Chapter One

“They found the body.”

Angel DeLuca stared at the text that he’d just gotten from an Unknown Sender. Some might have considered it spam. A sick joke even. But the bad feeling knifing inside him told him this was the real deal.

Sonofabitch .

This was the message he’d been dreading for twenty years.

“A problem?” he heard his boss, Ruby Maverick, ask.

That question did a quick job of yanking Angel’s attention away from the text. He pushed it, and what it meant, aside. He shoved it onto the back burner while he continued the briefing about the assignment that he’d just completed.

“No problem,” he lied.

Yeah, it was a big assed lie. Along with being a big-assed problem.

Still, now wasn’t the time to get into it. He just needed to get through this briefing, and then, well… damn it all to hell, he’d deal with it.

Somehow.

The personal briefings were something Ruby asked of all her team members at Maverick Ops, and Angel figured that the hands on attention was just one of the reasons Maverick Ops was the elite private security company that it was. That elite status had been hard earned by tackling missions that law enforcement didn’t have the resources or the wherewithal to do: Tracking down kidnapped victims, neutralizing stalkers, making dangerous rescues, and solving the coldest of cases.

For this mission, it’d been the first on that list.

A kidnapping, AKA a shitshow, with the thirty-nine-year-old married kidnapper, Kristin Buchanan, abducting her nineteen-year-old-lover, Camden Reeves, when he’d tried to break off their relationship. Kristin had forced Camden at gunpoint into her car and driven off. When Camden’s parents had learned what’d happened, they’d called the cops.

And Ruby.

Ruby had assigned Angel right away to locate Camden and extract him from the dangerous situation.

“About twelve hours after Camden’s abduction, I located both him and his kidnapper at a rental cabin on the Guadalupe River,” Angel explained. “Kristin had paid with cash and registered under an alias for both the cabin and the rental car she was using. She’d ditched her phone and was using a burner.”

Angel had to give it to Kristin. For someone with no police record, she’d taken solid steps to conceal her identity and location.

But then the shitshow part had happened.

When she’d stopped by a convenience store in nowhere Texas to fill up with gas, she had gotten into an argument with the cashier when she’d accused him of giving her the wrong change.

“A cashier at the Hob Nob Texas Quik Stop—and, yeah, that’s the actual name of the place—in Tallulah Point called the locals and reported an irate customer, and when he described her, I thought it could be Kristin. I had my AI app monitoring cop chatter, and I immediately put drone surveillance on her vehicle and drove straight to Tallulah Point.”

That’d been about two hours from San Antonio, where both Camden and Kristin lived. So, another solid move to cover her tracks. Many kidnappers didn’t put that much distance between them and the abduction scene.

“Did the local cops respond, too?” she asked.

“No. The dispatcher who took the clerk’s call hadn’t seen the APB on Kristin, and apparently this clerk has a history of reporting customers for, well, pretty much anything. The dispatcher passed along his complaint to a deputy who opted not to make a trip to the store.”

As a former cop, Angel could understand the logic of dismissing something like this, but what he couldn’t dismiss was that no one in the department had at least glanced at the APB. Then again, manpower in small towns was often stretched mighty thin.

“Did she sexually assault Camden?” Ruby pressed.

Angel shook his head. “Despite their previous sexual relationship, Camden said she didn’t. However, she did give him some bruises when she slapped and punched him.”

Not serious injuries, but Angel knew that often the worst injuries were the ones you couldn’t see. He had firsthand knowledge of that.

“Camden Reeves is back with his family and his kidnapper is in jail. She’ll be arraigned later today,” Angel spelled out, hoping that concluded his briefing.

Ruby stared at him a moment, her gaze slipping to his phone that he was still holding. Yeah, she hadn’t bought that lie about nothing being wrong, but she didn’t press him on it.

“Good job, Angel. Now, go home and take care of whatever that is.” She motioned to the phone again.

“Thanks,” he muttered, wondering when the hell he’d lost his ability to plaster on a poker face.

Once, he’d been good at it. Damn good, in fact. After all he’d been a deep undercover cop for six years and in covert military special ops before that. Poker faces were necessities for both jobs, and they’d saved his ass too many times to count. He should have been able to convince one woman that the text hadn’t knocked the breath right out of him.

Cursing himself and the text, he said his goodbye to Ruby and headed out, threading his way down the stairs of the massive complex for Maverick Ops Headquarters. Only after he was inside of his van, did he send a reply to the text.

“Where r u?” he messaged.

He got an almost immediate response. “Outside the gate at Maverick Ops.”

Angel glanced in that direction, and he spotted a white compact car parked on the layby lane of the private road. It was a space normally used for those visitors or delivery drivers who were waiting to be cleared for entry. He couldn’t actually see the driver from this distance, but he knew who it was.

Mia Sawyer.

Once, she’d been the love of his life, but that’d been when they were sixteen, when love and lives had felt as if they’d go on forever.

Mia had learned some hard lessons about that, too.

He drove toward the black wrought iron gate, using a voice command with his code to open it. As soon as he was on the other side, she got out of her car to come to him.

And the gut punch came, hard and fast.

It always did with Mia. Whether he wanted it or not, and he definitely didn’t want it.

Angel hadn’t seen her in a little over two years. That had been a chance meeting in a restaurant in downtown San Antonio. She’d been there on a blind date. He’d been there with friends. He’d gotten that gut punch then and was certain she had, too, but they hadn’t acted on it. The past created way too many barriers and held way too many memories for them to even consider reclaiming that whole “love of their lives” deal.

Dreading every bit of this, he got out and walked to the front of his van, where he waited for her to join him. No immediate conversation started up. Just a whole lot of long, studying looks. Maybe she was getting the same kind of kick he was.

“Angel,” she said, and for some reason—probably because he was thinking with his dick—it sounded as if she’d doled out his name as like a breathy kiss.

Yeah, dick thinking.

That came with the territory since Mia had been his first lover. And vice versa. Apparently, that had created a forever and ever amen bond. Well, one of them anyway. The other “bond” that they had wasn’t nearly as pleasurable.

They found the body .

Nope. No pleasure in that whatsoever.

With her gaze fixed to his, she stopped directly in front of him. The years hadn’t just been kind to her, they’d given her a damn blessing. She’d been pretty as a teenager, but Mia was downright beautiful now. With that slightly mussed black hair, cool blue eyes, and willowy body, she looked like some exotic fairy goddess.

Well, a sort of disorganized, couldn’t care less about her looks kind of goddess anyway.

She had on well-worn jeans, flipflops, and a snug black Guns N’ Roses t-shirt that probably didn’t hit the fashion status mark. Angel found her choice of clothing far more intriguing and attractive than he would have if she’d been wearing a modern-day goddess get-up.

Since he hadn’t been able to prevent himself from keeping tabs on her over the years, Angel knew she worked for a private security agency as their IT person. At least that was her official title. But because of those tabs, he knew she was a hacker, digging out data from the internet for the investigators. She didn’t quite have black hat status, but she wasn’t squeaky clean either.

Mia offered him a tentative smile that in no way made it to her eyes. “You look…” She paused as if trying to figure out how to finish that.

“I’m wearing my poker face,” he grumbled.

Her smile became a little more genuine. “I was going to say hot. Really, incredibly hot, but, you know, inappropriate. And unnecessary. You’ve no doubt got mirrors, so you’re aware of how you look.”

Angel frowned, uncertain how to take the compliment. But flattered. Yeah, really flattered. Which, of course, was the most ill-timed response in the history of such things.

“Sorry, I’m babbling,” she went on. “I babble when I’m nervous.”

“Yeah, I remember,” and he quickly tacked onto that, “we need to talk.” He had to get his thoughts back on track.

She nodded, and any trace of her smile vanished. Mia gathered her breath, glancing around. “Your van or my car? Or do you want to go somewhere else where we won’t be monitored?” She tipped her head toward the security camera on top of the fence next to the gate. “Does the camera have audio capabilities?”

“Yes. And infrared.”

Which meant Ruby or one of the security techs could be watching and listening. Not that they would zoom in on him specifically, but they’d monitor anyone near the gate, and monitoring could mean hearing what was said.

That was the reason he motioned for Mia to get into his van, and once she had, Angel pulled to the side of the road behind her car so that if anyone else came along, he wouldn’t be blocking the entry.

Mia didn’t say another word until he’d finished parking and then turned to her. She unhooked her laptop bag from her shoulder, opened it, and took out a burner phone. Probably the one she’d used to text him.

“I didn’t use my regular phone,” she admitted. “I didn’t want there to be a record of, well, anything.”

Angel understood that. Hated it, but he understood. And there was something else he hated. For twenty years, he’d tried to protect Mia by keeping her secret. That secret though was apparently in the open now.

They found the body.

Not a body. The body. That meant the time for secrets was over and that he was going to have to do something he should have done two decades ago. He was going to have to turn her over to the cops.

For murder.

She pulled out the SIM card from the burner phone, took out a small bottle of water, and after bending the SIM, she dumped it into the bottle. That would definitely destroy it, but she went a step further by dropping the phone on the floor and stomping on it.

With that “chore” done, Mia took out a tablet, opened it in an incognito window. “I’ve got firewalls on this,” she let him know.

Of course, she did. No hacker wanted to risk being hacked.

“I didn’t use the tablet to text you,” Mia added. “Because the police could get a warrant to access everything on it.”

They could indeed, with probable cause. And they would have that with the discovery of the body.

“I’ve set up alerts to get notifications of any bodies or remains being found that could possibly be a match for… him ,” she settled for saying. “This morning a hiker came across some bones on a trail about five miles outside of San Antonio,” she explained. “When the county cops arrived, they determined the remains were human. There was enough of it intact for the cops to see this.”

Mia loaded a picture.

“Shit,” Angel ground out.

His reaction hadn’t been for the bones themselves but for the silver peso coin pendant around the skeleton’s neck. In the photo, the sun was glinting off it, drawing the eye right to it. But Angel hadn’t needed the glaring sunlight for it to get his attention. He’d seen that pendant many times and knew the owner.

Kenton Barker.

Angel got a quick flash of some really bad memories. Of the bruises Kenton had put on Mia when he’d tried to sexually assault her. He’d failed because their foster mother, Melanie Matthews, had come in. Melanie had hit Kenton to stop him, and Kenton had stormed off, but not before issuing a warning to Mia that he wasn’t done with her.

Since Angel had been at football practice, he’d missed the altercation. However, several hours later when he’d gotten back home and found out what happened, he’d headed straight to Kenton’s room to have a come to Jesus meeting with him about keeping his hands off Mia. There’d been no Kenton.

Just the blood.

A tire-sized puddle of it.

And in that puddle, he’d seen Mia’s little pocket knife. The one she kept in her nightstand drawer.

He had been sixteen, stupid and in love and desperate to both find and protect Mia, so he’d picked up the knife and had gone looking for her. She hadn’t been in her room, so Angel had combed their usual spots. When he hadn’t found her by midnight, he had returned to the foster home and had once again looked in Kenton’s room.

The blood had already been cleaned up. Every speck of it. And the room had smelled of bleach. While he’d been trying to figure out what the hell had happened, Mia had shown up.

And kissed him.

And cried in his arms.

She had also said something he’d never forget. “We’ll carry this to the grave,” she’d whispered.

Angel hadn’t been sure how to handle that, and he’d decided he would spill everything to his foster father first thing in the morning. However, the following day, RJ and his wife, Melanie, had told everyone that Kenton had packed up and left. Even though Angel had figured that was bullshit, he’d wanted to believe it. With all his heart, he had needed to believe it.

Now, Kenton had been found, and it would spin Mia’s and his lives way the hell out of control.

“If any questions come up about the text you got from me, you’re to say you don’t know who sent it,” she insisted, “that you believe it’s a prank.”

Angel sighed and shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

She stared at him. And stared. Before she leaned in and got right in his face. “Angel, I don’t want you to go to jail for killing Kenton. You did it to protect me, and I don’t want you punished for that.”

Angel was certain he didn’t have a poker face now. WTF? “I didn’t kill him,” he couldn’t say fast enough.

Mia flinched as if he’d actually struck her, and she leaned back, studying him. That lasted a couple of long moments before she frantically started shaking her head. “You didn’t?” she muttered.

“No,” he managed, and he repeated it a couple of times while he tried to wrap his head around this. “I thought you’d killed him.”

Her answer came out on a rush of breath and was accompanied by more of that headshaking. “No.”

Well, shit.

That left Angel with one huge question. If Mia hadn’t killed Kenton, then who the hell had?

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