The Sally Ride Chronicle (The Syndicate-Born Trilogy Book 4)

by K. M. Hodge

  He seemed to notice the change and grabbed her hand. His thumb rubbed her wedding ring. “I wish you would change your mind.”

  “My old man is like a hunting dog. He wouldn’t stop until he found me. I’m staying and fighting.”

  “Promise me you’ll be careful.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll let you know if I find something good.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” The squeal of tires peeling on asphalt made her jump and they both stepped further into the shadows. “You’re crazy, Sally.”

  She harrumphed and turned to walk away. It didn’t surprise her when he grabbed her from behind. She turned to him and let him kiss her for a moment.

  “Call me. Anytime. For any reason.”

  The desperation in his tone nearly broke her. It would be so easy to walk away from it all and disappear into his lust-filled world.

  “I’ve got to go, Alex.”

  His jaw twitched, but he let her pull away. “All right. We’ll do it your way. For now.”

  She walked away from him, farther into the shadows of the alley, alone, to ready herself for the next battle.

  Epilogue

  I don’t feel like I’ve aged, but the reflection in the mirror tells me otherwise. Fine lines fan from my eyes and parenthetical ones bracket my lips—battle scars. This war seems like it will never end, with starts and stops that get me nowhere towards my end goal. The original plan never included being stuck living with Billy in this shitty trailer for over twenty years. Thankfully, he leaves me alone most days. It helps that I drug him almost every night so he can’t go out and get drunk. It’s something I should have been doing from the beginning. They say with age comes wisdom, thank God for that. While he sleeps like the dead, I steal intelligence that The Syndicate is too stupid to trust him to transfer back and forth. Finally, the higher ups are asking questions. They suspect that Billy might be a mole. Soon, if I’m lucky, he should be decorating the bottom of the St. James—all thanks to The Syndicate. And it isn’t even my birthday yet.

  “Ma, I’m going to be late.” My darling son—now a grown man--sprints past me in his baseball uniform.

  “I’m hurrying.”

  The weather man said it would be unseasonably hot out today. I braid my blue hair off to the side so I can still wear my bike helmet. My leather and metal bracelets and cuffs tinkle against each other while I weave the strands together. Billy’s idea. He said he likes to know when I’m coming and going, like a dog with a collar, so that I can’t sneak up on him or run off.

  “Ma!” Zane stomps his foot outside the bathroom door like he did when he was a toddler.

  “Boy, mind your mother!” Billy hollers from the front room.

  The TV from the living room blasts through the entire trailer. Billy’s hearing ain’t for shit and he keeps the volume up so high the whole neighborhood can hear. Today he’s got the news on. They’ve been covering The Syndicate again so, of course, Billy can’t miss one word. It’s all bullshit, they always get it wrong.

  I check my reflection one more time and decide to swipe on some lipstick at the last minute. A little better. “All right boy, let’s go.”

  We grab our helmets and hurry out the door before Billy can say a word. Zane and I hop on my beat-up bike and ride like the wind to the wealthier side of town where he plays on an intramural team. It’s the one fun thing he still lets himself do these days. Otherwise, he buries himself in his work and I almost never see him. The surfboard I got him for his birthday sits unused in his room. Most nights he sleeps in his lab. If it weren’t for baseball, I’d never see him. In a few weeks he’ll leave for California, a safe guard I’ve worked out. Zane’s will be back in California to finish up some college courses and, if all goes well, I’ll be able to get him the lab of his dreams.

  I stop the bike just outside the field, but keep it running. “I’ll be back before the eighth inning. Knock ‘em dead kid.”

  “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me where you’re going while you’re supposed to be watching me play?”

  “You know I can’t.”

  “This guy, or whatever, better be worth it.”

  He thinks I’m having an affair. He knows Billy isn’t his Pop, and he sure as shit got an earful of my suspected affairs over the years. If only people knew how celibate I’ve actually become. My job is my lover now. Not that I’ve been a saint or nothing, but I’m not exactly the whore everyone makes me out to be either. If Zane only knew how much I love him, how much I gave up so that he could go to college and make something of himself. But he can’t know any of it. This is my war, not his.

  Zane shifts his weight to his other leg—forever impatient with me. “Can you at least ride bitch on the way home then? I look like a tool riding on the back with you.”

  The wind ruffles his hair, which sticks up on the side, a persistent cowlick that refuses to be tamed. At that moment, he looks just like his father. It hurts to look at him sometimes. The memory of Alex has faded over the years so that now all I can recall are the good things about him.

  “All right, but just this once.” I adjust the gloves on my hands, wishing I could bite my nails. “And, for the record, I’m just going to the bookstore.”

  Zane chuckles. “Right, Ma. The bookstore.”

  His response hurts. But there isn’t time for a pity party today. “I’ll see you.”

  There’s someone I need to see. It only takes twenty minutes to get there. Pages Bound, an independent bookstore, is crowded when I arrive. I park in the neighborhood behind the store. Everyone is there to hear author J. Knettle read from his latest new release. I check my hair in the glass pane and smooth down some of the fly aways.

  “Ah, shit.” A tall, lanky man stoops down over a pile of books that lay scattered across the asphalt.

  I sigh and walk over to help him pick them up. The smell of alcohol hits me right away. I grab a couple of the paperbacks and hand them to him. He catches my eye and gives me a shy smile. His reading glasses slide down his nose and he pushes them back up. “Thanks. I’m a hot mess today.” His smile deepens and he makes no point of hiding the fact that he is checking me out. “Are you here for the reading?”

  I shake my head. “No, I can’t stay I’m afraid.”

  “That’s too bad.” He starts to walk away and glances back at me once more. I can’t help but smile at him.

  This is the man who wants to take down The Syndicate. The man my entire plan hinges on.

  He turns back to the store and I cross myself and kiss my St. Rita medallion.

  Lord, help us all.

  ---The End---

  Dying to know what happens next? Check out the award-winning Red on the Run as the adventure continues. Check out our Bonus Content—not just one, but two Special Sneak Previews:

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  Acknowledgements

  I am full of gratitude to everyone who supported me in this effort: family, friends, and readers. One of the best things about this job is the wonderful e-mails I get from y’all so don’t be shy. When I wrote this book my father-in-law was dying and the wonderful supportive emails and messages from readers really helped me get through that difficult time.

  One of my first and most loyal fans, Rosemary Pfeiffer, deserves a special thanks. She’s always supportive and encouraging when I need it the most. The authors in my life also need a shout out. My dear friends, Kristy Young and Kate Baray, help me stay on task, talk me through plot holes, and keep me company every week. Then there are my cheerleaders Melinda McIntosh and Lindsay Palmgren, who make me laugh, tell me not to give up, and encourage me to work hard and keep learning. My editing team, Sue Fairchild and proofer Rachel MacAulay, have helped me grow as a writer, and I am grateful for their hard work in helping to make this story great for the readers. Last, but not least, I am grateful for the friendship and support of writer, Cassidy Cayman, without her help and
insistence, I never would have become a published author to begin with. Even now with thousands of miles separating us, she still pushes me to keep going.

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  PROLOGUE

  ~~~

  Church Hill

  Richmond, Virginia

  June 15, 2025

  4:00 PM

  ~~~

  I want to scream, to fill the room with my anguish, but for her sake I don’t. She wouldn’t want me to make a scene. Instead, I sit in the back of the room, away from the other mourners, in an ill-fitting black dress that I borrowed at the last minute. I’ve never been a details person, so when my best friend told me she was dying I didn’t think to plan out what to wear for her funeral.

  I still can’t believe this is really happening. She doesn’t belong here in this dark cave. I want to pick up her lifeless body and animate her into the woman she’d been, but would never be again.

  For as long as I had known her, she had worn the millstone of grief around her neck like a family heirloom. Loss was all she knew. We were alike that way, except that she accepted it and kept going, rather than rage against her fate or lament it as I do.

  “Life is too short, Ellie,” she would say. “Choose joy all day, every day.”

  Fate brought her into my life when I needed a friend the most, and her love and support saved me from myself. She, and the glimmer of hope she had brought out in me, became the very foundation I stood upon.

  Now, without her, I feel as though I might crumble and fall back into the abyss. Why am I still here? Why is she gone? I’m left behind, again, alone with my grief and painful memories.

  Maybe I should start smoking. I think about it often these days, but no one takes up cigarettes in their late 40’s. Out of habit, I check the time on my phone—the service was supposed to have started twenty minutes ago. People are sitting in groups quietly chatting, remembering, some of them familiar but the majority of them strangers.

  She’d been a vivid storyteller, prodigious with her correspondences after I moved away and our regular sessions stopped. She had lived a life filled with one tragedy after another. During her weekly sessions, and then later in her phone calls and letters, she would artfully lay out each tragic landscape, stacking them one on top of the other, a veritable Lincoln Log house of horrors.

  In the beginning, the evocative imagery conjured by her life stories would leave me awake at night, bringing home for me the experience of secondary trauma.

  As her therapist, I had crossed some basic ethical boundaries by taking her on as a client and then becoming friends with her. Our shared experience of having lost a child bound us together in a spiraling transference that should have caused me to lose my license forever.

  Just the thought of those early days brings all the pain up anew, and I instinctively touch my stomach—another empty vessel.

  The sound of mournful music playing out of old speakers in the front of the room brings me back to the present. The service has finally started, and the minister is talking, but I can’t hear a word he’s saying. Seeing her lying stiffly in the oak casket, with a waxy, yellowed pallor makes it hard for me to breathe. My heart is racing, my breath is coming in short gasps, and the room suddenly feels as if it’s closing in on me. I need to get out of this cave, this tomb, before it consumes me.

  I make a beeline to the exit right behind me, and the heavy wooden doors give easily as I push them out.

  The cool spring air immediately stings my burning flesh, and my wobbly legs implore me to sit down on the funeral home’s stone steps. My heart rate slows and my vision returns to normal as the panic attack abates. From my seat at the top of a hill, the city lays spread out before me, a barren, lifeless landscape, a ramshackle center of yesteryear—ruin porn. Death is everywhere here, following me around like a persistent black cloud.

  Steeped in grief and self-pity, I didn’t hear the door open behind me or steps coming towards me, so I jump when he speaks my name in his deep baritone voice and the tips of his fingers brush my bare shoulder.

  “Ellie?”

  I look up at him. The skin on my chest and arms prickles and my heart skips a beat.

  His deep brown eyes capture mine and his smile deepens as he speaks it again. “Ellie.”

  A smile, curved inside book-ended parentheses, greets me. In one swift motion, he removes his hat, unbuttons his jacket, and lowers his large frame beside me. He’s aged but his smile and intense gaze, and the effect they have on me, are the same. Time slows almost to the point of stopping, expanding to envelop us in this moment.

  I somehow regain control of my vocal cords and acknowledge him in a half question, half proclamation. “Christopher.”

  Simply saying his name awakens my senses. I feel my face flush, and look away from him. His rounded shoulder playfully taps against mine. He had once been my respite, my port of call from the storms of life. My heart is heavy with grief and I long to burrow inside his embrace—cleave to him—like I had so many times before. I no longer had that right, though. I walked away, I remind myself.

  How is this possible? Why now? My brain is in hyper-drive trying to process this odd happenstance. “Are you really here?”

  “In the flesh,” he replies. As if to reassure me of his true presence, he takes my hand and brings it to his lips.

  Sometimes seventeen years can feel like a breath away.

  He nods his head towards the doors. “My mother passed away.”

  His news constricts my already grieving heart. “I’m sorry.”

  For the first time since he spoke my name, he turns away from me, trying to hide his pained expression.

  “Yeah,” he says with a long exhale. His grip on my hand tightens as he clears his throat. “Today was the viewing, or whatever it is they call it.”

  In that moment, I remember seeing the other family across the hall. I close my eyes and try to remember what she had looked like, the sound of her voice, and the smell of her kitchen.

  He brings our clasped hands back up to his mouth, brushing his lips against my fingers. A lone tear falls from his cheek onto my index finger.

  I stop breathing, but the heady silence is broken by his tearful laugh, and I finally breathe out again.

  “What?” I ask as his sweet, soulful, brown eyes meet mine.

  He smiles. “I was just thinking about how much my mother hated you, and about what she would think about my holding your hand like this.”

  I can’t help but tearfully laugh back even if it is at my own expense. “Yes, she would be none too pleased.”

  We look away from each other and instead gaze at the city at our feet—our city, our home. Well, it used to be my home.

  He clears his throat and nods his head behind us. “What about you?”

  My voice sounds shaky—not my own. “My friend Katherine passed away. I don’t know if you remember her or not.” A sudden shiver ripples through me as my body remembers.

  Without a word, he places his jacket over my shoulders, pulling me closer to him. His large arm encircles me while the ministrations of his fingers on my arm begin to calm my overworked nerves.

  I let out a breath I didn’t know I had been holding. My fingers brush the scratchy polyester jacket of his uniform just under the lieutenant insignia; he has done well, been promoted. I want to touch the cool brass bars, but years in the service have trained me to leave them unmarred by the pads of my fingers. He chuckles at me as if he can read my thoughts, making my cheeks hot and red. The visual show of my arrant embarrassment serves to fan the flames of his laughter, causing me to join in with him despite myself. As it dies down, we fall into a companionable silence. Like magnet
s, our heads are drawn together, deepening our embrace.

  His free hand finds the hem of my dress and works it between the pads of his thumb and forefinger. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

  I look up from the spot I had been studying on the step in front of me and meet his intense gaze. Our foreheads lightly press together.

  My response comes out in a hoarse whisper. “She was Alex’s....” I take a deep breath and continue. “She was the one who lost the baby.”

  His eyes lower in remembrance.

  I reach with a trembling hand for his. “What she went through....” A ball of unresolved emotions chokes my throat.

  He sighs and his heavy-laden lids, still at half-mast, avoid my searching gaze. “Alex,” he says under his breath, a name that holds such meaning to us both. Looking up at me at last, he asks, “Do you want to talk about it?” His voice implores me to open up to him.

  I clear my throat, preparing to tell him the whole of it and unburden myself, and present to him my elegy to her.

  CHAPTER 1

  ~~~

  Nin’s Bar

  Danville, Virginia

  February 29, 2008

  7:30 PM

  ~~~

  The clock radio on her 2003 Mazda 626 dash read 7:30. Katherine let out a deep sigh as she turned off the car. She was late for her meeting with Alex Bailey, the new FBI field agent assigned to be her partner. He had called her earlier that morning to tell her he was finishing a case in Richmond, and wondered if she might want to meet up later, before they were assigned their first case on Monday. She had agreed and suggested meeting in her hometown of Danville, Virginia in a high-end bar nestled right off of I-95.

  She hated to be late, but that had been out of her control tonight. Her thumb rubbed at the spot where her ring had been all her adult life—so many years wasted with a man she had never even loved. She closed her eyes and let the tears slide down her cheeks. She swiped at her cheek, took a deep breath, and got out of the car.