DEA agent Kira Waters was about to meet her half sisters for the first time. She was nervous, which was weird, because she didn’t get nervous anymore.
She passed a boutique, and couldn’t help checking her reflection in the glass. Maybe she should’ve toned it down, just for today, she thought. Maybe she should’ve worn one of those stupid pantsuits her mother had bought her instead of leggings, over-the-knee-boots, and her signature leather jacket. But that would’ve clashed with the scarlet highlights in her short auburn hair.
The coffee shop was just ahead. She told herself there was nothing to be nervous about as she tapped over the sidewalk, and finally through the doors, out of the winter cold and into the cafe, scanning the tables and spotting the women. Had to be them. Two blondes, one butterscotch, the other platinum, and a curly brunette. All three had long hair, making her self-conscious about her short cut.
The brunette glanced her way, saw her looking back, and nudged the others. They all smiled and got to their feet to greet her with awkward hugs.
“Toni Rio,” said the brunette.
Her face would’ve been familiar even if Kira hadn’t seen her picture. She was a bestselling author of true crime novels.
“You’re pretty well known around the DEA, Toni. I’m gonna get a lot of mileage out of being your sister.”
“And maybe I’ll get a little research out of being yours?” she said, lifting her brows, making it a question.
Kira laughed it off, and turned to the platinum blonde in the pretty yellow sundress, who had the very beginnings of a baby bump. “You’re Cait,” she said.
“I am. So good to meet you, Kira.”
“You, too,” she said. Toni had told her on the phone that Cait was expecting. “When are you due?”
“Not until June,” Cait replied with a quick, raised-eyebrow look at the third woman, who had to be Joey.
Joey shook her head and said, “My intuition says mid-May.” Then, “Great to meet you, Kira.”
“You too, Joey.” Kira knew about this one. In addition to talking to Toni by phone, she’d researched all of them before coming to meet them. Of course she had. She was a cop, it’s what she did. Joey was a self-proclaimed psychic, and by all accounts, a pretty good one, though Kira didn’t believe in that sort of thing.
They all sat down. Kira ordered a coffee, and then there was a lot of getting-to-know-each-other chit chat. Toni was the only one who’d been raised by the man who’d fathered them all, and Kira was full of questions about him, but about halfway through, she sensed there was something else on their minds, so she stopped talking, sipped her coffee, and looked at each of them, waiting.
Toni said, “There’s one more of us. And even with my resources, we haven’t been able to find her. We’re hoping you might be able to help.”
Kira frowned as Toni tapped her phone and handed it to her.
“She’s in danger,” Joey said. “I feel it right to my bones.”
Kira was looking at a photo of another half sister. She’d inherited a little more of their father’s Latin blood, like Toni had, naturally tan skin and huge brown eyes. “She’s beautiful,” she said. “What’s her name?”
“Lexia Stoltz,” Toni said.
Kira’s head came up fast. “Doctor Lexia Stoltz?”
The other three nodded.
Kira looked across at Joey. “You’re right. She is in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” Toni asked. She looked like she’d jump into the middle of it without much provocation, whatever it was.
“The kind I can’t tell you about,” Kira said. The other three looked at her expectantly, almost willing her to say more, and she looked away, then back again, and felt compelled to tell them something. “She hasn’t done anything illegal or anything like that. But…we’re looking for her, too. And we’re not the only ones.”
*****
The genius Dr. Elliot Stoltz had died in his sleep only three weeks after they’d arrived at the massive, Adirondack log cabin. Six months after that, Lexi was still there. She’d driven the U-haul back to pick up her car, put the house on the market, and wrapped herself up in the cabin like a big warm blanket.
Her mother had loved the place, from what she remembered. It was odd how her most vivid memories of the woman were set there. And they were happy memories; blurry, sketchy, happy memories. But they comforted her.
Lexi had only been five when her mom had died. And her father had grown steadily colder and more hateful toward her every day since. Maybe he had been before, and her mother’s love had protected her from realizing it. Maybe she’d just been too young to remember.
“He’s a great man, Lexi. He’ll save a lot of lives. But in a lot of ways, he’s almost helpless too. Our job is to take care of him so that he can take care of the world. In that way, we save a lot of lives, too.”
She remembered that. Those words of her mother’s had been repeated to her over and over. Always she’d emphasized how different her dad was, how brilliant men didn’t feel emotions the way others did, and how she must never take that personally, and never let it sway her from caring for him, enabling him to do his great work.
She still didn’t know what had killed her father. He’d left explicit instructions for his remains, forbidding autopsy or obituary, and requesting immediate cremation. There was nothing all that mysterious about a man of eighty-two suffering dementia or dying in his sleep. And since he’d have hated the notion of her interfering with his final wishes, she hadn’t.
She’d been surprised to learn that everything he’d owned had been quietly transferred into her name a month before his death. She wondered if he’d known, somehow, that he was out of time. And she wondered why he’d given everything to her when he’d always seemed to hate her, and why he’d always seemed to hated her. Her mother had insisted he was just emotionally crippled, but it sure felt like hate to Lexi. She wondered if coming up here to die had somehow made him feel closer to her mother, the way it did her. She wished she’d asked her questions while he was still alive.
“Who am I kidding?” she asked aloud. “He wouldn’t have told me anyway.”
Jax looked up at her from his spot on the rug, as close to the fireplace as he could get without singeing his yellow fur. Lexi sat in a rocker only a little bit further from the warm, yellow flames. It was good up here. Quiet. Comfortable. Serene. It was the perfect place for her to figure out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. Odd how hard that was. Caring for her father had been her prime directive for so long, she hardly knew what to do now that he was gone.
The wind outside moaned a little louder than before, compelling her to get up and wander to the nearest window. The place had lots of windows, tall, broad ones that followed the lines of the steeply peaked cathedral ceilings in the great room. They provided a panoramic view of the snow-covered pines and the mountains all around the place. An eighteen-foot spruce tree stood in front of the tallest of them, decked in soft white lights and nothing else.
The tree farmer had sent his teenage sons up with it a week ago, lights already attached. She hadn’t put another thing on the tree, and she rarely even bothered to plug it in. She kind of liked the serenity of the darkness with nothing but the orange and yellow fireplace flames and a few candles to break it.
Nighttime was different up here, she thought, gazing outside. Star-spangled and natural. Alive and real. Nothing like night had been downstate. The night up here spoke in whispers, but at least it spoke.
The house tended to creak in response to the wind outside. It was as if the night moaned a question and then the house creaked an answer.
She paced away from the window, bending to stroke Jax's head when he twisted around her calves. There was nothing out there. Just forests and lakes and the speck-on-the-map town of Pine Lake a few miles down the mountain, where old men still sat around a checkerboard in the general store.
She ought to go back to bed, try to sleep, she supposed. She turned toward the curving staircase and started up it.
Then she stopped dead in her tracks and listened to what sounded absurdly like an upstairs window scraping open.
A heartbeat later, the doorbell chimed, and she almost jumped out of her skin, the sound was so unexpected. No one visited her up here. Especially not in the middle of the night.
Her stomach turned queasy as she tried to decide which to investigate first. She turned toward the door, because a doorbell was certainly real, while a weird noise her brain interpreted as an upstairs window scraping open, was probably not.
Maybe it was a hunter who'd got himself lost. Or maybe one of the locals needed something. Still, there was a tingling along her nape, and her hand on the doorknob trembled a little as she turned it and pulled the door open.
The man who stood on the other side of it looked...desolate. A face of harsh angles, and eyes that held no light. Dark hair that had gone too long without a trim, and a face in need of a shave. Thick, expressive brows. Black leather jacket, jeans, boots.
He was looking her over just as carefully, and she shivered a little in her white flannel nightgown and bare feet.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I hope so.” There was something about his deep, rough voice that made her nerve endings go alert and tense. “I’m looking for Dr. Elliot Stoltz.”
“No one here by that name. You must have the wrong address.” She had no idea what made her blurt the denial. Maybe the ghost of her father’s delusional warnings before his death, that if anyone called or came by asking about him, she should deny knowing anything about him or his whereabouts. Yes, that was part of an old man’s paranoia, but the denial spilled from her lips before she had time to think better of it.
"You'll find," the dark stranger said slowly, "that it's not a real good idea to lie to me, Lexia. That is who you are, isn’t it? Dr. Lexia Stoltz?”
"Lexi Stoltz,” she said. She’d always hated her full name. Maybe because her hateful father was the only one who’d ever called her by it. “And now it’s your turn. Who are you? How do you know my name? And what are you doing at my door in the middle of the night?"
“I told you, I’m here to see your father.”
Another sound came from upstairs, and it shouldn’t have. A tingle of ice crept up her spine, and she glanced over her shoulder toward the stairs. There was definitely something going on up there. Maybe a raccoon had got in, like in the fall.
"My father isn't here," she said. “I’m sorry you came all the way up here for nothing.” She started to close the door, but he stuck a foot in the way, and her heart gave a warning flutter. “What do you think you’re–”
“Sorry. I'm not buying it." He shouldered his way past her into the house. Then he took a long, slow look around as Lexi stood there watching him and trying to decide what the hell to do. She was alone. There were no landline phones and cell service was spotty at best. But he wouldn’t know that.
His soulless gaze swept the room, from the flickering scented candles, to the fireplace, to the giant spruce tree standing in the window.
"Where is he?" Htook a deliberate step toward her.
She shook her head and took an equal step away from him. "I'm calling the police. And then I'm going to turn my dogs loose, and—"
"You're not calling anyone, because there's no phone up here. And if you had dogs, they’d be barking at me by now. Listen, Lexia, I'll be a lot easier to deal with than whoever comes through that door next."
That scared her, and the noises upstairs came back to her mind. Involuntarily, she glanced toward the wide staircase. Each step was a half log, flat side up, and the railings were birch branches and limbs still dressed in their white, knotty bark, preserved under layers of shellac. Her heart tripped over itself again and then launched into a full gallop.
"Someone's upstairs, then. Who, Lexia? Your father?"
“Stop calling me that.” She averted her eyes, tried to focus on getting her heartbeat under control, but it was too late. The tachycardia was off and running.
She felt as if she wasn’t getting enough air, which made her breathe more quickly, which made her dizzy. This was not an unfamiliar event, and not a dangerous one, but its timing sucked. Another sound came from upstairs then and her expression probably gave away that it shouldn't have.
The stranger—whose eyes were the darkest imaginable blue, she saw now that the firelight reached them—reached inside his leather coat and pulled out a handgun. Her heart sped even faster. It felt like a jackhammer trying to break out from inside. She pressed her hands to her chest, an automatic reaction to the thundering of her heart, then spun around and ran out of the great room. She didn’t even know whether she was running away from the gun or toward her stash of meds. She needed to take a pill and take it fast, before this episode got out of hand.
#
The beautiful Dr. Stoltz had run through a dark archway before he could stop her. Romano hadn't expected it, and something, instinct maybe, made him hesitate before going after her.
He saw where the broad staircase began, saw her stop at the base of it, and snatch a pill bottle from a stand there. She twisted it open and then quickly dry-swallowed a pill. Then she bowed her head, deliberately breathing slow and evenly while apparently waiting for relief to come. Relief from what, he didn’t know.
She stepped around the staircase, just out of his line of vision. And the second she was out of his sight, he heard her scream.
Romano ducked to one side of the doorway, peering around it, cursing his eyes for not adjusting more quickly to the dimness.
Then she came into sight again, a dark-haired angel in a white cotton nightgown, her eyes wide with fear. But her fear had little effect on the brute who pressed a gun barrel so tight to her temple that it was probably biting into her skin. The thug, all in black and wearing a ski mask, crushed her to his chest.
There was a deep growl that drew his gaze, and then a yellow cat the size of a small mountain lion arched its back, hissed and disappeared into the depths of the place.
Romano cussed mentally, bringing his attention back where it belonged. Lexia Stoltz's eyes were rounder than ever. Dark irises, brown maybe, and lashes like paintbrush fringe. The guy who held her was almost invisible in the darkened room, and he apparently wasn't aware of Romano's presence. Experience and caution—or maybe instinct, had told him to park his own ride a few hundred yards down the dirt road, so they wouldn't have seen that, either.
And he had no doubt it was "they" and not just "he." Because this fellow was not Mr. White. Romano was one of the only men in US intelligence ever to have seen White in person, if from a distance. And there was no mistaking him. This guy was one of White's henchmen, and while their boss worked alone, his thugs worked in bunches.
Romano sidled his way to the front door and slipped through it, unseen, into the winter night.
#
Lexi still had her pill bottle in her hand. Her heart was still running like a freight train on crack, and it would take a few minutes for the medication to kick in and convert it back to a normal rhythm.
She felt sick and dizzy, partly from fear, but mostly from the racing heartbeat. The man's grip was too tight on her, crushing her chest, which wasn’t helping her tachycardia. The gun barrel pressed painfully against her temple and she was trying not to think how easily he might pull the trigger by accident.
She scanned the room for Jax. Her poor cat would be terrified by all this disruption. He was probably hiding, scared half to death.
"Where is your father?" the thug rasped into her ear. His voice carried an accent she couldn't place. When she didn't answer instantly, the gun barrel drove harder into the side of her head. "Where is he!"
The accent was Russian, she thought. “I don’t—"
"Is he here, in the house?"
"I don't know what you're—"
The barrel embedded deeper. It cut. Warm blood trickled down the side of her face. "He’s not here!” She’d lost track of the stranger, but assumed that this guy was with him.
The pressure eased a little. Maybe now they'd leave, go search for her father somewhere else. What did they want with him? Why was this happening?
Someone might be after me, Lexia.
Her father’s words floated back to her, as if he were speaking them now. But her father had been delusional, sick. And that was more than six months ago, almost seven, for God’s sake!
The man shoved her through the archway into the great room, toward the door. She tripped over Jax and he let out a howl before streaking out of the room to hide. She stumbled on the rug, but couldn't fall down. The man's grip was too tight to let her.
"You will take us to him, then," he said in that accent.
She'd never been so afraid in her life.
"I know who you are, Lexia Stoltz," the man with the gun whispered into her ear. "You will take us to your father or we will kill you. A simple choice, really. Take us to him, and we let you go.''
"But my father isn't—"
The gun pressed harder. "No talk. You will take us to him."
She bit her lips to stop them from trembling. She had a feeling that no matter what she said, this animal would kill her anyway. And she couldn't have spoken a coherent phrase even if she'd wanted to, with her heart racing, and that sensation of no air. Her words were whispery at best.
Could her father have been sane all along? Was this what he'd been running away from? Had he been telling the truth when he'd told her that someone might come after him?
The man in the ski mask pulled her backward, through the front door. He stopped just outside, turning again, staring down the gravel driveway into the darkness beyond. "If you do not cooperate, it will be most unpleasant for you. And in the end, you will talk all the same. Better to do so now, and spare yourself a lot of pain.”
Lexi stared into the darkness, across snowy meadows and hills, but there was no help for her out there. The breeze was icy on her cheeks. Pine boughs sighed in time as it whispered through their needles. It seemed like such an ordinary night. Clean and crisp and cold. She wished the icy ground against her bare feet would snap her heart back into rhythm.
A black van was parked at the end of her driveway, near the roadside, like a shark waiting there to devour her. Its headlights flashed on and it rolled closer. Ski Mask shoved her forward as the van stopped and its side door slid opened.
The interior lights came on. She planted her feet, resisting as the thug tried to shove her toward that open door. And then she saw a form crumpled on the van's floor, dressed entirely in black just like the one who held her. From inside, a booted foot nudged the body, and it rolled out and onto to the ground.
The man holding her pushed her down to her knees, shouting a curse, lifting his gun and firing at the van.
The other man—the hollow-eyed stranger who’d come to her door tonight—was inside. He dove toward the back of the van, out through its rear doors and around the vehicle toward them so fast there was no time to react before he took Ski Mask right to the ground. He yanked the gun from the thug’s hand on the way, bashed him in the head with its butt and either knocked him out or killed him.
Panting, he looked up at Lexi. Her eyes never leaving his, she backed away a step, then two. He'd saved her, but for what purpose?
He bent down to pat the other man down, taking his weapons and shoving them into his own pockets and holsters and whatever. Then he straightened and she saw the blood on the front left side of his shirt.
It didn't matter that he'd been hurt. He was no better than the other one, and she was getting the hell out of here.
She turned to run and wondered if she should or even could in a state of tachycardia.
"There will be more of them on the way, Lexia. You won’t get far."
The words were low, and she could hear the pain that laced each one. It was enough to make her pause and look back. He was pointing the gun in her direction, but not directly at her. "You're either gonna have to deal with me, or more like them. Believe me, they won't be far behind."
She shook her head, shock seeping like ice water through her veins. She was dizzy and her heart was still pounding far faster than it ought to.
"Dammit, get a grip and tell me where your father is, or he'll end up dead... or worse."
He was bleeding a lot. The gleaming scarlet stain on the front of his shirt grew and spread. His left arm hung useless at his side. His right one gestured with the gun as he spoke.
She took another step backward. Her car was in the garage. If she could get to her car...
One of the men on the ground moaned.
"Snap out of it, Lexi! Your life is in danger, or haven't you figured that out yet? You don't really want me to drive off and leave you with these two, do you?"
She dragged her eyes from the man on the ground, to the one standing in front of her. His hair was wild and his eyes were intense. His arm must be hurting. His unshaven jaw was rigid and she could see the corded muscles in his neck standing out. Yes, he was in pain. A lot of it. He came closer, lifted his wounded arm, gripped her shoulder in a hand that dripped blood. "Dammit, where is your father?"
In the moonlight, his pain-glazed eyes compelled her.
"My father is dead," she whispered, because she couldn't seem to speak louder. Fear and the tachycardia tightened her throat.
"Dead?"
She nodded and he swore.
"All right. Okay, we'll have to search the house." His hand finally fell away from her, but she felt the sticky warmth it left behind. "Get me some rope, or duct tape or whatever you have, so I can keep these two from kicking the hell out of me. And make it fast. We have a couple of hours at most."
Lexi blinked, not moving. This wasn't happening. This couldn't be happening. What did this man want? What did it have to do with her father? Why did he want to search her house?
Of all the questions swirling in her mind, she only voiced one. "A couple of hours until what?"
"Until more of these guys show up. The rope, Lexi."
"What is this all about?"
He scowled at her until his dark brows touched.
Still breathing as if she’d just run a marathon, she shook herself and turned toward the little greenhouse beside the cabin. The one that held all of her father's gardening tools. He used to love to putter in his garden at home, and the first thing he’d done upon arriving up here was to start a new one in the back, hoe out the old greenhouse and get it fixed up. The last three months of his life, he’d spent more time in it than he’d spent with her.
Lexi hated the greenhouse.
But she went inside anyway, and she found some rope.