Retribution: The Vendetta Trifecta, #2

By A.J. Scudiere

Sin and Lee are back! – Readers say it's "even better than the first, which I could not put down!"

Sin and Lee have left their violent pasts behind, but the past will never leave them.

They've tried to lay low. Sin and Lee have whole new identities as Will and Diana Kincaid. Will/Lee is supposedly a mild-mannered accountant, and Diana/Sin is now … a police officer. 

When the body of mafia leader Kolya Kurev's son turns up in her district, Diana is forced to take a hard look at how well she has—or hasn't—covered her tracks. A stronger generation of Kurevs is growing out of the wasteland she and Lee left behind and the Kurev sons have a memory that is long and angry.

Her precinct is concerned about the growing threat of the Kurev family and more than a little curious what brought it to them. But was it Sin? Or was it her new boss, Nick Stelian? He specifically recruited her to his department and now she's having to ask herself why.

It's hard to choose sides when Diana can't even determine what the sides are anymore. She can't run, she can't stay, and she can't protect what she fought so hard for, not when a newer, more dangerous breed of assassin waits around every corner…

Retribution is the second book in the Vendetta Trifecta. While it can be read as a standalone, you'll want the whole series before you even finish.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Griffyn Ink
• Release date: Apr 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781937996352

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

H ello, Sin.

Shocked into stillness, Diana froze for only a split second. That barest of moments cost her; no one was there when she jerked into action and spun around. Rather, everyone was there. Crowd control was exactly what it was cracked up to be. Though cops were everywhere, they were outnumbered one hundred to one by game-goers.

She must have heard it wrong; she hadn’t heard that name in years. Diana had long ago left Sin and that life behind. Far behind. Dead.

Slowing her heart rate by sheer force, a skill she’d learned early and used often, Diana opened her eyes, scanned everyone, looked for anyone she recognized from a past long since buried. But she saw nothing. In the sea of faces around her not a single one popped out. The crowd had a soul, moved like a tide, and cleanly carried the person who whispered those words in her ear away with the current of bodies.

Hey! Reese looked over at her.

Diana’s head popped up. Hey was not the usual form of address from one officer to another. Given the look on Reese’s face, this had not been her first attempt to get Diana’s attention.

Reese held two large men at bay, each of her fists twisted into a collar, each man holding his hands docilely on his head. People often dismissed the tiny blonde, but it was a mistake they made once. Only once. She and Diana had become fast friends upon meeting, coming in as rookies together and working their way up.

Reese yanked one collar toward Diana and indicated that the men were being cuffed but not arrested. Not yet.

Using the barest of words and handling the cuffs with a fluid economy of motion, she restrained him. In Diana’s opinion, they were dipshits who were likely to just keep being stupid and would probably wind up with something filed against them before they were done. Reese was pretty lenient. She didn’t cuff just anyone.

Hand him off to me and head back to your post. The male voice over her shoulder startled Diana.

What are you doing here, Nick?

He rolled his eyes. Back in uniform for the game. Go. He took the man, who never turned around to see that it was Diana who cuffed him, and she headed back to her post. Back into her life.

A life that was relatively normal. Or it should have been.

She was the proud owner of an accountant husband and a steady paycheck. Police work was a good fit for her. Though she and Will tried several years earlier to get pregnant, they’d struggled with it, miscarried, and made the decision to wait. All normal problems.

She enjoyed her problems and embraced the tears that had come. They were ordinary tears and thus the events made her happy even as they made her sad. Will had freaked out a little bit when she’d gotten pregnant and then again when she miscarried. If she ignored why he freaked out, it was all perfectly average.

So she didn’t think much about the fact that Will didn’t want to lose a second child. That his first wife had met her better angels wrapped around her daughter. That he hadn’t been able to protect her from the high-speed, cop-killer bullets designed to do maximum damage to two people who had never done anything to deserve it except be associated with Will in the days before he became Will Kincaid. Diana ignored all that.

She focused on the fact that her fake background had survived the investigation necessary to become a police officer, and she buried Cynthia Beller once and for all.

Or so she had thought.

Until she heard those words.

Diana scanned the crowds, cursing her short stature and wondering if she’d really heard it or if—for some reason—she’d suddenly hallucinated the sounds.

The second was the better option. But she could come up with no good reason why today would be the day for her brain to fabricate something like that. She could make up a rationale for it, but that would involve lying to herself. And she’d stopped lying to herself when she was eleven, when she used a kitchen knife to cut the duct tape from her wrists and had dialed 911 to report the crime against her family.

Hello, Sin.

It rang in her head, rattled around her skull, repeating and probably warping.

She struggled to recognize the voice, but no matter how many times she replayed it, she couldn’t place it. It didn’t even linger in the back of her brain, nagging, telling her she had an idea or that she’d heard it before. No, there was nothing.

Pulling her attention forcibly to the present, Diana told herself that—even if the voice was real—it was gone, pulled away by the surge of the crowd. Normality was her best cover, and normal Diana would be neck deep in the job at hand. There would be no way to explain her lack of focus to her fellow officers.

They weren’t like her, didn’t think like she did. But despite the rumors and what everyone liked to say about them, cops weren’t as a general rule as stupid as they were made out to be. These guys were sharp, and it would only take one of them thinking that something was off kilter to lead to some digging.

Her background would stand up to some research . . . but only so much. She’d already screwed up a few times. Already let Sin out of the bag on a few occasions that no one should have seen, times that shouldn’t have happened.

So maybe Cynthia Beller wasn’t as far gone as Diana had thought. Maybe her old self was closer to the surface than she liked to believe.

And maybe someone had seen that . . .

Will was nervous.

He was nervous because Diana was nervous, and she was never nervous. She was the one who made him want to come back to life, the one who made a full life seem possible and—if not entirely safe—at least safe enough.

But she’d heard something today, and though she wanted him to believe she’d brushed it off, it had clearly gotten through that tough shell of hers.

In four years, nothing had gotten through.

That FBI agent had come to their house, handed them a recording device holding what was supposedly the last piece of evidence the FBI had against them, and left with a smile on his face. Diana had broken the recorder. In true echoes of the Sin she’d been, she’d buried part of it in the backyard, burned the actual recording chip, and put the remaining parts in three different trashcans at three different types of locations in three different counties over four days.

Then she’d wiped her hands of it—acted as though getting rid of the plastic got rid of the whole problem.

Will didn’t wash his own conscience so simply.

What they’d done could easily carry the death penalty. He didn’t think any jury would push it that far. He truly believed any lawyer worth his or her salt would play the card that he and Sin had been on the right side of things, driven by what some could easily call a multiyear temporary insanity.

But former FBI Agent Owen Dunham knew their new names. He possessed the confirmation he wrangled from them in a moment of their own sheer stupidity that they were exactly who he thought they were. Though his evidence was only verbal, he knew where they lived.

Diana had gone back to school, back to the former agent’s class the next week, aced his course, and signed up for another one. She was on her way to the police force, then Quantico. Had big plans to join the FBI. She could have her big plans; Will wanted a small life with few interferences. Somehow, he’d let her talk him into not running.

Aside from her coursework and only typical professor/student interaction, Diana had not had any contact with Dunham in the time since. Will had never seen the man again or heard the name Lee Maxwell associated with himself in all that time. And slowly, he had felt his muscles unclench. It had taken months. He hadn’t really sensed the moment tension left him; he only realized one day that it was gone. That he believed he was safe from the ghosts that surely still pursued him.

Tonight the solid earth beneath his feet on the south side of Atlanta had turned to shifting sand when Diana came home and told him.

Sin had followed Diana.

She’d been here all along, somewhere inside, lurking. Though Diana had done an excellent job of shedding her old skin, sometimes Sin popped up. Sometimes Diana the police officer wanted to hunt rather than just collect and detain. Sometimes her eyes darted out and she saw things she shouldn’t or understood nuances a girl from a small town outside Dallas wouldn’t. Tonight it was just a subtle tension that told him she was on high alert.

A high alert she hadn’t been on since they’d first become their new selves back in Los Angeles.

A high alert brought on by words she couldn’t prove, couldn’t reclaim, couldn’t place. Words she might have even imagined.

But there was no reason he could come up with—console himself with—that she might have fabricated the warning now. There was nothing in their current lives indicating that the old had come back to haunt them. Or if there was, he had missed it.

That thought was as scary as anything else. Though he lived Will Kincaid’s partially fictional life, he was still Lee Maxwell as much as Diana was Cynthia Beller. She was in the back room after dinner, doing fifty push-ups. His wife was more concerned with staying buff than he was. He was happy—at least he thought he was—in his tie and button-down shirt. His computer had a wireless ten-key pad that he used as often as most people used a mouse. He owned a keyboard with programmable buttons that he set up for common tax equations, and lately he’d felt the beginnings of a good case of carpal tunnel syndrome coming on. He was a personal rather than corporate accountant like Lee Maxwell had been. His hair was just a shade darker than Lee’s, his eyes at the same time keener and sadder.

His wife was doing push-ups and sit-ups in the room that had once been designated for a child. Now it held weights and mats and a punching bag—all normal workout tools, none of the weapons or gear she’d once played with regularly.

But while she stayed pumped as a plan for her future and tried to look like a normal fitness-nut cop, he stayed pumped from their past. He never truly believed they could live out Will and Diana’s lives.

Or maybe he had. Maybe that’s what turned his stomach tonight—that somewhere along the line he had started to believe it could work. Suddenly two words could change everything. They could disappear into the air, a figment of Diana’s often overactive imagination or they could be the harbinger that foretold of an epic crash.

He stood up from the table, clearing his plate and the one Diana had left behind when she went to work out immediately after eating. Then he walked into the bedroom as calmly as he could and changed into an old T-shirt and sweatpants as though it wasn’t stark raving fear that drove him. With a battered towel slung over his shoulder he went into the back room, the sound of whispered counting getting louder as he came through the open doorway.

Mind if I join you?

Never breaking count or motion, she smiled and nodded as though he always did this.

Clearing a space beside her, he started his own set of reps—knuckle-down push-ups. Every time his nose neared the mat, he heard two words.

Hello, Sin.

I have to go to work, Mom.

He was a grown man. Thirty years old. Grown men left for work. But this dance they did was routine. He waited a beat . . . there it was.

Why do you go to this job? You know your grandfather wants you to work for him.

Nick smiled. Because this job is better. He kissed her and headed out the door before she could ask him to explain. He couldn’t. Not to her. While he could easily lay out his logic and say the words, she still wouldn’t understand. He’d said them hundreds of times before he realized that a kiss and a smile were much easier than the truth.

At least he wasn’t in uniform today. He’d made the sorry mistake of being late for crowd control and hadn’t left enough time to change twice. His mother had seen him, everything but the shirt and patches, and she hadn’t approved. Her eyes narrowed in a way that he was never sure about. Was it the purview of all mothers? All Romanian women? Or was it simply her own?

That had been a shitstorm brewing soft and silent for twenty-four hours. So today, he was grateful for the shirt and tie; he could have been a businessman. He was a businessman. Only no one really knew that.

The drive in was uneventful and left his head full of thoughts. His grandfather was slowly heading downhill. There were mild memory lapses and changes in emotion that weren’t fully explainable by circumstance. His closest people were covering for him. But Bun’s time at the top of the family business was coming to a close. And Bun was left with Nick—his only grandson—to take over.

For a moment, Nick felt his hand clench on the steering wheel. There were a lot of problems with Bun’s ideas. In this day and age, Nick’s illegitimacy should not have been an issue. His mother, a self-proclaimed American, should have been a liberated woman, free to have a child on her own. But she wasn’t. And she’d suffered much at the hands of her father and the rest of the family for her decision. She should have left but didn’t or couldn’t, and she suffered as much for staying as for her other choices.

It might have been better—would have been better—if Nick’s father had been anyone else. Even an unknown would have left both his mother and himself in higher regard. But no, in true Romeo and Juliet fashion, she had fallen hard for his grandfather’s greatest rival’s son. The rival had died, leaving only the son to bear Bun’s full hate. Of course, in the end the son had been no such Romeo; her love had been the only thing sustaining that union. And Nick grew up as the bastard while Bun waited for another heir that Nick’s uncles failed to produce. Their early deaths tasted of irony in the back of Nick’s mouth. His cousins were all female, most with no ambition to take over the business. Those that did have ambition were constantly pushed down and held back because of their gender.

Though his family lived in America and made their money from Americans, it appeared that they themselves were not yet American, regardless of three generations of integration.

Despite all this, or maybe because of it, Nick’s greatest hope was for family. His female cousins adored him. How could they not? In an Old World business, Nick was not a chauvinist. To his grandfather the women were at the least meant to be decorative and at best strategic. To Nick, they were loyal.

So he tightened his tie as he parked in the back and exited the car. His key card gave him access to almost all the doors in the building and his diligence gave him access to all the avenues his grandfather had never thought about.

Nick smiled at his coworkers as he headed down the hall. He loved his job. And more than that, he loved that he was building his future on this foundation.

What crawled up your ass, Di?

Diana pressed her lips together. She’d wanted this. Wanted friends, female friends. But she hadn’t counted on the fact that normal was sometimes damned obnoxious.

Sometimes she and Will didn’t speak to each other for several days. They moved around each other, existing in the same house. Sometimes they sat side by side on the couch, watching TV or even making love, and barely said a word. They just weren’t chatty people.

But Reese was the bane of all that was holy. What Diana couldn’t figure out was why she liked the other woman so much. What did she really see in this small, navy-blue-clad creature, with her arms crossed and her hip jutted out as she waited for a legitimate answer to her crude question?

For a moment, Diana stood by her patrol car in the waning sunlight and considered her options.

She could just pull her gun and shoot the woman. Wipe the frown right off the too-blue eyes, pink lips, and peachy skin.

She could take Reese down, put her into a choke hold and shut her up that way.

Or she could answer. Thank God she was known for being short of words, so a terse answer wouldn’t throw any red flags.

But the reasons she couldn’t do it were all the reasons Diana liked, no loved, Reese. Reese was what her sister, Wendy, should have been: beautiful and grown and strong. Reese didn’t take anybody’s shit, including Diana’s. No, Diana couldn’t really just take her down. Not without a good fight. And not because Diana would pull her punches. It would hurt because Reese could dole out far more pain than anyone would ever think could come from a little former ballerina.

So Diana gave the answer that she saw as her only option. I don’t know.

She did know. But as much as she liked her life and her friends, she would never tell about Sin. Diana pulled open the door of her squad car, wondering why she was back in uniform.

You’re lying. Though Reese called bullshit, she didn’t put any venom behind it. Something spooked you at the game, right?

What the hell? Yeah, you arresting everyone in sight.

They had Kubotans and small rolls of duct tape. And one of them had handcuff keys in his pockets. The exaggerated shiver belied the topic. Cops had died over misses. Reese didn’t miss.

It’s not illegal to carry cuff keys. Damn, her car was hot. Always a joy when wearing Kevlar. Who knew she’d end up wearing the stuff nearly every damn day?

So they keep telling me. But I feel better arresting people for little things when I find cuff keys in their pockets. She slid in and shut her door, opened her laptop, and waved goodbye, thereby letting the topic of the tension drop.

Twisting the key, Diana started her own engine and tried to focus on work. There was a BOLO for a car in her area just before shift change, which meant the perp was probably long gone, but hey, she’d keep her eyes peeled for a black Mercedes. She had a warrant to run down, but she and Reese would meet up for that later in the evening, when Mr. Restraining Order was more likely to be home.

Will had spoken less to her in the last two days than Reese had just now with them back on shift. But he’d checked in regularly. Had she heard anything again? No, she had likely imagined the whole thing. Still she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was in someone’s crosshairs and that she deserved it.

Ready to crash by about four a.m., Diana instead parked off in a dark corner and typed up her reports on the in-car laptop. She was scrutinizing the writing—the decidedly unbrilliant, just-the-facts-ma’am style suiting her—when the call came in.

With a sigh, she flipped on the lights and responded.

Dispatch was reporting something suspicious in the area. Enough for lights, but not enough to know what the hell she was going into. What she did know was that the area was relatively nice and not one they got a lot of calls from. Arriving on scene, she flipped both her blue lights and headlights off and simply observed.

The house was unassuming: small, yellowish in color, grass mowed occasionally, if not trimmed within an inch of its life. Several cars graced the driveway, and Diana noted the fact that both the number and the wide range of quality of the cars were unusual. Add in the odd hour and she knew the suspicious call from a neighbor was probably the right idea.

Pulling back out of sight, she waited, watching the house and reporting in regularly as she waited for support. While she ran license plate numbers, adrenaline started seeping into her system in tiny quantities, but she ignored it. She knew better than anyone that these things could go in any direction, and the best thing to do was stay in control.

So when a middle-aged man walked out of the house and climbed into one of the back cars, Diana kept her eye on him. His car had checked out clean, and he appeared to be the proper owner of the vehicle.

A burst of static told her Cummings was just around the corner. Not her favorite fellow officer, but he was more than capable of the job, a good person for watching a suspicious house. Slowly she turned her car and followed the man in the compact, mid-level sedan. Three blocks later, her lights went on as her quarry started weaving.

Luckily, there was no one on the streets at this time but the two of them, and he gave up relatively quickly and pulled over. Walking up to his window, Diana called it in. Ward Daniels, can I please have you step out of the car?

The use of his name had his head snapping up. I have two kids, a wife, I— He looked frantic, trapped, scared. All of which were appropriate given what she’d seen of him, but his roiling fears didn’t speak well for her safety. This had to be by the book, piece by piece and slow.

In the end, he didn’t freak out on her, just let her put the cuffs on and stood facing his car while she searched him. Aside from the usual wallet and change she found only a small zipper baggie of pink crystals. She held them up, Pink?

It’s . . . better. His voice was soft, his words resigned.

She almost grinned at the thought. Better? There was never anything better. But she followed protocol, pushing his head down and ducking him into the back of her squad car. There was something comforting in following the routine, something soothing in having the rules made for her, though she would never have guessed that five years ago.

Her decision that he was an easy catch evaporated as she headed back toward the house. He asked her to let him go, promising to never do anything like this again. Told her his marriage would disintegrate if his wife found out. Diana refrained from laughing and suggesting that he not buy illegal drugs in the dead of night if he wanted his marriage to stay together. Three blocks later, she was ready to deliver a sharp blow to just under his jaw or choke him out. He would not shut up.

Lights off, she sat back and watched the scene, ears perked around the blubbering of the man in the backseat. Outside the boundaries of the property, officers were stalking and picking off the people coming out one by one as they left.

Sitting out of sight again, she watched through the windshield and called dibs on another person-of-interest she saw leaving the house.

This was another male, younger, healthy, and sane looking. Seemed like the best bet since she had to double up. The out-of-state plates on his car were concerning, and the call-up as a rental was even more so. Maybe he hadn’t been the best perp to choose, but he was hers now.

Again, she turned her patrol car, followed the nondescript sedan and wondered what she was getting into. This one didn’t even try to flee, just pulled over at the first rotation of the blue lights and looked bored.

That was probably the worst possible outcome. His boredom—and clear familiarity with procedure—indicated that this was not his first time. He knew his rights and operated within them, even going so far as putting his hand on his head while being cuffed without being told to.

Her heart rate, having run at slightly above normal the whole time, kicked up another notch. She wasn’t at kill-level yet, but she was definitely well above normal. A search turned up nothing more than a wallet and some change. His keys sat on the front windshield where she’d had him place them as she approached the car, and that became the sum total of his possessions. No pink crystals on this guy.

Another flag.

Why would he be in that house at four thirty a.m. if not to buy drugs? Blubbering Dad there had made it pretty clear that someone was dealing meth out of the place. So Donald Kinsington seemed more suspicious for his lack of evidence.

After he was in the car, she ran his license and—though nothing was wrong—the record was almost too squeaky. The fabricated-background kind of squeaky, and she should know.

There was something scratching at the back of her brain . . . something that bothered her and she couldn’t place it. Years of practice had her exterior shell remaining calm while her thoughts churned. Everything inside her stilled as her head scrambled to organize and pull her memories while in the back of her car meth-dad blubbered to Kinsington. Kinsington ignored him, even though Ward Daniels said enough to at least place Kinsington inside the house.

That was good. Cucumber-cool Kinsington was likely to claim that he’d never been inside the place, that he was walking through the backyard for some odd reason—no law against that, right officer?—at four thirty in the morning, and clearly he had no idea that there was meth in the house. Oh, and he needed to call his good friend, his lawyer. So it was nice to have meth-dad slobbering implications all over the place. But Kinsington kept his mouth closed all the way through processing, not even telling the other man, now openly crying, to shut the hell up.

Diana spent the next several hours processing her two guys. She parked them in holding cells and then called Nick in to interview them both. She listened to chatter about the house and whether the PD would watch, search, or just wait.

Long after the official end of her shift, she stopped by to check on Nick’s progress to see if anything had shaken out. But he reported nothing unusual. Kinsington had claimed they had nothing to hold him on, not unless the homeowner pressed charges for trespassing. Since no one could find the actual homeowner, that was highly unlikely. The man wouldn’t say anything else, and Nick suggested they let him sit for a little while longer.

Meth-dad didn’t seem to understand his rights at all and told everything he knew. Maybe too much. Poor Nick was going to have to listen to all of it. Diana laughed at him and wished him good luck.

Methodically, Diana headed into the locker room, changed out of her uniform, and climbed into her own car. Will would be gone when she got home, and she would normally nap for a while, but her brain wouldn’t shut down. The scratching at the back of her thoughts was even stronger than before.

Just to prove herself wrong, as soon as she got home she lifted the floor board in the back of the closet and pulled out a jump drive she’d stuffed in there. It held some pictures she’d filed, things she’d kept, things she’d looked at before, information she’d continued to follow. She’d prove that the worst wasn’t on the table, and then she’d be able to relax, eat, sleep.

But as she flipped through the files and checked records, her fears gelled and her blood ran cold.

Donald Kinsington existed; he even lived in Virginia, but he wasn’t the man she’d cuffed tonight. The man she saw matched to one of the pictures in her files. She worked to forgive herself for not seeing it before. Blamed his altered facial hair. But she’d looked into his eyes, and before, in another life, she’d looked into eyes just like his at the moment the life had left them. She’d been responsible for that, so she should have recognized it. She might not have placed his first name just from her own recollection, but she should have been able to tag him.

The man she’d just handed off to Nick was none other than Ivan Kurev.

CHAPTER 2

Nick stared through the two-way glass into the holding room. The man stared back.

Somehow, Kinsington seemed to not only know that Nick was there, he pinpointed his exact location and managed to make eye contact. Crossing his arms, Nick searched the other for clues, shifts in behavior, anything that would give the man away.

Nothing came.

Donald Kinsington sat there, bored and utterly unconcerned with being detained. Most innocent people—at least eventually—became agitated that they were being kept from their lives. They had work to show up to on a Thursday morning. A kid at home needed to get to school. Someone would be wondering where they were. Not Kinsington.

If the man showed any less irritation, Nick would have thought he was about to put his head down on the table and go to sleep.

Nick waited, not liking the course of his thoughts. He was going to have to let this guy go. There was no meth on him or in his car, despite the reports of a thorough search by uniforms. The car was a rental and everything checked out. The meth-house owner was not available by any means they had tried and, though it was concerning, nothing raised any red flags or pointed in any direction that Nick could follow.

Like many cops, he maintained a proprietary feeling about the area. White Oak was his place. Atlanta was his. His family was here; he was raised in these neighborhoods. Bun had worked his whole life in the city, taking over for his own father and growing a place for them all. Nick did not like this man treading on what he considered his personal territory.

He had to think.

He had nothing to work with. Nothing he could prove.

Son of a bitch.

There was not a single good thing about Kinsington. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time and not coincidentally. He had asked to call his lawyer—he was traveling, yet he had a lawyer on retainer? A criminal defense lawyer at that. Clearly, he expected things to go wrong.

And he had this lawyer on retainer despite the fact that there was no record of Kinsington needing criminal defense in the past.

And Kinsington’s picture didn’t come up on the Virginia state file, for some unknown, and unlikely coincidental, reason. But Nick couldn’t legally search Donald Kinsington photos on the Web. Any photos produced wouldn’t be admissible at all.

So he had a stare-down with a man who couldn’t see him.

In the end, he did the only thing he could do. He made his calls and let Kinsington go.

He did the checkout himself, walking his detainee out of the station, giving him back the baggie with his few belongings.

Kinsington stayed quiet in the back of the unmarked car until Nick brought it to a stop. Unmarked was a joke—it had a bulletproof divider, heavy-duty back-door locks, and a few too many lights. But though it clearly said cop, at least it didn’t scream it to the heavens.

This isn’t the impound lot.

It was the first time Nick heard the man’s voice in nearly two hours, since he demanded that if Nick was going to question him, he had a right to have his lawyer present. Nick had tried chatting about daily activities, but Kinsington had stonewalled him. So it had come to this.

His only response had been, I think this is fine. You know why you’re here.

He’d gotten out and opened the back door, receiving only a sardonic, Thank you, Detective Stelian in reply as the other man stood, stretched his legs, and looked around the neighborhood he’d been dropped off in.

Nick drove off.

He’d made his opening move.

It was a gamble, and it was a grand one.

Unable to sleep, unable to call Will, Diana checked and rechecked the file pictures of the Kurev family off and on for hours. She considered pulling up more recent photos from the Web, but didn’t want to flag anything if someone was watching her system. She’d downloaded all the photos she had from addresses and log-ins that were not linked to her name or home at all and she wouldn’t change that now, even though she desperately wanted more current information.

Ivan was Kolya Kurev’s middle son. He had Kolya’s mouth, his eyes, his silent, cold gaze. But what was Ivan doing in the Atlanta area?

The Kurevs ruled Chicago, had done so for several generations. They controlled drugs, money, prostitutes, guns, old neighborhood alliances, and anything else they could make a buck off. They had been the quintessential crime family, with Kolya sitting as don at the top.

Diana leaned back in the chair.

Kolya’s RICO arrest and the subsequent fallout had left the Kurev family in shreds. The FBI had come in like a giant hand scooping sand and closing a tight fist around as many as they could hold. But some had sifted out. Kolya’s three sons had been too young to paint with a dirt brush and they had skated. Others who missed the seizures had fought for king of the hill, and one by one they had reigned and been deposed. The organization was constantly folding in on itself and hadn’t been effective for about five years.

Diana had been unable to fight the urge to follow the story. She’d tried to ignore it. Most people did, even her fellow cops—who followed the mafia in another town? No one, that’s who. Except Diana.

Even Will didn’t know about her information collection. Or she thought he didn’t. Chances were that was a very stupid and arrogant assumption on her part. He was both too smart for her to pull one over on him, and he also knew her too well to think she’d simply let it drop and live a life that was completely Kurev-free.

Will and Diana had originally moved to Los Angeles, in large part because it wasn’t Chicago. Then they’d come here for her job. In fact, it had been a guest lecture by Detective Nick Stelian that had brought her to White Oak. Stelian had been with Fulton County PD when he’d come to UCLA, but she’d made a contact, and by the time she graduated he was working here in White Oak. At his mention of an open spot for a new officer, Diana applied.

They’d come here because there was a job. That was normal. And they’d come because it wasn’t Chicago.

Should she tell Nick who was in his interrogation room? How would she do that if she wasn’t supposed to know who it was?

Maybe . . .

She picked up the phone. Hey, Stelian.

What’s up, Kincaid? He sounded distracted. That was probably good.

I was just curious what went down with the pink-meth house. I’m not on for the next several days. Thank God for that. A handy excuse was always good. She focused on a speck of air straight ahead and slowed her breathing.

I’ve seen that stuff before. Not in that neighborhood though. They claim it’s purer.

She snorted—the appropriate answer whenever anyone said street drugs were purer. What’s with the pink? Don’t ask after Kurev, not yet. Work your way around.

This time he laughed. They cut the step where they wash the red off the Sudafed tablets. The dye lingers; the crystals have a slight shade. So now grown men are carrying adorable little baggies of pink meth.

Forcing her mouth to smile, Diana hoped the movement could be heard in her voice. So they’re actually getting a less pure product and paying more for purity? And pinkness? That’s pretty freakin’ awesome. Did you lock anyone up?

She heard papers shuffling in the background and assumed Nick was at his desk. Her desk, too. As his part-time, junior detective trainee, she didn’t have her own spot, just the empty space next to his while she worked her way out of the uniform . . . or as far out of the uniform as any of them got.

We got your meth-dad dead to rights, but he’ll probably end up in rehab. One of the others had enough on him that we nailed him with intent to distribute. And there was some in one of the cars we pulled over, but the guy said the drugs weren’t his and that the car wasn’t his—which it wasn’t.

What about my other guy? Now was the time. Kinsington? I didn’t find anything on him. She didn’t add because he doesn’t exist.

He was a little too clean. But too slick to grab. Had to let him go.

What? Shit. That was too much. She toned it down. Figures. Anybody follow his sorry ass when he got back in his car?

Another laugh, followed by sarcasm. "Yeah, we put one of our extra patrols on him. He’s still following him now. Ordering martinis at the bar while he watches."

Her hand crept into her hair. Her eyes squeezed. Stupid question. But she’d had to know. Yeah, imaginary extra patrol guy gets to have all the fun.

Hey, while I have you, want to be me for several days next week?

What? She wasn’t equipped to follow the conversation. Her head was still reeling from the fact that Ivan Kurev was not only in her town but had been in the back of her patrol car and was now wandering free. Best case scenario, it was entirely coincidental and he was already gone.

But the best case scenario was highly unlikely. And those two little whispered words at the game last week came roaring back into her head. Hello, Sin.

Nick’s voice slashed through her careening thoughts. I need you to be me, handle my caseload while I’m out for about four days at the end of the week. Hold my on-call spot. Rutger will be lead. He’ll watch out for you.

By sheer force of will, Diana put together the words she heard into a coherent string and managed to at least partially contemplate them. Sure. Then she spoke more forcefully. Yes! That would be great.

That sounded more like someone who wanted to become a detective, not someone whose past was probably coming back with a vengeance. Hopefully like someone who would still be alive next week. Where are you going?

Another lecture. Out teaching-slash-recruiting so all the criminal science majors don’t head directly for the FBI. She heard the smile in his voice. That was his thing. How he’d come to UCLA. He liked teaching. Wanted to retire to a life of lecturing, and he was constantly setting himself up for it. Police work didn’t pay well. Nick was hedging his bets, and she’d rarely seen someone so easily and cleanly putting his future into place. Add in that he was naturally charismatic, and here she was, in White Oak, Georgia, just outside Atlanta.

Diana wasn’t the only one. Two of Nick’s cousins were on the force, one in White Oak and another in Marietta. Both claimed Nick got them into the idea of it.

But as her brain followed her path to the present, her life fluttered slowly, ripples forming in the texture of it, as though it had been painted on a scrim rather than ever being real. Diana acted, pushed again to be a real girl. That’s great, Nick. I’ll be glad to be you.

Thanks, Kincaid.

She hung up. Settled the cell phone on the table and then looked at it with wary eyes. Was it monitored? Brown eyes darted to the computer. Had simply pulling up and opening her photos of all things Kurev raised a red flag? Had she brought Ivan here?

Slowly, she looked out the sliver of front window through the open door to her back room. Was her house being watched? She lived in cookie-cutter suburbia, not the best place to escape unseen. There was no hidden barbed wire around her property and no long road and open area where she could see anything coming about five miles before it got there.

Her hand snaked into the desk drawer, and she ran her palm along the not-so-smooth wood under the desktop, her fingers bumping into the wide blade she had put there long ago.

She had never reached for it. Didn’t have the smooth grasp and release that she would if she’d practiced the move. But she slid the blade free for the first time and slowly circled the interior of her house. She didn’t get into her lockbox with her gun; she was quieter with the knife, deadlier. With all her muscles in rigid control, she searched every closet, checked the attic for footprints, and looked out each window for anything out of the ordinary.

Nothing. There was nothing outside the house or in but standard suburbia and her own paranoia.

Still, she was alive because she was paranoid. She’d told Will that on more than one occasion. So, with her ears perked, she rattled through her closet looking for dark clothing. She couldn’t go full cover in this Georgia heat, but she could do something.

An old pair of cargo pants in gunmetal gray called out to her. Sneakers in a single dull color. A shirt that didn’t cling but wasn’t loose . . . an abstract pattern on the shirt would blend in best if she had to get away into a wooded area or a crowd. A ball cap, no writing. She had all these things. She was good at being paranoid.

Diana didn’t put the clothes on; instead she put them in a cloth grocery bag. She tucked a gun into an ankle holster and pulled her lightweight jeans down to cover it, then slid a sheathed knife under the back of her shirt. The weight of the pieces was comforting as she headed out to her car.

Her car was problematic. But she didn’t have time to drive to another town, get a rental, and drive back. Plus, she’d need false ID to get the car . . . it was too much for her fact-finding mission.

So the weapons were the only comfort she had as she drove around town, out to a deserted area—cops knew all the best places—and changed not only her clothes but her license plate.

The movement pattern was old, unused, but motor memory came back. The battery-charged hand-held drill that had been in the attic along with several spare plates made short, easy work of popping off her real tag. The task brought the sobering realization that Sin had not been buried as deep as Diana had thought.

Ivan Kurev was in her town. The question was why. And how was he connected to the words she had heard a week ago?

She didn’t ask if he was connected. Of that, she now had no doubt.

With her regular clothes stashed in the grocery bag and the ball cap pulled low, she texted Will that she loved him and to stay safe before she drove into the section of town where the pink-meth house had been. Ivan’s rental car was not there.

Meth wasn’t big in this area, but it was in a few others in their district. Undaunted, she headed that direction. Her likelihood of stumbling upon Ivan Kurev was low but worth the shot.

She was into the poorer zone in White Oak when her phone dinged.

It was a text, which meant it had to be Will. He would know from her word choice that something had come up. He just didn’t know what. And she was not about to get recognized or pulled over here, in these odd clothes, for reading a text. Not while driving her own car with a stolen plate. Will would have to wait.

Two hours and three more incoming texts later, the sun was setting. The phone rang and she answered it, not having moved from the driver’s seat the whole time. Thank God she wasn’t on shift tonight.

Will.

Is it . . . ? His voice was not tentative or were the words.

Yes. One of the sons. She didn’t give an exact name. No longer would she speak freely on the phone. For several years now it didn’t matter how open she was because the topics of her conversations were of no real concern. This one was. I’m out. Looking.

Stay safe. I’m at the house.

Just as she signed off, she saw the car.

Ivan Kurev’s rental, at a known dealing spot. Remington’s Bar was mostly empty at this time of early evening. Re-Bar, as it was affectionately known by locals and cops alike, was best known for calling in drunk and disorderlies, fist fights, and drug deals. Not that any of the regulars would call it in. Newbies did when they didn’t know better. The neighbors did when the activity bled into the surrounding area.

There had also been rumors of mafia ties, gun