All the color had drained from Carrington’s face as those words sank in. Shauna, Aidan’s invisible friend. Or was she really that invisible?
In an instant, he was tearing down the stairs, screaming for our youngest daughter. But I knew he wouldn’t find her.
Mahoney had her.
JOSS
Prologue
Joss
Seven years ago…
“So, the thing is,” I said, trying really hard not to look at him. I felt like a fool. What kind of adult was I, getting myself in such a predicament?
We were standing on the steps of a church, cars passing us by. I could almost feel the judgment pouring from each passerby.
I was an adult, a grown woman who’d already been married once, had a child. I shouldn’t be in this predicament.
“I’m pregnant.”
“You’re pregnant,” he repeated like he didn’t quite understand what I meant.
“Yeah.”
I stared at the ground, waiting for his reaction, but he was quiet for so long that I finally had to look up. He was watching me with this big, goofy grin on his face.
“What?”
He laughed. “Did you really think that would scare me off? You do realize I already have a kid.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t sure if—”
“Oh, hell, Joss,” he laughed. “For such a strong, brave woman, you can be stupid sometimes.” He pulled me into his arms and kissed my neck, holding me so tight that I thought he might break a rib. “I thought you were dying or something.”
“How was I supposed to know that you wouldn’t be shocked or upset?”
“It is a little of a shock, but not enough to make me not love you. I’m not upset at all.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
I pulled back and looked up at him. “Say it again.”
He grew very serious despite the laughter dancing in his eyes. “I love you, Joselyn Grant Hernandez.”
***
Now…
Tears rolled down my cheeks as the memory played itself out in my head over and over again. My baby girl…life had begun precariously with her, but it had worked out better than it had a right to. Aidan was such a joy, but now…
She was gone and I was in her bedroom at a house that had been empty for weeks, holding her favorite stuffed bear against my chest.
I should have known his target was Aidan from the very beginning. I loved McKelty with all my heart, but she wasn’t mine by blood. Aidan was.
Mahoney wanted to hit me where it would hurt the most. It was brilliant move.
But I had to be smarter than him. I had to out-think him, had to out-maneuver him.
I had to find my baby before he hurt her.
I would find her.
Chapter 1
Carrington
“I want to know where she is and why no one is talking to me!” I slammed my hand down on the table, anger so great that I didn’t even feel the impact on the tiny bones that ran along my fingers. “Where is my wife?”
Ash shook his head, his own anger bringing color to his face. “I told you, she doesn’t want you to know.”
“My wife is gone, my daughter is missing, and my other daughter has been shipped off to people I’ve never even met in Illinois and you—what? You expect me to just sit here and pretend that nothing’s happening?” I shook my head, my hands now fists at my sides. “You must think I’m a damn fool!”
Mina, Ash’s wife, approached me cautiously with her hand outstretched. “I know this is frustrating, Carrington—”
“You don’t know. You have no idea.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Oh, I think I do. I was the one sitting in a strange place on a ranch wondering if my husband was ever going to return to me last year.” Her tone softened a little. “I do know.”
She was trying to manipulate me by bringing up a past none of us wanted to talk about it. And it was working.
I stepped back and folded my arms over my chest, regarding both Ashford Grayson and his wife. It was true, I was responsible for having Ash kidnapped a little over a year ago. It was my plan, my knowledge of how Ash worked that allowed Mahoney’s people to walk him out of a botched raid and into the safe house where I was hiding out. But I was also the one who stood between him and the men who wanted to execute him for his part in the destruction of the Russian mob here in Santa Monica as well as his firm’s part in multiple raids on the Mahoney Cartel in Wyoming that eventually led to Jack Mahoney’s arrest.
“I never meant for things to go as far as they did last year. I controlled the situation as much as I could.”
Mina touched my arm. “I know.”
“He blackmailed me like he blackmailed so many others.”
“She knows,” Ash said, exasperation in his voice. “We all know, Carrington. It wasn’t your fault. We get it. But that doesn’t change our current situation.”
“You think all this has something to do with last year? With Mahoney’s arrest?”
He bobbed his head to one side. “All I know is that we didn’t have people shooting up our car on public streets until you brought Mahoney into our lives.”
“I brought Mahoney into your lives?” I asked, incredulity dripping from my words. “Who began investigating Mahoney’s connections to the Bazarovs? Who brought the fucking Bazarovs into our lives?”
“You did, as I recall,” Ash retorted.
“I wasn’t the one fucking their new leader.”
That was going over the top and I knew it, but I was frustrated as all hell. Aidan had been missing for more than a week and my wife was suddenly gone, too. And no one was telling me what the fuck was happening!
Ash charged at me, but Mina simply touched his hand and he backed off, spinning on his heel and pacing the other direction.
Funny the power the women we loved had over us.
“I’m just saying it’s not all on my shoulders, yet my family seems to be the one taking all the shit right now.”
“There’s been plenty to go around,” Ash snapped.
“Where is Joss?”
Ash shook his head. “If she wanted you to know, Carrington, she would have told you.”
I snickered at that. “Not necessarily true. Joss seems to think she has to do everything on her own. She thinks she’s protecting me, but all she’s doing is putting herself in a hell of a lot of danger.”
“That’s her job.”
“No. Her job is to run your office for you. She wasn’t supposed to go on cases anymore. She wasn’t supposed to put herself in the line of fire anymore.” I jabbed a finger in his direction. “And before you put the blame on my doorstep again, remember that you’re the one who got her into all this in the first place. If anything happens to her, her blood is just as much on your hands as it is anyone else’s.”
I stormed out, my hands shaking as I tried to control the vibrating wheel of my luxury car. I’d thought once that if I worked hard enough, if I did the right thing every time, I would live a good life. I would have everything I could ever want. It never occurred to me that hard work wouldn’t be enough to protect me and my family from the darkness that existed in the world.
My first wife committed suicide. I blamed myself for years, believing if I’d been there for her, if I hadn’t been so wrapped up in my father and my brother’s deaths, if I hadn’t been so wrapped up in saving our family company, if I’d noticed how miserable she was, staying home all day every day to take care of our daughter, that I could have helped her. I could have saved her. When she was gone, my world shrank to just the size of my mother, my daughter, and my business. And I was fiercely committed to all three.
And then came Joss.
She was this little slip of a thing who was supposed to protect my daughter from the gangsters who wanted to use my shipping company to move illegal weapons and drugs in and out of the country. She didn’t even speak, for Christ’s sake! But she changed my life in ways I never could have anticipated.
I never thought I could love anyone again, not after my first wife. But Joss…my love for her went miles above the feelings I’d had for McKelty’s mother. She was everything. She was the reason I got out of bed in the morning, the reason I worked so hard, the reason I loved our children so beyond distraction. She was the reason I breathed!
I let her down when we struggled to get pregnant and it didn’t work. Aidan had been a surprise, a miracle that cemented the commitment I’d already been so ready to make. But it turned out she was also a miracle that wasn’t meant to be repeated. Joss was so disappointed that it killed my soul.
Once again, I’d let the woman I loved down.
I let myself get wrapped up in my guilt, in my own self-esteem, and I made the biggest mistake of my life. I let a charming woman convince me that her affections could make me a better man, a bigger man, a stronger man. All they did was reveal how weak I truly was.
I betrayed my wife. I knew it was a mistake the moment I did it. I wanted Joss to kick me out, to punish me the way I deserved to be punished. But she didn’t. She continued to love me and, in a way, that was worse.
When Mahoney’s man came into my life and threatened to tell my staff, my children, everyone in my life what I’d done, I couldn’t let that happen. I’d already humiliated my wife in the act itself; I couldn’t add to it by allowing it to become public. So I let Mahoney blackmail me, allowed him to force me to act in the kidnapping of Ashford Grayson. I allowed him to put the final nail in my marriage’s coffin.
Oh, Joss didn’t leave me right away. We tried to make it work. But I couldn’t look at her without feeling the burden of my guilt and she couldn’t look at me without seeing my betrayal.
And now our daughter was missing, our little Aidan named for her uncle, and Joss was rushing off, playing cowboy, to rescue her all alone.
I was losing my wife all over again.
How many times would I have to lose her before she was gone for good?
I pulled into the driveway of my house, a little reluctant to go inside. The place was too quiet with everyone gone. I was considering going to the office, sleeping on the couch there again even though my personal assistant gave me funny looks every time she saw the pillow and blanket folded on the coffee table. I reached to turn the ignition when my phone buzzed, alerting me to a new text message.
She’s in Austin. But she’ll only be there another day.
The number was marked as unknown. A burner phone?
It could be a trick. But I wouldn’t know until I checked it out.
I started the car again, but headed toward the airport instead of the shipping yards. I was going to go find my wife.
Chapter 2
Joss
“We found a program…it’s a sort of virus. Aidan probably downloaded it without realizing.” David sat back and regarded me with those puppy dog eyes he knew melted even the coldest of hearts. “That’s probably how they wiped the history of the Skype calls.”
I leaned forward, studying the computer screens set up in front of him. I’d come to him because I knew David Grayson was the best when it came to finding things on computers that someone didn’t want found. The only thing we knew about the ‘friend’ Aidan had left the compound to meet was that they talked on Skype. But when we checked her computer, there was no record of calls over Skype except for the ones I’d made to my daughter.
“Did you find any traces of the calls?”
“We did, actually. The virus was good, but you can never really fully remove all traces of something from a computer.”
He pushed a button on his computer and a picture filled the center screen of the monitors arrayed on his desk in front of him. It was a woman of about twenty-five years of age with dark hair and light eyes. She was smiling brightly in the photograph, like she was responding to a joke Aidan had told. Anger rose in my throat like bile. What did this woman want with my child?
“I sent the picture to a friend of Ricki’s on the dark web and he came back with a name. Riva Tyran.”
“Riva. Sounds like a pseudonym.”
David nodded. “Beautiful name, but she doesn’t seem like a Riva to me. But that’s the best we could do.”
“I’ll call my counterpart at the FBI and see what he can do with it.”
David sat back and regarded me. It amazed me how little he’d changed over the years. The only difference, really, from the day I met him until now was the fact that he used to be confined to a wheelchair. But the chair disappeared after he had surgery on his spine that removed bone fragments that had been driven into his spine in a car accident. It took a long time and a lot of physical therapy, but if I hadn’t seen him in the wheelchair, I would never have guessed he’d ever been unable to walk.
David was kinder now, had less of a chip on his shoulder than he’d had all those years ago. I blamed his wife, Ricki, for that. And I’m sure it had something to do with the two kids they now shared. They’d found that happily ever after thing that seemed to be eluding me.
“You okay, Joss? This can’t be easy.”
“It’s not.”
I dragged my fingers through my fine, blond hair, catching sight of myself in the window behind him. I looked tired, a little too thin. I tried to remember to eat, but it didn’t help that morning sickness was still destroying my appetite even though, by my calculation, I was just over the twelve-week mark.
“How’s Carrington?”
I tilted my head, remembering how panicked he was the night we realized Aidan was gone. And then when the phone call came:
No harm will come to her as long as you back off all cases dealing with the Mahoney Cartel and Jack Mahoney himself.
I didn’t believe that any more than Ash did, but we both ended all Gray Wolf involvement in the outstanding cases involving members of the Mahoney Cartel. Not that it took much to do that since we’d identified all remaining active members of the cartel in California and turned their names over to the FBI. They hadn’t said the FBI couldn’t act on that information—and they had, quite successfully from what I’d heard.
I didn’t believe they would harm Aidan—at least, that’s what I told myself—but I wasn’t going to sit back and wait for them to change their minds. I was going to find my girl even though I suspected I was playing right into Mahoney’s hands.
I knew Mahoney’s beef was with me and I knew he understood I wouldn’t just sit back and allow him to torture my family. I was pretty sure this was the end game, that he wanted me to confront whoever—or whatever—was waiting where Aidan was.
“Carrington’s a mess. I tried to talk him into staying in Illinois with McKelty, but he wanted to be at home in case these people just decided to dump her there for whatever reason.”
“He thinks they will?”
“He did, at first. I think he was kind of hoping she’d get loose and she’d find her way home. Or whoever was holding her would have pity on her. She’s only six…almost seven…”
My voice broke a little. David laid his hand on my knee, his thumb rubbing the inside curve.
“I’m sorry, Joss. This shouldn’t have happened to you.”
I shrugged miserably. “I don’t understand why it is, to be honest. If this was all about his nephew, why didn’t he come after me in the four years after the accident, before I married Carrington? Why didn’t he come after me when I quit Gray Wolf and was playing housewife? Why didn’t he come after me before Ash began checking into him?”
“Because you weren’t bothering him before then.”
“But I didn’t bother him then, either. I hadn’t even heard his name until Ash called and asked me to go to Wyoming to help with the raid on his warehouse.”
David sighed. “Who can predict when a crazy man is going to act out? There is no way of knowing.”
“I tried. I went to visit him.”
David’s eyes widened. “Why would you do that?”
“Because I thought I could get some insight into him, figure out
how to stop all this. It’s taken its toll, you know? My marriage…” I groaned, stretching my neck in a futile attempt to keep the tears burning my throat in my head. “It was bad enough before all this began. But having to put a detail on Carrington and the girls and then moving them to the compound? It’s done a real number on my family.”
“And now this.”
I lay my hand on top of his, needing the support of his touch. He turned his hand and wrapped his fingers around mine.
“I thought I could reason with him, but all he did was threaten my child. I assumed he was talking about McKelty, but he knew the whole time that his accomplice was already in the process of stealing Aidan away.” I gestured at the computer. “Ash and his crack team even caught it all on film, the moment she punched in the code and walked through the gate. But because she had the code, no alarms went off and the kidnapper knew where the cameras were, so we didn’t get anything but my daughter walking out of camera range.”
David grunted. “I can’t imagine.”
“I just don’t understand why Aidan. Why would they go after her when she can’t do anything to protect herself? Why not McKelty? She’s older, she could fight back. I’ve taught her…” A sob slipped from between my lips. “Aidan’s just a baby!”
David stood and pulled me into his arms. “I’m sorry, Joss. Really.”
I couldn’t let myself give in to my tears. If I did, I would never crawl out of the hole that was grief. I’d been there once before. I knew what it was like.
I pulled away abruptly. “I have to make a phone call.” I headed toward the door, wiping at my eyes.
“Joss, you’re not alone in this. Anything you need, you’ve got it.”
“I know.”
I went out the back door, needing some fresh air, aware of the stares of the operatives David had employed here at his Austin compound. Things had been going well for him here these past few years, business exploding. He employed twenty operatives and almost that many in support staff. Ash liked to brag that he was doing so well that David had to turn away clients.
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