A trade of a woman’s whereabouts versus his son’s life. It had seemed like such a simple, logical choice. But he should have known—once a blackmailer got his hooks into you, they never stopped.
He shouldn’t have been so stupid. And he should have let his son face the consequences of his actions.
But now he had to face the end results of his own choices.
And that involved this beautiful young woman.
He pulled his car out in front of hers. It was a rainy night, and she was driving cautiously. But he knew how to set her up. How to take advantage of her youth and inexperience, and even Mother Nature.
She didn’t stand a chance.
He braced himself for impact.
Everything went according to plan.
She ran up to his car to check on him, sweet and concerned.
She reminded him of his baby daughter, who was probably a year or so younger. That made him feel like even more of an evil bastard.
He feigned a pang in his chest and she helped him to stand.
That was all it took for him to sink the syringe into her shoulder. He caught her when she collapsed. He placed her carefully in his trunk, then returned to her car. He drove it back to its original parking spot, grabbed her purse and a battered gym bag from the front seat, and climbed back into his driver’s seat.
He’d effectively kidnapped the young woman in less than ten minutes.
And no one had seen a damned thing.
Chapter 1
IT was the kind of life you could never escape. Not really. No matter how many trappings of normalcy she put on it, she would always have that dark connection that she could not sever.
At least in the world she lived in.
Paige Daviess walked away from the crime scene. She kept walking until she got outside. She’d been in the warehouse for way too long.
Why?
She wanted answers to those questions, but she’d long known she wouldn’t ever get those answers. The profilers she worked with could tell her theories and statistics and information from their own considerable experiences, but it would never fully tell her why some monsters existed.
Why they chose the most vulnerable to target.
Thirteen young women—the oldest probably no older than Paige’s own twenty-eight—were dead in the piles of old blankets they’d called their beds.
The youngest girl was no older than her landlord’s teenage daughter. The victim’s hair had been just as golden red as Gracie’s.
Paige had had to turn away. She kept seeing Gracie lying there.
“What do we know?” Her boss—and brother-in-law—Sebastian asked as she stepped around the back of the Bureau issue SUV he’d arrived in. She’d hated to call him in today—he was about to become a father any day, and he needed to be at home with her sister.
“Absolutely nothing yet. Thirteen females, most likely vagrants. I’ll let you see for yourself. How’s Carrie?” She’d wanted to take a few days off to be with her sister, but it hadn’t been possible.
“Telling herself she’s not worried. That she’ll be just fine. Running through birth statistics.” A faint smile touched his mouth. She loved how he loved her sister. “She’s beautiful, perfect.”
“I’m sorry to drag you out today.”
“Don’t be. I’m not here long. Ed is assigning a temporary team leader, and I wanted to be here when he showed up. Smooth over any problems.”
“Who?” She tried to think of who was free and available to lead a team temporarily.
“Brockman.”
“Mal?” He had his own team, and she seriously doubted Ed Dennis—head of the PAVAD directorate—would be moving an established team leader to Team Three. Not when Team Two needed him. It made more sense for Mal’s sister Alessandra—Paige’s partner—to take over. “Al, I guess?”
She could deal with that, easily. Al was Sebastian’s second-in-command and had been since the teams were formed. “But I thought she was taking a few days to plan the ‘great wedding of the century’?”
Al was driving everyone crazy with details of her dream wedding, to Sebastian’s brother Seth.
“Not Mal. Not Al… Paige… Ed’s put—”
A Bureau vehicle pulled in and Paige recognized the behemoth behind the wheel. Horror filled her. “Not—”
“I knew you wouldn’t like it, but Ed was able to pull him from Internal Affairs for a few months to help out the CCU.” Sebastian’s face was full of compassion.
Everyone knew she and Al’s brother Mick burned one another every time they were within fifty feet of each other.
Working one-on-one with him ranked right up there with her top ten nightmares.
“He can’t be partnered with Al because of the familial relationship. She’s switching for this case with Compton on Team One. So that leaves you.”
“No choice?” No, no, no, no, no.
“None. You’re stuck with him. For the time being. I’m sorry. Maybe I can get you switched, too.”
Paige thought of those thirteen young women. Thought of what their lives had been like.
Thought of Beaver Cleaver Brockman, with his perfect background and everything-in-life-was-either-black-or white attitude.
Those thirteen victims needed someone who understood the different gray that most people actually lived in.
“No. I’ll stick it out. Can’t guarantee that he will, though.” He wasn’t capable of sticking through a case like this. His shtick was to rip the people who worked the field, who actually got their hands dirty. To make them feel like crap and make them second guess every decision they made on the job.
She’d always despised Internal Affairs.
She’d keep her eyes on him, make sure he didn’t mess it up.
Thirteen lost girls depended on it.
***
MICK hadn’t been on an active crime scene in more than a year. IA agents often were called in after investigative agents screwed up. And then there was a lot of ass-covering that he had to ferret out.
But this… this wasn’t just him filling in for Sebastian Lorcan. It was his entrance into the world of the CCU.
The very unit he was trying to preserve.
Ed Dennis had called him into his office again that morning for an update on the special assignment Mick had taken months ago. Mick hadn’t been able to give him an answer.
There was a traitor, a mole, inside the Complex Crimes Unit within the entire PAVAD—the Prevention & Analysis of Violent Acts Division. It was Mick’s job to find that traitor.
He’d been working the case off the books for months, and had gotten nowhere.
Mick wasn’t used to failure in his cases. His personal life—hell, yeah, he’d had a few noticeable screw-ups there—but not his professional.
He rubbed the scars from his most recent screw-up more out of habit than pain. Although sometimes those bullet holes itched like hell. Usually when something he wouldn’t like was about to happen.
Mick scanned the gathered agents for the one he needed. Sebastian Lorcan had told him where to meet the rest of the team, and Mick needed to find the head of the CCU Team Three before he could do anything else.
Lorcan wasn’t hard to spot—he was taller than many of the other agents around him and was at the center of the action.
Right next to Daviess.
Daviess.
Why had he forgotten her?
The scar just above his heart pulled and itched worse than it ever had before. Something damned bad was about to happen.
It always did when that woman was involved.
***
PAIGE kept her eyes steady on Mick’s. She wouldn’t look away first. He’d take it as a real sign of weakness, and she knew he already doubted her in every way. She wasn’t totally sure what she’d ever done to him to bring on his irritation. It was as if he’d taken one look at her almost four years ago and decided to hate her, no matter
what.
And she didn’t owe him a thing, so why should she have tried to make nice with him?
She didn’t have to prove herself to anyone. Not any longer.
Especially him.
She had more field experience than Mick, at least with the CCU, and no one—no one—was going to doubt that.
“What have we got?” He practically barked the words at Sebastian. It was the way he talked—big, abrupt, brusque, bordering on rude. That was Al’s older brother.
She’d never quite figured him out. His younger sister and older brother were great people, friendly, helpful, fun. She trusted them completely. But not this guy.
Didn’t he eat kittens for breakfast? Sometimes she half thought so.
“Thirteen dead,” Paige said. She’d make it known to him from the very beginning that this was her case. He was just along for the paper trail. “All female, ranging from early teens to late twenties.”
“Cause of death?”
“We won’t know that definitively until Mia and Jules finish.” Policy for the CCU was that c.o.d. was always confirmed, not speculated on. It covered their butts that way.
“Give me an idea of what I’m going to see when I walk in there.” He cut between her and Sebastian. Isolated her from the rest of her team with his brick of a body. She couldn’t help but step back. He just took up so much of her space.
He was taller than Sebastian by an inch or three, and he weighed a ton compared to most of the men she knew. The only one who even came close to him in height was her brother Luc, who topped off near six and a half feet.
Her brother was built lean; this guy definitely wasn’t. Half a granite mountain stood there in front of her, glaring.
How was she supposed to do this? “Blood. And lots of it. And their eyes. Try not to look at their eyes. Or you’ll never forget them. And… they never made it out of their beds, Agent Brockman. This was a slaughter, and they never saw it coming.”
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