Prologue

Austin

As soon as the back door to the SUV slammed shut, Cade took a step back and sent a jerk of his chin to Dune, who was behind the wheel.

If I clenched my jaw any harder, I was afraid I was gonna crack some teeth.

But I held it all in. Kept the rage tucked deep inside, which was something I had gotten good at.

The tires kicked up dust, and soon, the eerie red glow of the taillights became lost in the storm.

Those three kids were going to the hospital. With any luck, they’d be reunited with their families in the next few hours. It wouldn’t erase what happened to them— nothing could erase that— but at least they could begin to heal. I was glad we’d gotten there when we had. I hated to think what just another hour would have led to.

“It’s over,” Cade said in that gruff, unemotional voice of his.

It was over, in a sense. But on the grander scale, it wasn’t. It never was… never would be. Not for those kids we saved. Not for the parents of the ones we were too late to save. Not for the millions of kids and people still trapped out there.

As I met Cade’s stormy eyes, still trying my hardest to hold in my anger, I knew he understood on a level not just anyone would get. This wasn’t simply a job for people like us. It was a necessity. It was redemption. It was life. Each of us had a different reason why we were here, why we tortured ourselves like this, but in the end, we were basically the same. We were fucked up, some of us even dead inside, and this was our reason to keep going.

“It feels like things are escalating,” I said to Cade.

Jameson grunted in agreement at my back.

The Sons of the Holy Fire.

The group we’d been trying to end for years. So far, we’d only managed to carve out smaller cells and shut them down. It felt like picking scales off of a dragon. In other words, we hadn’t gotten anywhere.

“There’s no way they’ve figured us out,” Cade said, answering the unasked question that went along with my statement.

I had to believe Reed and his secret project weren’t on the verge of being exposed. Without this team…

“We’ve been hitting them hard lately,” Roland not-so-helpfully pointed out, effectively pulling me out of my thoughts. “They’ve probably caught on to the fact that we’re out here.”

He had a point. We hadn’t exactly been subtle lately when it came to taking out these cells. We tended to make sure there wasn’t a single sick fuck left to tell the tale of what happened. That might have said more than an actual witness, though.

Sometimes you had to kick the hornet’s nest to shake shit up. It was my thought that if we rattled the organization enough, they might slip up, and we could take them out for good.

“Yeah, but I just figured with us using Agent Priestley’s team for cleanup and shit, they’d figure it was that division taking them out,” I said. “That is one of the reasons it was put together, right?”

“That was what we were led to believe,” Cade said. “The whole reason Reed wanted to work with Agent Priestley’s team and help them out.”

We were supposed to have the same goal.

“If no one is supposed to know they exist, then how would this bad FBI guy suspect that it’s Agent Ford Priestley and his team that’s been going after them?” Jameson asked. I turned to face him just in time to see his mouth frown with uncertainty. “And remember, we collectively agreed not to involve the FBI team in any of those cases.”

He was right. After we’d gotten Milo back when someone high up in the FBI who ran The Sons of the Holy Fire had him kidnapped, we had agreed not to bring in Agent Ford Priestley and his off-the-book team on any of those cases. We hadn’t found who this guy was, which meant that we didn’t know who to trust. We sure as hell weren’t taking chances.

We were at a loss, but this was not the time to talk about it.

“Let’s bury the bodies and light it up,” Roland said, looking ready to get this night over with.

***

Hours later, I was back at the office, resting on one of the beds we had in a backroom. My bed, as I had claimed it, though this room didn’t often get used by the rest of the team. I was the only one that took advantage of the fact that it was here on a near-daily basis.

Some liked to say I lived here… and I wouldn’t agree with them, though I couldn’t deny that I had nothing to back up an argument.

My hair was still damp from the shower, and though I’d scrubbed twice, the smell of smoke still lingered on my skin.

The paper ball flew in the air above my face, curving and coming back down a second later. I caught it and immediately tossed it up again. Over and over, I took comfort in the rhythmic movement that felt too familiar even though it had been years since I’d touched a real ball.

The ball fell into my hands and I cupped it, the crinkle of the paper filling the silent room.

Something was wrong.

I felt it like a boulder falling off a cliff and right onto my chest.

A sense of panic and fear were shaking the walls of the office, turning the air toxic and making it hard to breathe.

And I should know. These walls I knew. They were my stability and comfort, sad as it might have been. This was the place where I spent most of my off time because, despite the chaos that could happen between these walls, I didn’t feel secure anywhere else. Not even in the decent apartment I rented about thirty minutes away.

All of that might have been a red flag when it came to myself, but I ignored it, like so many other things in my life. Things I refused to sort through or go all psych-deep-dive into.

My eyes were sharp as I made my way through the inner workings of the secret floor on the top of the Willis Security Tech building. I guess it wasn’t really secret, but you did have to have super high clearance and a special key card to get up here.

It was quiet, but that was normal given that I should have been the only one here now.

But the pressure in my chest didn’t let up.

As I stepped into the main room, I noticed the light pouring out of the cracked door to Reed’s office, strobing in a way that let me know he had the TV on. I didn’t see Reed as the type to sneak off to the office to binge on some show in secret. I’d bet he had some news channel up, which could only mean that whatever was going on had to be serious. As I drew closer to his office door, the motion-sensor lights flickered to life above me. The dread tightened in my stomach the closer I got to his door. It had been a long day, and I had a feeling it was about to be a long night too. I pushed the door open without stealth. I didn’t want to scare him.

“What’s going on?” I asked. My voice was casual but I was sure the pinch between my brows let Reed onto the fact that I felt the rising panic coming from him.

Reed’s honest eyes turned to me with a fear in them that I wasn’t prepared for.

“Shit has hit the fan,” he said.

Well… fuck.

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but whenever that saying was used, it tended to be an all-hands-on-deck type of situation, or worse, the end. I didn’t want it to be the latter.

Reed might not have been the most stoic, hide-your-emotions kind of man, but I’d never seen him look this lost before. This unsure. He usually had a plan… or knew who to put in charge to make the right plan. But he had nothing right now.

“The FBI is urging anyone that might have seen this man to call the tip line.”The voice pulled my attention to the TV where a brunette woman wearing a white shirt and a powder blue suit jacket filled viewers in on what sounded like a serious matter. A number scrolled along the bottom of the screen. “This former agent is considered to be armed and dangerous.”

Reed pointed the remote at the TV and it went silent.

It didn’t matter. The image they flashed was of a man I knew quite well, though not really.

There staring back at me was Agent Ford Priestley, with his dark brown hair lightly layered with salt and pepper and a stern expression that I knew very well from a distance. His brow was furrowed in an unhappy way, and behind the plain metal frames, his eyes cut so sharp I was surprised there was still glass covering them. The man was hard, but the image they had of him made him look deadly— nearly evil, and ready to take blood. My gut twisted. I didn’t know the man on a super personal level, but I’d worked with him enough to know that photo was all wrong. It was taken out of context.

But at the same time, I knew better than most people that you couldn’t trust the image someone portrayed. That you never really knew people, no matter how close you truly thought you were to them.

Monsters were real. Evil existed. People wore masks to hide the things they didn’t want others to see.

Ford Priestley very well could have been a monster. He could have been the one we’d been hunting all this time. And he’d been there in the thick of it, pretending to help us save people from other monsters like him.