door. She collapsed on top of him, sending them both to the floor hard. But he didn’t let go.
Between the surge of adrenaline, getting the wind knocked out of her, and now being choked, Prissy felt her entire body screaming even if she couldn’t do it out loud. She swung her elbows down, trying to hit her attacker in the ribs long enough to make him loosen his grip. But she could feel herself starting to lose consciousness and knew that her blows weren’t having much impact.
It can’t end like this!
The thought popped into her head as spotted lights began to consume her vision. The idea scared her enough to force one last, desperate attempt to shake herself free. But by then, it was far too late.
CHAPTER TWO
Jessie Hunt stood up from the kitchen table without visibly wincing.
She collected everyone’s plates and walked over to the sink to rinse them off. As the worst cook in the group, she had escaped dinner prep duty. But that meant she was the official dishwasher. Normally it was a fair tradeoff. But since suffering her latest wounds, bending over the sink was a challenge. Putting dishes in the dishwasher was often cause for silent tears.
She still felt the sting where the skin on her back had been burned three weeks earlier. But she managed not to let it show. Neither her boyfriend, Ryan, nor her half-sister, Hannah, seemed to notice that she was still in considerable pain.
She’d suffered the burns while rescuing a woman from a disturbed man who’d abducted her and intentionally released her days later only to come back to her home intent on killing her. Jessie and the woman had barely managed to escape the burning house. Since then Jessie had been on leave from the LAPD, first stuck at the hospital and now in her own condo.
She knew it didn’t have to be that way. She had lots of pain medication. The doctor had instructed her not to lower the dosage for a month. But she’d started weaning herself off it a week ago, partly worried about becoming dependent. But there was another reason too. She needed to stay alert.
On the day after Jessie was burned, while she was recovering in the hospital, her ex-husband, Kyle Voss, was released from prison. This was the same ex-husband who’d been incarcerated in the first place for murdering his mistress, trying to frame Jessie for the crime, and then attempting to kill her when she found out.
And yet somehow, the prosecutor in Kyle’s case had recently confessed to improper conduct involving the mishandling of evidence. Of course Jessie knew the “somehow.” Kyle had made friends with a prison gang associated with the infamous Monzon drug cartel. Subsequently, cartel members had threatened the prosecutor’s family. Jessie was sure of this. Her FBI agent friend, Jack Dolan, was equally certain. Unfortunately they couldn’t prove it.
So, while Jessie lay in a hospital bed recovering from burns, a judge released Kyle Voss into the community, even apologizing to him in court. Kyle was his usual charming self at the time. He held a press conference admitting he was “far from a perfect person” and that he planned to turn over a new leaf, including starting a foundation to fund charities that helped wrongly convicted prisoners.
What Kyle didn’t admit to—what Jessie knew but couldn’t prove—was that while he was in prison, he’d undertaken a campaign to destroy Jessie’s life and reputation. It had started with small things, like having a cartel member knife her car tires. It escalated to planting anti-psychotic drugs, anonymously calling social services to claim she was abusing Hannah, whom she had custody of, and hacking into her social media and posting racist and anti-Semitic rants. That last maneuver, despite being unmasked, was still having lasting impacts on Jessie’s work relationships and the public’s perception of her.
It culminated with an anonymous flower arrangement sent to her hospital room saying the giver would be seeing her soon. Considering that Kyle had already tried to kill her and had told a prison informant that he wanted to “gut her like a pig and bathe in her warm blood,” Jessie decided a little less pain medication was worth the discomfort if it kept her vigilant.
It helped that her boyfriend, who’d recently moved in with her and Hannah, was a decorated LAPD detective who looked like he could take a charging bull in a wrestling match. Ryan Hernandez, the top investigator in the department’s Homicide Special Section (HSS)