CHAPTER ONE
Jessie Hunt lay in bed, enjoying the feeling of sweat.
With everything going on lately, they hadn’t reconnected in a little while, and she’d missed the intimacy. She heard the shower turn off in the bathroom and reluctantly sat up to grab her robe.
They’d all agreed it was the wise move. After Kat, a private detective, had informed them that hitwoman Ash Pierce had recently been scouting their house in a limousine with tinted windows, they knew they had to make a change.
Last summer, Pierce had been contracted by a murderer that Jessie helped put away to torture and kill both Kat and Hannah, all as a way to make Jessie suffer. They’d managed to turn the tables on Pierce and catch her. She’d spent months in jail, awaiting trial, but then escaped.
Since then, Pierce had been bouncing around the southwest, trying to stay ahead of both the law and Kat, who’d made it her mission to recapture the woman. But once it became clear that Pierce was no longer hiding, but rather stalking, something had to be done.
Jessie’s house was already a veritable fortress.
It had to be, as a result of her work as a criminal profiler.
With multiple killers she’d taken down having vendettas against her, she’d set up an elaborate security system at her house that involved everything from fingerprint identification to steel doors to a panic room.
She and Ryan—who was notjust her husband but also Detective Ryan Hernandez of the LAPD—had obtained permission from the city to install surveillance cameras at various locations on their street and in the wider neighborhood.
But after learning about Ash Pierce’s recent visit, they’d amped it up beyond even that.
The home security system now includes a retinal scan.
Additional cameras were installed along their street, enabling real-time facial recognition.
If Pierce showed up again and was identified by the system, Jessie, Ryan, and their station’s police captain, Gaylene Parker, would get immediate alerts.
That was all well and good, but it wasn’t enough to assuage Hannah’s concerns, and Jessie understood why.
Ash Pierce had tried to kill her on multiple occasions, and though Hannah would never admit it out loud, she was clearly still traumatized by the experiences.
Trying to sleep in that house when it had been specifically targeted by Pierce was nearly impossible. Plus, there was her ankle.
It had been badly sprained a month ago when she’d scrambled up a mountain while fleeing from a college classmate that she thought she was on a pleasant overnight hike with.
It turned out that the guy, Dallas Henry, was a closet incel and acolyte of a serial killer named Mark Haddonfield, whom Jessie had captured.
Henry spent months luring Hannah into complacency and something approaching a crush, all the while plotting to kill her as payback for Jessie catching him in the act.
Hannah had managed to get away from him, but had injured her ankle in the process.
It was clear that she wasn’t confident that she could defend herself if Ash Pierce came calling.
So Jessie suggested that she stay with Kat for a while.
Hannah jumped at the chance. After all, Pierce had been hunting for Kat, too.
That was why, while the hitwoman was on the run, Kat had relocated to a new office and apartment.
With Jessie’s help, both were rented under pseudonyms, making it difficult for Pierce to find her.
If Hannah stayed at her place rather than Jessie’s Mid-Wilshire area home, she’d be hidden, too.
But the arrangement did come with a downside, one Jessie knew her sister found depressing.
Hannah had been doing an informal summer internship with Jessie’s specialized investigative unit, Homicide Special Section, particularly with HSS’s research team.
Since Pierce was aware of where the unit was located—at LAPD’s downtown Central Station—that meant that she could conceivably stalk Hannah there.
So she’d been staying almost exclusively at Kat’s apartment, rarely going out. She helped the P.I. out, doing research for some of her cases. But she’d been mostly apartment-bound, even after her ankle improved. Jessie was worried about her.
She stood up, put on the robe, and walked over to the bathroom to see if she could get in soon.
As she did, she silently acknowledged one other uncomfortable fact.
The time apart may have been good for her and Hannah because of the whole Finn Anderton situation.
Before she could ponder that mess any further, Ryan opened the door. He was only wearing a towel.
He jumped back slightly, startled at her being right there. She smiled at his reaction. Not much startled her husband. The veteran detective had seen just about everything and was impressively even-keeled about most of it.
Even when he was surprised, he could usually handle things. She noted that as she looked at him admiringly. Not only was Ryan great at his job, but he also cut an imposing figure. Square-jawed and well-muscled at two hundred pounds and six feet, some suspects gave up just at the sight of him.
Jessie had a different reaction to seeing him. Looking at his kind brown eyes, shy grin, and adorable dimples—the features that had first attracted her to him—she felt a mix of attraction and gooey affection.
“Didn’t mean to scare you, big boy,” she teased.
“Why do I think you enjoyed it a little, though?”
“I’m just a simple girl trying to get into the shower so I’m not late for work.”
“Just a simple girl, huh?” he said, smiling, those dimples nearly blinding her.
“That’s right,” she said, leaning over to give him a kiss, before whispering, “I enjoyed our morning workout.”
“Me too.”
“I could tell,” she said, “With your effort level, I wouldn’t be surprised if you knocked me up.”
It was intended as a joke, but she knew it was a mistake the second the words were out of her mouth. His smile faded.
“I’ll let you get in there,” he muttered quietly, stepping aside.
She wanted to say something, but worried that she’d just make it worse. Better to leave it be for now.
“Thanks,” she said as she entered the bathroom. “I’ll be out as quick as I can.”
She closed the door and stared at herself in the mirror, shaking her head at her idiocy. It wasn’t a laughing matter. As she looked at her, now fully awake, with green eyes and disheveled brown hair, she wondered how she could fix this.
She brushed her teeth as she mentally revisited her mistake.
Joking about having a child was pretty thoughtless considering their situation.
Until recently, Ryan had been seriously talking about having one.
Jessie had pushed back on getting pregnant for a variety of reasons and had floated the idea of adoption instead, even though she was reticent about that too.
Ryan was just coming around to that possibility when he’d learned about what they’d come to call the “bloodlust problem.”
For eight months, Jessie had been dealing with an increasingly intense desire to personally punish the suspects they were after. On multiple occasions, she’d nearly killed them. And then, while engaged in a physical confrontation with one, she finally did it.
Admittedly, it was technically self-defense, and the LAPD’s Force Investigation Division had cleared her.
But she knew the truth: she enjoyed plunging that knife into the heart of Rachel Thompson, the serial killer she’d been after.
Yes, the woman would have used the weapon on her if she’d gotten the upper hand in the fight, but that didn’t change the fact that Jessie had gotten pleasure from what she did.
She didn’t know if the urges she felt were an unwanted hereditary gift from her own now-dead serial killer father.
Or maybe it was just the accumulation of horrors she’d seen and been through that took her down that road.
But whatever the reason, when she finally confessed how she felt to Ryan, he told her that he thought they should postpone discussing children until she got a handle on those feelings.
Jessie stepped into the shower as she recalled what had happened next.
The nearly daily sessions with her psychiatrist, Dr. Janice Lemmon.
The attempts to medicate away the dark impulses.
And finally, a two-month stint at a secretive Sicilian treatment facility where she couldn’t even tell the staff the real reason she was there.
She had to use the euphemistic phrase “anger management issues.”
The funny thing was that now she finally felt like she was making progress on controlling her violent desires, and it wasn’t because of any of those efforts.
She’d been debating whether and when to tell Ryan about her growth and its source.
But now, with her ill-timed joke—one that Ryan surely saw as rubbing salt in a wound—she wasn’t sure when or how to bring up the topic.
She grabbed the body wash and tried to put the whole mess out of her head.
After all, she needed to focus on getting ready.
They were running late, and Captain Parker, who wasn’t known for her patience or easygoing manner, would be pissed if she needed them for a case and they ambled in without a care in the world.
Jessie had learned that the hard way.