6

The smell of smoke followed Abbey Laurent into her oceanfront home off Highway 1 west of Malibu.

For six months, as she did research for her next novel, the smell had stayed with her and never really gone away. It lingered in her clothes, in her car, in her closet, on her skin, and in her hair. Every breath she took brought a faint, charred aroma through her nose. But Abbey didn’t mind. She couldn’t write about things without living them herself, and for months she’d been living the aftermath of the La Sienta Ranch fire.

Forty-​­five thousand acres blackened in the ­tinder-​­dry Santa Monica Mountains. Fifteen hundred homes destroyed. One hundred and three people dead. And no explanation of how it had started.

It was almost one in the morning. Abbey didn’t turn on any lights as she got home, and she tried to move quietly in the darkness, not wanting to awaken Garrett. He was used to her strange hours, but he wasn’t a night creature like her. She lit the way through the house with her phone. Despite the months she’d spent here, she still made wrong turns sometimes and bumped into furniture in the ­five-​­thousand-​­square-​­foot hillside mansion. Abbey didn’t own the house. She’d rented it from a Hollywood producer who was away on a yearlong film project in New Zealand. He was a fan of her books, so he’d let her have it for a price so ridiculously cheap for Malibu that she couldn’t turn it down. The house was only half an hour across the mountains on Highway 23 from the worst of the fire’s devastation.

Abbey slipped inside the den she used as her office and writing space. It was a ­front-​­facing room with an enormous balcony that overlooked the crashing waves of the Pacific. The double doors to the adjacent bedroom where she and Garrett slept were open, and she could hear the quiet rumble of his breathing from the ­king-​­sized bed. Keeping the lights off as she went into the bedroom, she opened her walk-­in closet, which was almost as large as the entire studio apartment where she’d lived in Quebec City a few years ago. Another pent-­up wave of fire smoke wafted from her clothes inside. She stripped naked, then padded across the plush carpet to the master bathroom.

With the door closed behind her, she finally turned on a light. She started the water in the walk-­in shower, and when it was scalding hot, she let the water cascade over her body. She soaped herself up from head to toe and shampooed her ­shoulder-​­length burgundy hair, but even when she was clean and dry, the ashy smell lingered on her pale pink skin. Still naked, she turned off the lights and went back into the bedroom.

She was too riled up to sleep. That was typical. This book was the most emotional project she’d ever pursued. She’d spent the day interviewing a lawyer who’d lost his house, his wife, and his ­four-​­year-​­old son in the fire. The numb look on his face had stayed with her, that empty desolation of someone who had seen his entire life stripped away. He hadn’t been back to the scene since it happened; he said he couldn’t bear to see the remnants of what had once been his home. All he wanted was answers.

How had the fire started?

And who did it?

Those were the answers Abbey wanted, too.

Her huge success over the past couple of years had been as a novelist. She’d followed in the heels of the late Peter Chancellor by writing ­ripped-​­from-​­the-​­headlines conspiracy thrillers, the kind of books where readers wondered if that was how it had really happened. So she was writing the La Sienta Ranch book as a novel, but she wanted it grounded in reality. The more she dug into the fire, the more the real mysteries got inside her head. Even if this was fiction, she was still a journalist, and she wanted to figure out the truth.

In the midst of her research, she’d also done something she never expected.

She fell in love.

Abbey stared down at the dark shape of the man in the bed. She could make out his bare chest above the thin sheet, his head turned sideways on the pillow. She loved how he looked: his long dark hair, almost as long as hers; the smooth, neatly trimmed line of his beard; his bony frame, athletic but a little gangly. The sheet bulged from the mound between his long legs. He always slept naked, like she did. She felt a strong desire to slip the sheet aside and reach down and arouse him with her fingers, and then climb on top of him and make love to him in quick, sweaty silence.

Garrett Parker.

He was ­twenty-​­nine; she was ­thirty-​­six. He was still a kid, ­really, but she liked the novelty of being with a younger man. Most of the men she’d loved in the past were older. They’d met by accident five months ago at a bar in the O’Hare airport, when she was on her way back to LAX and Garrett was on a layover flying from Washington, DC, to Seattle. Abbey didn’t think she’d ever met anyone quite so charming. He was funny, brilliant, and ­movie-​­star handsome, like a nerdy version of Harry Styles. They’d talked for hours, losing all track of time between martinis. When they both realized they’d missed their flights, they rented a room together at the airport Hilton, and Abbey did something she’d never done before in her life. She fucked a man only hours after meeting him.

And it was good. Very, very good.

After that, things moved crazy fast. Too fast. She found that she wanted to spend every waking minute with Garrett, but she had a book to research, and he had a senior IT job in Seattle. They stole weekends together when they could. They Zoomed all night. They had real sex when they were together and video sex when they weren’t. Only six weeks later, Garrett sublet his Bellevue condo and moved in with Abbey in her rented Malibu mansion. Another three months after that, they took a weekend trip to Reno, won big at craps, and got very drunk to celebrate. She didn’t really remember whether he’d asked her or she asked him, but when they got on the Southwest jet back to Los Angeles, they had rings on their fingers.

That had been two weeks ago.

She’d lived two whole weeks as a married woman.

Abbey was still floating. She’d found the man of her dreams, something she’d never expected at this stage of her life. Standing in the bedroom, naked, she wanted to make love to him. She wanted to feel him inside her at the end of a long, difficult day. Her body was damp and ready. But she didn’t reach for him. She went back to her walk-­in closet and found a silk robe, and then she took her laptop to the balcony outside her office. She sat on one of the patio chairs, with the low hills all around her and the hypnotic noise of the waves rising from the Pacific, which glittered like millions of stars under the California moonlight.

This was paradise. How could anyone not be happy with this life?

And yet she wasn’t.

Yes, she loved Garrett, but as Abbey sat on the balcony, it wasn’t Garrett’s face she saw in her head. It wasn’t Garrett’s arms that she wanted around her. The gravelly voice that aroused her didn’t belong to her husband. Her heart told her what she didn’t want to hear, that she’d fallen in love and gotten married for all the wrong reasons. She was trying to fill a hole at the bottom of her soul, and that void had a name.

Jason Bourne.

Jason.

Where was he now?

She’d said goodbye to him more than a year ago. Her choice. She’d walked away. She’d had no contact with him since then, nothing, zero. He’d given her a way to reach him if she ever needed to find him again, but she’d deliberately chosen not to do that, even on those lonely nights when she would have loved to hear his voice and be reminded of their time together.

He hadn’t reached out to her, either. Not that she’d expected him to. They were doing what they’d promised each other when they split up on the boardwalk in Quebec City. They were living their own lives, apart from each other, in different worlds. She couldn’t share the life of a killer. She couldn’t accept who he was and the things he had to do. She’d tried, and she’d fooled herself for a while, but it was too hard.

But every time she thought she’d put Jason behind her, he crept into her mind again.

“Fuck!” Abbey said out loud, exasperated with herself.

She opened her laptop, hoping work would push all the other thoughts out of her mind. Her focus now was on the La Sienta Ranch fire and the novel that would come out of it. She had an idea in her head of how the book would start, with a desperate man anxious to cover up a crime. A murder.

Chapter One.

Her fingers tapped on the keys:

Death always carried a scythe, and so did the midnight man.

Sweating, panicking, he hacked at withered thistles and tall brown weeds filling the scrubland, which had seen no rain in months. He dragged armfuls back to the hilltop house, stacking it against walls and under windows, making kindling for the blaze. This was the burn season. The season of fire. Warning signs alerted the people who lived here to be ready to run with just the shirts on their backs.

From a single spark, infernos came. One little flame would hatch the egg that became a dragon. And the body left behind in the house would simply be one more victim.

Abbey read the words and then reread them. She liked the idea of the midnight man starting the fire. But who was he? Why was he willing to go so far? Did he start the fire knowing it would spiral out of control, or was he horrified at the monster to which he gave birth?

The body. Whose body? Who was it?

She shook her head. The concept wasn’t there yet, and she couldn’t rush it. She needed to know more about the real mystery in order to craft the fictional mystery. In a few days, she was supposed to meet a conspiracy blogger with whom she’d crossed paths once before. He’d reached out to her online when he read in People ­magazine that her next book was to be inspired by the La Sienta Ranch fire.

There are things about the fire you don’t know!

Most of what he published was ­QAnon-​­level nonsense, but he’d been right once before. He’d pointed Abbey toward a Washington conspiracy that had nearly killed her. She was only alive now because Jason had been there to save her.

Jason!

Everything always came back to Jason.

Abbey slapped the laptop shut. She tugged her robe tighter against the nighttime chill. The bitter smell of smoke stayed in her nose, never going away.

Except . . .

This was not the smoke of a fire. This was a cigarette.

Her brow furrowed with puzzlement. Abbey got out of the chair and went to the balcony railing. Rolling hills stretched in both directions in the darkness. Below her, beyond the highway, the ocean reflected the moonlight. She inhaled, and what she smelled was definitely a cigarette, rising with the wind that blew up the slope. Someone was down there, in the shadows not far from the house.

Watching her.

“Hello?” Abbey called. “Who’s there?”

She found herself adding, “I have a gun.”

Which was a lie. If whoever was down there had night vision ­binoculars—​­Jesus, why would she think that?—​­then he could see that she was unarmed. She was also keenly aware of being naked under the thin robe. But she had a CZ P-­01 9mm in the bedroom steps away, and she knew how to use it.

Thanks to Jason.

To live in his world, he’d told her, she needed to know how to use a gun. If they come after me, they’ll come after you, too.

“If you’re looking for money or drugs, you won’t find any here,” she added in a conversational tone to whoever was hiding down there. “But if you get close to me, I swear, I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

She heard nothing. Even the cigarette smell seemed to vanish, as if it had been snuffed out underfoot.

Was she talking to herself?

No. She wasn’t. On the slope leading toward Highway 1, she heard a faint crackling of brush. Her eyes narrowed, and just for a moment, she was sure she saw the silhouette of someone walking away.