The Wolf (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #2)(109)

Flash Gordon stammered some thanks, and then he shambled away, looking over his shoulder a couple of times before he disappeared around a corner into an alley.

“You’ve got a good heart under those daggers, Vishous.”

“Whatever,” V muttered as he started walking again. “Let’s keep looking. At least we have a street first name now. But if she’s undercover and she’s missing? She’s going to wake up dead.”

Rhage caught up with him easily enough. “Hey, that’s what Butch says all the time. It’s a funny saying.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Christ on a crutch, V thought to himself. Finding that prison camp was a real pain in his ass on so many levels, true?





Hello?”

When Rio’s third call to her direct report, Leon Roberts, was finally answered, she had a split second of relief. Except then the man who’d picked up repeated the greeting—and she knew it wasn’t Leon.

“Hello . . . ?”

Without conscious thought, she stomped on the brakes. The SUV’s knobby tires immediately grabbed on to the pavement and brought her to a screeching halt in the middle of the narrow strip of country asphalt. As a surge of fear gripped her, her peripheral vision sharpened, the pine trees on either shoulder coming into almost painful clarity in the glow of the headlights.

Roberts was never without his cell phone. And she’d called him so many times over the last three years, she’d know his number and his voice anywhere.

“I can hear you breathing,” the man on the other end said. “I know you haven’t hung up.”

No, she hadn’t. But where was Roberts?

“And I think . . . I think I know who this is. Even though this number is not in Leon’s contacts.”

Rio covered her mouth with her free hand. Oh, God, she knew this voice. She knew who this was.

Tears speared into her eyes and she blinked quick.

“If I’m right about who you are,” the man continued, “you need to listen carefully. Do not . . . don’t come home. Wherever you are, if it’s safe, stay put. It’s not good here . . . at home. Do you understand what I’m telling you? I think I know who you are, and that means you know what I’m telling you and why I’m telling it to you like this.”

Drawing the cell phone away from her ear, Rio stared at the time count as the seconds moved quickly.

Then she snapped the thing back in place. Lowering her voice to disguise it, she said, “Detective José de la Cruz.”

There was a brief pause. “Yes. And I think you can guess why I’m answering this phone.”

All at once, she was back downtown, racing to meet Luke for the first time, accepting a call on her own cell phone. Clear as a bell, she heard Roberts’s voice in her ear, telling her her identity had been compromised. And there had been something else when she’d been busy talking over him. He’d told her he’d sent her something. Hadn’t he?

What had he sent her?

Suddenly, there was no air in the SUV so she put down the window a little, the cold night coming in.

“Home,” she said in that falsely low tone. “Go home.”

Then she quickly ended the call.

Maybe he’d figured out what she was trying to tell him. Maybe he wouldn’t.

But either way, Detective José de la Cruz of homicide had just saved her life.

Someone on the inside was after her. And had killed her colleague and friend because of it.

Holding the cell phone to her chest, she tried to breathe, tried to think. And sometime thereafter, she realized she had come to a stop next to a green-and-white highway sign.

Walters 10

Upstate. She was seriously upstate.

The idea that she couldn’t go back to her apartment made her feel as if she were in a foreign country and did not speak the language. Then again, she had no idea where she could go, who she could talk to. What was safe. What she should do—

Another set of headlights rounded a curve in the road, coming toward her.

Snapping to attention, she threw the phone out of the window and into the opposite lane; then she punched the gas and continued on. She was in a stolen SUV, owned by drug suppliers, with a phone she’d lifted off a guy she’d shot and killed, stuck in an information vacuum where the wrong move could end her up where Roberts had.

Wherever that grave was.

Rio kept driving until she came into a little hamlet with a diner/grocery store combo, and a bank, and a gas station. She wasn’t hungry—but then she had no money.

At least the tank was full.

That gasoline, and this vehicle she didn’t own, were pretty much the extent of her assets.

God, what was she going to do? She’d assumed that as long as she could stay out of Mozart’s way until she could get to the station, she’d be fine. But now that was not an option.

She had to find a safe place to collect her thoughts and figure out what she needed to do. But like she knew this area at all?



As Lucan walked out of Willow Hills’s front entrance, the sense that things were closing in, smothering him, suffocating him, was like a tangible stalker, tight on his heels. He knew what he was supposed to do, knew where to do it, knew what he had to accomplish to be successful.