Page 1 of Twisted Empire

CHAPTERONE

Madelyn

Isat tensed in the backseat of an unfamiliar SUV, staring at the pistol trained directly between my eyes and trying to determine exactly how I’d gotten here. It had happened so quickly—and been so incomprehensible—that I was still having trouble wrapping my head around the apparent facts.

Logan’s mother was alive.

Logan’s mother was holding a gun to my head, after dragging me away from Logan and the rest of my guys at the strange medical facility we’d been investigating.

I’d only seen the woman next to me in photos from before her supposed death more than ten years ago, but I could recognize the matching curves of her features, the pale hair and dark eyes that were so like Logan’s. And from his response, he’d had no doubt it was her either.

How could she be alive? Where had she been all this time—why had she stayed away?

Why had she appeared out of the bluenowof all times?

And what did she want withme? We’d never even met before.

My gaze dropped to her prosthetic hand resting on the middle seat between us. Logan had told me that he and his father had been forced to bury only her hand. They’d assumed the rest of her body had burned up in the explosion.

But really she’d simply left it behind… to create a convincing story of her death? Why had she wanted to disappear at all?

My mouth opened and closed, but it was hard to summon the courage to ask any of those questions with the gun staring me down.

My phone, which I’d shoved into my hip pocket, chimed with an incoming text. Faster than I would have expected—which maybe was wrong of me, considering how nimble I’d seen Slade move with his mechanical leg—Logan’s mom switched the pistol to her prosthetic hand and leaned forward to yank the phone from my pocket. She held down the button to turn it completely off and shoved it into her purse before swapping gun-hands again.

“You won’t be talking with anyone else for a good long while,” she said.

I glanced at the driver, but all I could see of him was the back of his head with its ruddy buzzcut as he kept the SUV in motion. No sign that he thought there was anything strange about what his passengers were getting up to.

My attention shifted to the window next to me. If I could keep track of where we were going—

But Logan’s mom obviously guessed my intentions. She tsked her tongue at me and dug a strip of black fabric out of her purse. “Put this over your eyes,” she said, tossing it to me.

When I balked, she waved the gun. “I could start shooting off fingers and see how many you’ll be left to work with when you give in.”

She sounded totally serious—and totally calm about the threat. A shudder ran down my spine.

My jaw clenching, I grabbed the blindfold and tied it over my eyes. I meant to leave it a little loose with a sliver of visibility at the bottom, but no such luck.

“Tighter,” Logan’s mom demanded.

I gritted my teeth and tugged the knot a little more. Only a faint glow of light remained at the edge of my vision. I wasn’t figuring anything out from that.

“Why are you doing this?” I couldn’t help asking, wincing inwardly at how pathetic my quavering voice sounded.

“Don’t you worry about that.”

Yeah, right. Don’t worry about the fact that I was being kidnapped at gunpoint. If I hadn’t been so on edge, I’d have rolled my eyes.

This was Logan’s mother, the woman who’d raised him for the first ten years of his life. She couldn’t be completely horrible, could she? She’d acted like she still cared about him in the few moments before she’d grabbed me.

“Logan thought you were dead,” I said cautiously. “Where’ve you been all this time?”

“That’s none of your business. Just sit there quietly and this’ll be easier for all of us.”

For her, anyway. My heart thumped louder, but I risked another question. “How did you find us at that building?”

Wasshetangled up in the crimes we’d been investigating somehow?

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