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Forever
, the voice whispered in her mind. It was both wish and hope and hunger:
His, forever
.

She extracted herself carefully from the bed, doing her best not to wake her sleeping lover. She closed the bedroom door and, on the way to the bathroom, saw her purse sitting on the kitchen table. Ricardo must have carried it here because she had no memory of seeing it in the bar after he'd taken it from her.

When she was finished in the bathroom, she got a glass of water and drank greedily. On the counter, covered in plastic, was half a pizza, the kind the Fairy Godfathers used to serve on Friday nights when she was a teenager, a rare indulgence for the health conscious duo. But Chelsea had no appetite for it now.

Thinking of her fairy godfathers reminded her that she should let them know she was all right. They were used to her coming and going and had no idea of the mayhem at the center of her life, only that she was seeing a new man. She smiled as she realized that they probably thought her lover had taken her for a nice dinner and maybe some perfectly respectful, ordinary lovemaking after and was even now spending the night in some urban condominium with a man who worked in the financial district.

She dug in her purse for the phone, mentally composing the text she would send…
doing fine, miss you, love you, call you tomorrow
.

But her phone lit up with a text from someone else entirely. Jade. And she'd sent a link along with, in all capitals, the words
READ THIS!!!

For a moment Chelsea hesitated. She longed to slip back into bed, into the warm cocoon embrace of Ricardo's arms. It had only been a few hours since she'd talked to
Jade, since she'd heard the warnings and added them to the complex case she was building in her mind concerning Ricardo's true nature. Despite the raw, sometimes violent nature of his sexual attentions—or maybe, in some twisted, complicated way, because of it—she'd allowed herself to be lulled into a sense of safety. Of complacency.

She could thank Jade and tell her not to look any further into his life. Commit herself to trust, when even those two words—“commit” and “trust”—had never been part of her emotional vocabulary.

She'd just take a quick look first.

While she waited for the web browser to open, Chelsea listened to the sounds of the night below and smelled the mixture of fragrant vines and spicy food wafting through the windows. She could be happy with Ricardo, no matter where they were. Perhaps she could open her gallery again, in another town, another place, when things settled down. Maybe they had a chance to build a life together, despite everything.

An image appeared on the phone's tiny screen, coming into focus pixel by pixel. At first it was just a jangled collage of colors, dominated by slashes of red.

Then Chelsea realized what she was really looking at and almost dropped the phone in horror.

The man depicted in the photograph—what was left of him, anyway—had been massacred. He'd been stabbed, slashed, defiled. Blood seeped from his body in a dozen places. Appendages hung by thin threads of skin and tendon.

Crouching next to the body was a second man, this one very much alive. His face was shielded from view, but the knife in his hand was sharply detailed.

As was the watch on his wrist.

A gold and steel Breitling, the same one Ricardo wore. And that jacket—he'd been wearing it on the night he'd come straight from the airport to get her, the very same night she'd been threatened in her home.

One by one, other visual details fell into place—the hair, the broad shoulders, the shirt cuffs at his wrists—until Chelsea could not deny that it was Ricardo. And that he'd not only killed a man, something she had made her uncomfortable peace with when he had avenged the violent murder of his friend—but attacked him in such graphic and sickening ways that what was left looked barely human.

Chelsea felt like she would be sick. She went out on the small balcony and drank in the cool night air, taking deep breaths until the dizziness passed. The image, however, was indelible in her brain.

What had she been thinking, only moments ago, when she was contemplating making a life with a killer? How could she ever endure his frequent absences, knowing that he might be taking lives, murdering and plundering, playing casually with stakes almost too high to contemplate?

She had to get a grip. Sleeping a few yards away was a man who made her feel like no one had before. But a few miles away were two men whom she loved, who had raised her as a daughter. What if the men in Ricardo's dangerous world decided to go after them? Was she willing to endanger Donny and Rufus, just so she could continue the dangerous game she was playing?

Or should she put an end to this now, while she still could, before she was pulled even further into his web?

Her heart leaden with shock and the return to her terrible reality that accompanied it, Chelsea tapped the phone, bringing up her list of contacts. She stared at it for a long time before bringing up the number.

Not Jade's.

She dialed, knowing the man on the other end would pick up no matter how late it was, no matter where he was.

“Hello?” Stone Everson said.

CHAPTER TEN

An FBI van had come for her once before, when she'd foolishly gone for a jog in a questionable neighborhood on another night when she had been trying to make sense of the chaos that had turned her world upside down when she met Ricardo de Santos. That time, Stone had interrogated her about her lover in an effort to coax her to help the FBI take him down. Stone had brought men with him, a driver and a second agent in case things went badly.

This time, he came alone.

Chelsea waited on the balcony until she saw his familiar unmarked car cruise slowly down the street below, only twenty minutes after she'd made the call.

She didn't dare take a last look at Ricardo. Not just because she feared waking him…she feared even more not being able to go through with it.

Leaving him. Betraying him. Losing him forever.

She opened the door to the apartment carefully. Luckily, it made no sound. Then she was padding down the hall with her purse hugged close to her body, taking with her only what she'd had when this day began. She broke into a run when she reached the stairs, taking them two at a time and racing across the landings. In seconds, she was pushing her way out of the front door.

The driver's side window was lowered and she saw a gun—Stone was driving, and he was pointing it directly at her. Not at
her
, she forced herself to remember as she ran for the passenger door, but at whatever danger might follow her.

The minute she was inside, he hit the gas without putting down the gun, and for the first tense seconds, they didn't speak as he focused on the rear view mirror and gunned the engine.

But when they'd gone a few blocks, and he'd eased back on the speed and into the traffic of a major street, he turned to her and sighed. “You could have come the first time I asked you to,” he rebuked her. “Now it's going to be a hell of a lot harder to keep you out of the investigation.”

“I know,” she said woodenly, refusing to meet his gaze.

“Then there's the matter of your timing,” Stone continued.

“I'm
sorry
,” Chelsea snapped. “Look, I fucked up, okay? You don't need to rub it in. I have terrible taste in men, blah blah blah, I get it. Can we just get this over with?”

“That's not what I meant,” Stone said. “Your timing, as in, not two hours ago I got a very interesting piece of intelligence from our Las Vegas office that doesn't have anything to do with your lawless boyfriend.”

The hairs on the back of Chelsea's neck stood up. “What was it?” she asked cautiously.

“I may have found Huber.”

He kept his eyes on the road, but Chelsea felt as though he had hit her with a two by four. “Where?”

“In Las Vegas. Living under an assumed name in a shitty part of town.”

Roy Huber, the man who had stolen her childhood—alive and living a few hundred miles away. Chelsea felt like she couldn't breathe, like the ghosts from her
childhood were reaching up and trying to strangle her. She'd never stopped thinking about him, never escaped the memories of the horror completely, but over many years those memories had formed a protective scrim, their impact softening. Now it was as though that protection had been ripped away, exposing the pain and horror underneath.

“I'm going to pick him up tomorrow,” Stone continued. “So your timing is, well, fairly remarkable.”

“How?” Chelsea had been reduced to one-word sentences, and even those single words were difficult to form. The seeds of panic were building inside her.

Perhaps Stone expected that because, as he pulled into the parking garage of the FBI offices, he gave her a sympathetic glance.

“Let's go upstairs, okay?”

“Just tell me. Please. How did you find him?”

“Well, it's pretty remarkable, really. We've had feelers out all over the country for years. We still get tips from time to time, believe it or not, but it's always turned out to be dead ends until now. But then I got a very interesting call two days ago.”

A warning bell went off in Chelsea's head. Judging from the way Stone was watching her, the same thought must have occurred to him as well.

“The caller gave us very precise information, including an address and the name Huber's ostensibly been using,” Stone continued. “I couldn't get any other information out of him.”

“How do you know it's not just another crank call?”

“That, unfortunately, is classified. The Las Vegas office offered to pick him up, but as you can probably imagine, I want this one for myself.”

“Take me with you.”

“Chelsea, you know very well that—”

“Please! Please, Stone, I need to see him.” Need to know that it was really him. That he was well and truly finally going to be locked up. That he couldn't ever come after her again.

“You can see him when we've got him in custody. Chelsea, come on. If all goes well, I'll be back by tomorrow night. Even if there are complications, we'll have him picked up within the week if this really is him. I've got full support from the Vegas office, even though I'm not going to need it.”

“You can't know that,” Chelsea said, the ancient fear inside her swelling to take over her body. “He'll fight back. He'll try to kill you. He'd rather die than be locked up, and he'd want to take you with him. I
know
him.”

“Look, I understand, honey, I really do.” Stone hadn't called her “honey” since she was a teen. “But he's over sixty years old now, with no resources and no way to flee. There's nothing around that part of town but strip malls and hundred-fifteen degree temperatures. If he runs, he won't run far or fast. And, as you know, I'm extraordinary.”

It was an old joke between them. Ever since Stone had been commended for his “extraordinary service in a duty of extreme challenge” when he was awarded the Medal for Meritorious Achievement after closing a difficult case many years ago, he had teasingly reminded her of the word whenever she expressed despair that Huber would never be caught.

“I know it,” she said quietly. “But I don't think I can stand to wait. Not if he's really that close.”

“Look, we'll put you up tonight. Somewhere safe, where no one can get to you—not Ricardo, not Huber, no one. And I'll let you know as soon as I have him in custody. Look, Chels, we've got all the case evidence from years ago, and the DA will want this tried as soon as possible. You'll get to see him in court—in handcuffs, staring down the rest of his life in jail. I promise you that.”

“So what, I just have to…wait?” Chelsea demanded. “You want me to sit in some hotel room somewhere while you drive to the middle of the fucking desert?”

Stone sighed, and she could imagine him rolling his eyes. “It will be a nice hotel room. You won't be alone, Agent Tabitha Bledsoe will stay there with you. You'll like her. And to pass the time, Agent Vega will be grilling you to find out everything you know about de Santos.”

“Wow, I can hardly wait,” Chelsea said shakily.

“Maybe we'll even get you a clean shirt.”

#

Stone was true to his word. By eight o'clock the following morning, after a very restless night of sleep in an anonymous chain hotel near LAX, Marco Vega was sitting across the table from her tapping his pen on his yellow pad.

“You're sure they'll call the minute he's in custody?” Chelsea said, holding her cup of coffee beneath her chin so the steam rose up to warm her face. The air conditioning was impossible to turn down, and the room was icy.

“For the third time, yes,” Vega said, rolling his eyes. “Listen, Everson's been after Huber for years. He's obsessed. Nothing is going to stop him. And you know he's as good as they get. Now can we get back to the matter at hand?”

Chelsea sighed and pulled the FBI sweatshirt they'd brought her more tightly around herself. “Fire away.”

#

By mid afternoon, Vega had come at the subject of Ricardo de Santos from every direction imaginable. Chelsea had told him in detail the locations and dates of every time she'd been with him. What she hadn't shared was the things they'd done. No matter how often Vega asked her to elaborate, the furthest she would go was to admit to a consensual sexual relationship…the exact nature of that relationship she didn't plan to share with anyone.

But in the afternoon, when her attention was sagging and the room service club sandwich was sitting like a stone in her stomach, she found her attention wandering. Back to the bar where she'd swallowed a stranger's cum while Ricardo rammed her from behind. To the house in the hills where she'd crawled on the floor and begged for him to fuck her. To the apartment high above the city where he'd tied her to a chair and anointed her with hot wax…