Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 72154 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 361(@200wpm)___ 289(@250wpm)___ 241(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72154 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 361(@200wpm)___ 289(@250wpm)___ 241(@300wpm)
And I’d be damned if I let him slip through my fingers, too.
***
What felt like hours later but was only about forty minutes, I left the school when my father arrived so Gunner wouldn’t be alone.
Then I started to hunt.
The dogs had already been called, and the manhunt had commenced.
But I had a secret weapon.
Carmen. My MWD—military working dog—that was retired. No one else had faith in her, but I sure as hell did.
And I was going to find the bastard who killed my nephew and make him pay.
***
“No, please! No!” The kid, and he was just a kid, begged. Eighteen, almost nineteen, according to him. “I didn’t mean to!”
“You didn’t mean to,” I repeated cooly.
Carmen, sensing my displeasure, shook her head. It just so happened that Carmen had the kid’s arm in her mouth as she did it, which tore even deeper gashes into the little bastard’s flesh.
Not that I cared.
Because before the day was out, I planned to do a whole lot fucking more than that to him.
***
“Do you want a job?”
I looked at him with confusion.
“I don’t have the educational requirements to be an FBI agent,” I told him bluntly.
The agent grinned. “Sometimes if you have other requirements, we look the other way.”
I read between the lines.
I apparently had skills that he wanted, and he didn’t care if I met the ‘requirements’ or not. He wanted me on his team, and he was going to make sure that it happened if I wanted to be a part of it.
I shrugged. “What will I be doing?”
He looked me dead in the eye. “A lot of what you just handled. School shootings. Shootings in general. It won’t be easy. The lifespan of an agent in this particular assignment is about three years max. Then we will move you into an assignment that will be a little less…taxing. Or you’ll quit.”
After that glamorous description, how could I say no?
Then again, I owed Jett. He believed in me when nobody else did. He saw something in me that I never once saw in myself.
And for him, I’d do this for a lifetime. If I could prevent another person from ever having to feel what I was feeling right at that moment, then I’d do it. Forever if I had to.
Chapter 1
Trial and error, but mostly error. Like, a shitload of error.
-Kayla explaining to Janie how life works
Kayla
“I think you need to look for an older man,” Janie, my best friend in the whole wide world, declared. “Guys our age don’t know how to do the things we need.”
I blinked. “They don’t?”
Janie shifted her wide girth—though, I guess I should say her nine-months-pregnant belly instead—to the side and gestured to herself.
“Do you really think I had a choice in this?” she asked.
I blinked. “I would hope you had a choice. You can always say no, even when it’s your husband. Or, in your case, the man you’ve been crushing on since we were twelve.”
She laughed.
Janie had a crush on the man that was now her husband, Rafe, since we were kids. He fought valiantly, but in the end, Janie got her man.
Now they were married with a baby on the way.
And I was being left behind
Well, I guess in all technicality, I was the one doing the leaving. Well, kind of.
I was headed to Benton, Louisiana to do an internship with a detective there.
I was trying to find my niche in life, and so far, everything I had tried wasn’t what I wanted to spend my life doing.
I was now graduated from college with a pointless degree in art. I’d started three programs only to find out that they weren’t for me. Nursing, athletic training and rad tech. None of which had been my cup of tea.
When I’d been in high school, I’d thought I wanted to become a doctor, but turns out, becoming a doctor takes a very long time to accomplish, and I’d decided to go with nursing instead.
Unfortunately, that hadn’t worked, either.
Instead of spending more money getting educated in something else that I may end up not wanting to do, my stand-in father, Janie’s father, James, had worked his magic and gotten me a two-week, hands-on internship with the Benton Police Department. The man that I was going to be shadowing, Loki Rector, had been a detective there for twenty plus years now.
Hopefully, I was going to find my place in life while I was down there.
There were other things that I thought I might find there besides my path in life. New friends. A house. Things to that effect.
All sorts of things could be found.
But what I didn’t expect to find was what landed right in my lap.
Which happened to be just about the worst thing that could ever happen to me.
A serial killer turned stalker.
Only I could find that.