by Adrian, Lara
“It’s the truth. Send someone to Carla’s house if you don’t believe me.”
“I will do that,” Barstow replied, his tone grave. He let go of a sigh, a heavy sound, full of contemplation. “What about the other Breed male . . . Knox. Is he with you now, Leni?”
“No.”
“Where is he?”
She was sure it wouldn’t take the cagey old law officer more than a second to answer that question for himself, but she wasn’t going to give it to him.
“You’ve been through quite a lot, Lenora. I know you must be scared, but this will all be over soon, I promise.” Barstow’s voice took on a soothing tone that for some reason made the fine hairs at the back of her neck stand on end. “Stay where you are. I’ve got deputies on the way to bring you here to the station as we speak.”
That prickle of unease went cold now. “I never told you where I am, Amos.”
Before he could sputter in response or try to calm her with more false concern, she ended the call. Her phone was no use to her now. All it would do was help lead Barstow and his men to her and Riley.
She tossed it away, then dashed back to the great room to get the boy.
They couldn’t wait another minute for the Order to arrive.
They had to leave now.
Somehow, she had to find a way to warn Knox about everything she’d just learned.
She only prayed she could do that before Sheriff Barstow and his men caught up to him first.
“Riley, we have to go now, kiddo.”
He must have seen the urgency in her face. Grabbing Fred, he hopped off the sofa and ran to her. Leni grabbed their coats and her purse, then hurried out to her Bronco parked outside. With Riley strapped into his seat in back, she climbed behind the wheel and started the engine.
As the old truck rumbled to life, she pulled out the phone Knox had given her and hit the number he’d told her to call.
A low voice answered. “Too early to be hearing from you, brother. This can’t be good news.”
“Hello . . . um, Razor?” She held the phone between her ear and shoulder as she gunned the gas and roared out to the road. “My name is Lenora Calhoun—”
“I know who you are. Tell me what you need, Leni.”
CHAPTER 28
Knox kept the Parrish man in the beams of the headlights as he drove up the length of the driveway. The urge to hit the gas and ram the conspiring bastard against the trailer and the tons of timber stacked on it was nearly overwhelming, but he kept a lock on his rage as he approached.
When the SUV slowed to a halt, Parrish strode up to the driver’s side. He rapped his knuckles on the glass from the outside, an invitation to roll down the window. “Dwight and Pop are waiting for you in the house. They’ll handle paying you the rest of your mon—”
The human’s expression went slack as the dark glass slid open and he stared into the face of a stranger instead of the paid killer he’d been expecting. Knox’s amber-hot irises and bared fangs sent Parrish back on his heels.
“Oh, fuck.”
Knox wrenched open the door, knocking the man to the ground. Parrish’s boots moved as if he was running even though his ass was planted on the snowy driveway.
Knox climbed out of the vehicle.
“Holy shit!” Parrish clambered to his feet and started sprinting away. He managed to fumble a pistol from the pocket of his jacket and pivoted to fire a wild shot. He missed. He fired a couple more, his skinny legs pumping as he fled for the cover of the outbuilding.
He didn’t get that far.
Knox flashed from his position a few yards behind Parrish to the space directly in front of him.
He didn’t waste another second’s effort or thought on the man. Grabbing his skull in both hands, Knox gave the fragile human neck a hard twist. The corpse dropped at his feet with a muffled thud.
At the same moment, Dwight Parrish burst out the side door of the house. He stood on the covered porch, a large semiautomatic pistol in his hand. “Jeb?”
Knox stepped out of the darkness and into the pool of light from the floods overhead.
“Jeb’s dead. So is the Hunter you hired.” He started walking forward. “You’re next.”
Dwight raised his weapon and shot off a seemingly endless hail of bullets. A few of them hit, though not enough to stop Knox. He stalked across the driveway, heading with deliberate purpose toward the house.
Dwight had about two seconds to decide between continuing his useless barrage of gunfire or running for cover. No surprise, the coward chose the latter.
On a panicked curse, he pivoted back into the house and bolted the door behind him.
Knox kicked it off its hinges and stepped inside.
He caught the flash-fire of a shotgun blast in the corner of his eye barely an instant before the spray exploded toward him. He dived out of the way, though not before he saw that the shooter wasn’t Dwight, but an old man.
Enoch Parrish.
The hunched, gray-haired patriarch of the family fled like a rat through the hole Knox had made where the side door had been. He let the scurrying bastard go—for now. Enoch wouldn’t get far.
First, Knox had some payback to deliver on the old man’s son.
He pounced on Dwight’s retreating bulk, taking him down to the floor. Flipping him over, he pinned him with his hand clamped hard over the front of Parrish’s throat. The instant his hands made contact, the bombardment of Dwight’s sins and ugly truths seeped through the connection.
The suffering of countless young women and girls.
Abductions. Sexual enslavements and imprisonment. Unconscionable physical abuse that had ended in murder too often for Dwight to keep an accurate count.
And while some of those sins were decades old, many of them were fresh.
Knox glared down at the face of the human monster. “You sick fuck. I should’ve killed you that first night. I should have killed all of you that night.”
Dwight snarled, his voice throttled under the pressure of Knox’s grip. “Go to hell!”
“You first,” Knox said.
He reached for Parrish’s dropped pistol and put it under the bastard’s chin. Then he pulled the trigger, blowing away Dwight’s final words and taking half his skull along with them.
In the lumberyard outside, the semi’s engine fired up.
Knox rose and calmly headed out to deal with the last of the Parrishes.
Enoch sat behind the wheel of the tractor trailer, exhaust spewing in a gray cloud as the old man revved the engine. Knox was there before the truck lurched into gear.
He ripped off the driver’s side door and yanked Enoch out of the seat, throwing him to the ground. The old man had a gun too. Knox batted it out of his feeble grasp like he was swatting a fly.
He didn’t have to guess at Enoch Parrish’s guilt. That he had participated in the decision to send the Hunter out to kill Leni and him in order to take Riley was not a question. But Knox couldn’t kill the son of a bitch without being certain of everything he’d done.
The old man made a frantic attempt at escape, crab-walking backward while Knox loomed over him. Knox brought his boot down on Enoch’s chest, savoring the brittle pop of aged ribs giving way beneath his heel.
“Get up.” He backed off slightly, glowering at the man. When Parrish only wheezed and sputtered, refusing to comply, Knox reached down for a fistful of his flannel shirt and hauled him up to his feet.
Parrish howled in agony.
The scream cut short under the punishing crush of Knox’s fingers, now wrapped around the old man’s throat.
“Holy hell,” he hissed through his teeth and fangs as the floodgates opened on Enoch Parrish’s nearly eighty years of corruption, criminality, and unspeakable cruelty.
If Dwight and Travis had committed hideous acts, their father’s sins made them pale in comparison.
A lifelong abuser, Enoch’s brutality had known no bounds. His wife and children. Local girls in Parrish Falls
and elsewhere. And it hadn’t stopped there.
Christ, not even close.
Enoch Parrish was the leader of a twisted ring of fellow offenders, who, like him, got off on preying upon young females who lacked the power or resources to stop them. Indigent women. Runaways. Vulnerable girls with no one to turn to, no one to help them.
Parrish had been trafficking and trading in human flesh most of his adult life, but had stepped up his operation once the family logging business had begun to decline.
He and his sons, along with a secret cabal of repugnant cronies, were still enslaving helpless young women to serve their sick pleasures.
Knox slammed the old man’s spine against the rough timber logs stacked on the trailer behind him. “Where are they? The girls you’re currently holding. Goddamn it, tell me where you’re keeping them.”
The blare of sirens screamed in the distance. Swirling lights broke through the trees as what appeared to be an army of law enforcement vehicles sped along the two-lane toward the Parrish property.
Enoch struggled against Knox’s grasp, but his craggy old face remained shuttered, his thin mouth stubbornly silent.
Knox wanted to kill the bastard. God knew he did.
But he needed the information first.
He needed to be able to save Enoch Parrish’s victims.
“Where are they, you miserable fuck?”
Then he heard it. A soft, muffled cry coming from within the outbuilding. He heard pounding. The sound would have been undetectable to human ears, but Knox’s Breed senses latched on to it at once.
Behind him now, half the county’s sheriff department swarmed onto the property. Snow and ice kicked up as the fleet of vehicles poured in to block any escape. Officers leapt out with guns in hand, all of them trained on Knox.
A voice came over a bullhorn—Amos Barstow, demanding Knox’s surrender. “Turn around, and put your hands where we can see them.”
Spotlights hit him from behind at the same time, lighting up Enoch Parrish’s grinning face.
“Now, you’re done for, vampire.”
Someone fired a warning shot. Knox glanced back and saw it was Barstow.
“Bastard.”
“Let him go,” the sheriff shouted over the PA.
“You heard my friend.” Enoch cackled. “Let me go.”
Knox sneered. “All right.”
He dropped him, at the same time reaching for the side rail release lever on the trailer’s payload. Enoch Parrish screamed as twenty-plus tons of heavy timber avalanched down on top of him, burying him alive.
Amos Barstow’s voice bellowed to his men. “Kill that son of a bitch!”
An explosion of gunfire erupted from the army of cops behind Knox.
CHAPTER 29
“Oh, my God. No!”
Leni pulled through the gate of the Parrishes’ property just in time to see dozens of sheriff’s department officers open fire on Knox. Throwing the old Bronco into park, she leapt out and ran toward the line of cops whose vehicles were fanned out like they had come prepared for war.
“No! Stop shooting at him, please!”
But they didn’t stop. Amos Barstow was in charge and his voice rose over the din of the gunfire.
“Where’d that bloodsucking son of a bitch go?” he shouted to the other officers. “Don’t let him get away!”
Leni couldn’t tell where Knox had gone, either. He’d moved with all the speed he had at his command, vanishing into the darkness as nothing more than a blur of shadow.
But he hadn’t escaped without injury.
She could feel his pain through their blood bond.
Some of the rounds had found their mark. But he was alive.
He was alive, and he was furious with a rage she could hardly fathom.
“Stop,” Leni pleaded. “You’ve got the wrong man. Knox isn’t the enemy.”
“Stay out of this, Lenora.” Barstow swung a contemptuous sneer in her direction. “You’d say anything to protect your lover. It won’t work. That vampire’s gonna die tonight. We just watched him kill my good friend Enoch Parrish in cold blood.”
“You mean, the way you and the Parrishes killed my friend Carla Hansen? The way you would have killed me too?”
The gunfire died down, then ceased altogether. Some of the other officers stared at her in confusion.
“It’s true,” she said, addressing Barstow’s colleagues. “Enoch Parrish and his sons hired a Breed assassin to get rid of me and Knox so the Parrishes could take my nephew. Sheriff Barstow was going to let it happen. And that’s not all they’ve done. The Parrishes are running a human trafficking ring. It wouldn’t surprise me for a second if Amos isn’t also aware of that too. He may even be participating in it.”
The sheriff sputtered. “You’ve lost your mind. Those are vile lies you’re spouting, Lenora. Dangerous ones.”
“Leni is right.”
Knox’s deep voice rang out, coming from the direction of the lumberyard outbuilding. He stood inside the open entrance of the steel barn, immense, fearless in the face of so many weapons trained on him. His transformed eyes glowed like hot coals. Blood dripped from the numerous gunshot wounds that had managed to hit their mark.
“The Parrishes are responsible for the abuse and murders of dozens of young women. Children too,” Knox announced grimly. “Their evil ends tonight.”
“Holy shit,” one of the sheriff’s deputies gasped. “He’s not alone in there. Look!”
From behind Knox, a frail woman in soiled, tattered clothing stepped forward. Another followed. Then another, her arm sheltering the thin shoulders of a crying preteen girl. More females emerged, one by one, all of them looking haggard and abused.
The most recent victims of the Parrishes’ sick ring of terror.
“Knox.” Leni sucked in a stunned breath. Then she ran to him.
He caught her in a brief embrace, then took her hand in his. They walked out together, leading the group of traumatized survivors.
“Hold your fire,” one of the law officers commanded. “Let them all come out.”
The unit obeyed . . . all except Amos.
On a mad bellow, he raised his weapon and squeezed the trigger.
A rapid stream of bullets tore across the distance—only to collide with the unseen barrier of Leni’s gift.
She wrapped the whole group in her shield. Knox and herself, the terrified women and girls who had already endured more than anyone should have to bear.
Amos’s spent rounds dropped to the snow like metal raindrops.
And in that next instant, he dangled aloft in the vise of Knox’s fist.
“You did know,” Knox growled as he held the sheriff two inches off the ground. “You’ve been part of this for decades, along with your father before you. You helped the Parrishes bring their victims over the border. You took your cut out of the flesh of innocents.”
“Lies!” Amos wailed. “It’s all lies!”
“Ask any of those females if it’s a lie,” Knox snarled. “Who else was in on this with you?”
“Knox,” Leni said, glancing around her at the near dozen women who watched in silence. A few of them had lifted their fingers to point at two of Amos’s fellow officers.
They pointed at Amos too, united in their condemnation.
While one of the deputies ordered some of the men to apprehend the pair who’d been identified, Leni’s pride surged.
She wasn’t only proud of her incredible mate and his actions which had saved so many lives tonight, but for the resilience she saw in the faces of the women and girls who were getting their first taste of freedom, of triumph, over such an unspeakable suffering.
It would take time, but they were alive. They were going to be okay.
Thanks to Knox, they all would be.
A pair of big officers strode over to Amos with grave purpose. The one in charge nodded in approval, clapping Knox’s shoulder in acknowledgment. “We’ll take it from here.”
; Knox let go of Amos, turning him over to his colleagues who immediately slapped their former commander into handcuffs and led him away.
Only then did Leni let go of the cry that was trapped in her throat. Then she strode forward, into her mate’s open arms.
CHAPTER 30
Knox pressed a kiss to the top of Leni’s head as the unit from the sheriff’s department wrapped up at the scene.
Amos Barstow had been put into the backseat of a squad car along with the two other officers implicated in his crimes. Also nearby, a pair of ambulances had arrived a few minutes earlier to look after the women and girls who’d been freed from their imprisonment inside a cage the Parrishes had constructed under the floor of the lumberyard outbuilding. Now the group of survivors were seated inside the heat of the vehicles, wrapped in blankets and being tended by a team of paramedics.
Standing next to Knox, Leni was wrapped in a blanket too, holding Riley inside the warmth with her.
One of the emergency medical staff came over to check on them. The male attendant had already given Riley a snack and some water. Now, his concern was on Knox. “You’re sure there’s nothing we can do for you, sir? Sounds like you took on some heavy fire tonight.”
“I’m fine,” Knox replied.
And he was, more than fine. He was already healed from the worst of the gunshot wounds, and he had his Breedmate secure in his arms. He couldn’t think of anything else in the world he might need.
As if she could feel the depth of his contentment, Leni smiled up at him.
Because, yes, of course, she could feel that.
She had to feel just how desperately he loved her too.
The paramedic cleared his throat. “All right then. We’ll be heading out shortly.”
As he returned to the ambulances, another vehicle rolled through the open gate of the property. The large black Land Rover with Massachusetts plates came to stop not far from Knox and Leni.
A pair of Breed males in patrol gear climbed out. The passenger had the demeanor of a leader, his ice-blue eyes shrewd beneath the military-cut of his golden hair. His companion behind the wheel was ebony-haired and immense, an obvious Gen One soldier with the catlike prowl of a stealth killer. A former Hunter, Knox had no doubt.
