evidence to prove it. Someone who prided himself on getting away with murder by having others do his dirty work. Including his three daughters, two of whom had paid for his sins with their lives. And now Charlie was back. After ten years of hiding. Why? “You said these came from insideSangre por Sangre. What would they want with a woman who blew up a pipeline ten years ago?”

“I don’t know, but they’re not wasting time trying to find her.” Ivy shifted in her seat, the first real sign of life from Socorro’s founder. “I’ve got a report that says they want to use her for something big. Something that may tip power back intoSangre por Sangre’s hands. Though my source couldn’t tell me what, exactly.”

“You want me to find her.” It made sense. Granger was the only one on this team who had experience with homegrown terrorism and the painful aftermath people like Charlie Acker inflicted on bystanders who got in the way.

“There’s a reason Charlie has chosen to show her face after all this time. If she’s working for Daddy again, I want to know what Henry Acker is up to. Before we have another national incident on our hands,” she said. “You’ve studied her behavior. You know what kind of resources she has at her disposal. Where would she go?”

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