by Lora Leigh
Cami was susceptible to bronchitis and pneumonia. If the first stage wasn’t treated quickly and aggressively, then Cami could become viciously ill. She’d been hospitalized twice in the past four years, once for pneumonia, the second time for double pneumonia.
Pausing at the street corner, she felt a chill race up her spine and marked it down to the thought that her father might be attempting to kill his youngest child.
If she was his youngest child.
Jaymi had done some counting in the past weeks since her father had revealed his attempt to convince Uncle Eddy and Aunt Ella to keep Cami when they moved to Aspen.
Cami was thirteen. She would be fourteen in three months. Add nine more months to that, and it added up to the time their mother had taken Jaymi and stayed in Denver with Aunt Beth for nearly a year.
Jaymi had been ten, and she remembered, even now, how much happier her mother had been then. She laughed, giggled on the phone. Sometimes, Jaymi would wake up in the middle of the night and thought she heard a man’s voice in the bedroom across the hall.
She remembered the man her mother had said was a friend of Beth’s. He had worn a uniform. Dark hair, and eyes a soft, soft gray ringed with the same odd blue color Cami’s were ringed with.
She walked across the street as realization began to rush through her.
God, why hadn’t she made the connection before now?
For years she had watched Mark Flannigan treat Cami like shit, and had agonized over how a father could be so cruel. Why hadn’t she remembered the darkly handsome man with the gentle smile and big hands?
Why hadn’t she remembered, during that time, the day she had come home from the park with a neighbor to find her mother sobbing as though she were dying? Aunt Beth had been crying as well and Uncle Jonah had been grief-stricken.
She unlocked the pharmacy and stepped in, careful to lock the door behind her, holding her breath as she heard a car easing down the street.
She prayed it wasn’t Mr. Keene, or the police. She would hate to have to explain why she was here. Even if she did have the key, she didn’t have permission to be in before it was time to open the pharmacy.
Moving quickly to the back, she began to fill the prescription as those memories continued to ease forward from whatever shadowed recess they had been hiding in.
She was still shocked, dismayed that she hadn’t remembered that summer so long ago. She should have. Because she remembered her father showing up not long after that and he and Uncle Jonah fighting over something Mark had called a “whoreson” and “wife-stealing brother.”
It was beginning to make sense. So much was becoming more clear.
She had been pushing so many memories back over the years, trying to keep the truth at bay. She hadn’t wanted to remember, though it was something Cami deserved to know. But that didn’t mean it wouldn’t destroy her. Cami still had the hope that the day would come that Mark would accept her as a daughter and part of the family.
The fact that he never would wasn’t lost on Jaymi, or Jonah, if she could remember the past well enough to recall the screaming match they had gotten into.
Why? Why had she forgotten?
That question tormented her as she finished filling the prescription, capped it, and printed out the label before peeling the paper from it and sticking it onto the bottles.
The antibiotic would take at least twenty-four hours to kick in, but the cough medicine would ease her labored breathing and the horrible coughing.
Did Cami take her susceptibility to bronchitis from her natural father? Jaymi wondered as she made her way to the back door.
And if her mother had loved this other man so much, why had she taken Mark Flannigan back and allowed him to treat their daughter so dismally?
It was a question she intended to ask him the minute she arrived at the house in the morning. She would make a special trip before work just to throw her knowledge into his face and demand custody of Cami from both her parents.
She’d had enough. She wasn’t about to allow Cami to be treated so cruelly, or endangered while ill again.
Re-entering the security code, Jaymi opened the back door to the pharmacy, eased out, and turned back to lock the three locks on the door and reset the code.
The door was almost closed, the keys ready to shove into the lock.
There was no warning.
There was nothing to alert her.
One minute she was filled with righteous indignation over the treatment her sister had received for as long as she could remember, and the next second, everything was black.
* * *
The lone dark figure, black mask pulled over his face, his eyes filled with sorrow, looked up to the camera that was almost hidden above the door.
He knew what would be seen later. Rich, sapphire blue eyes.
Picking Jaymi up in his arms, he turned away and laid her carefully in the backseat of the stolen pickup before tying her hands snugly behind her back. Her ankles were secured with another length of rope and gray tape placed over her lips.
He stared down at her, just for a second, before reaching out and pushing her hair back from her face.
He’d tried to warn her, he really had.
She’d pushed too far, though. When she had begun calling his phone, he knew she suspected. He should have known she would catch on quickly, she was really smarter than the others. Smarter, and with the clear advantage of having known him most of her life.
With a last pang of regret he closed the door to the back of the king crew cab pickup before moving to the driver’s side and getting into the vehicle.
He stayed on the back streets, easing through them and making his way to the end of town before pulling the mask off and driving the speed limit the rest of the way.
He didn’t have far to go. There was a small gravel and dirt road that led to where he’d told the other man to meet him. Once there, he would turn her over to the killer whose lust for blood made him exceptionally easy to use and to control.
The man wasn’t good for much else but killing. He’d fried his brain with too many drugs years before, and existed on autopilot until he scored the next fix. Give the man a fix and he obeyed every command given and didn’t remember a second of it the next morning.
For the first time since the killing had begun, he knew he wouldn’t be participating. He usually took that first taste of them, raping them while they still had some fight to them. But he couldn’t, not with Jaymi.
He couldn’t hurt her himself.
He couldn’t stay and watch her be hurt.
He’d have to trust the drugs to have done the work this time as efficiently as they had the past five times.
Jaymi would be the last nail in the Callahans’ coffin. Once her body was found along with another, more significant piece of evidence, the Callahans wouldn’t be able to excuse their way out of murder.
There was no way to save her. There would be no way to save the Callahans. And the truth of the events that began this tale twelve years ago would continue to rest in peace along with the bodies of the grandparents that had set the events in motion.
He’d killed them. He’d been forced to kill their sons and their sons wives that snowy day as they returned from Denver. He hadn’t wanted to, but he’d had no choice. What they had been doing, and what they had found in that safe deposit box no one had known JR and Eileen Callahan had rented, could have destroyed them all.
Him included.
He couldn’t let it happen. He couldn’t let them destroy everything he had killed the cousins’ parents for.
And it could have ended there.
It should have ended there.
And it would have, if only Jaymi hadn’t realized who was calling. And if he wasn’t certain she would figure out he was killing as well.
All for the greater good, of course, he told himself as he had been telling himself since that first life had been taken. It was all for the greater good.
B
ut this time, with this woman, he knew the lies were catching up with him.
It wasn’t for the greater good.
It wasn’t for his own good.
It was for the good of a man that only gave the orders and refused to bloody his hands.
It was for the good of a family that would throw him to the wolves if it meant saving their own asses.
And he had no intentions of taking that fall.
At least, not alone.
CHAPTER 2
Rafe sat in the jail cell, silent, staring unblinking at the stone wall across from him, trying to ignore the blood that stained his clothes nearly two days after Jaymi’s death. The sheriff refused to allow them to change clothes or shower. Swabs had been taken for DNA. But despite the tech’s request for the clothes, it had been refused. Sheriff Tobias commented that he needed to wear Jaymi’s blood a while longer to realize what he had done to her.
He could hear his recruiting officer in the sheriff’s office yelling. Ryan Calvert had a strong, booming voice. It carried through the jail and caught attention, but for Rafe, Logan, and Crowe there was very little that could penetrate their shock, even now.
“I know I killed him.” Crowe repeated again. “I put that knife straight inside his kidney. It was a kill blow.”
At twenty-two Crowe shouldn’t even know how to make a kill blow with a hunting knife.
But he had. Unfortunately, the blow had come too late.
They had come too late.
Rafe was yanked back, hours before, to the memory of Jaymi’s screams echoing through the forest, jerking the cousins awake as they camped at the side of the lake and sending them crashing through the forest to find her.
They had followed the glow of a fire higher up Crowe Mountain. Followed her screams which were agonized and enraged. They had rushed into the clearing as her attacker’s knife plunged into her side.
Crowe hadn’t been able to save her.
After the black-garbed figure had jumped from her, his pants still pushed below his hips his round eyes filled with fear as he ran. Crowe had crashed after him, tackling him to the ground as Rafe ran for Jaymi. He’d been aware of Crowe struggling with Jaymi’s attacker. Crowe’s knife had gleamed in the moonlight before a high-pitched scream had sounded and the assailant had managed to grip a stone and slam Crowe in the head with it, before escaping.
The knowledge of her death shadowing her gray-blue eyes, Jaymi’s last thoughts were of her sister. She was sick. “Take care of Cami,” Jaymi begged, crying. As he held her, as her blood soaked into his clothes and Logan made the desperate 911 call.
“Please, Rafe, swear it.” The harder she had sobbed, the faster her blood had flowed from her body.
“I swear, Jaymi,” he vowed hoarsely knowing she was struggling to hang on. “I swear I’ll always watch out for her.”
There was no saving her.
Rafe had applied pressure on the wound. He held her. He screamed at her and demanded she live. And still, she had reached up with one hand shaking, touched his cheek and whispered, “She loves you, Rafe. She’ll always love you so much, just as I love my Tye. Give her a chance when she grows up.” Tears had washed her face as he rocked her, his own cheeks damp as he realized he was losing her forever. “Promise me. Take care of Cami.” Then Jaymi had looked over his shoulder and smiled before whispering, “Rafe, it’s Tye.” Her lips had trembled as such joy flooded her face, her dying gaze. “He’s finally come for me, Rafe. Tye finally came for me—”
And she had died. With the greatest joy that Rafe had seen on her face since the day she had married her precious Tye, he watched Jaymi slip from life as he screamed out her name.
But the sheriff hadn’t believed the men.
The sheriff and his deputies had arrived ahead of the state police. Immediately he and his cousins had been handcuffed and arrested as Jaymi’s murderers. And now they were trying to pin the five other murders that had occurred that summer on Rafe and his cousins.
The black-masked serial killer had been caught on surveillance taking Jaymi outside the pharmacy the night before. Her sister, Cami, had reported Jaymi’s disappearance hours later when Jaymi didn’t return to the apartment with the medicine she had gone for.
That morning when the pharmacist went to unlock the back door he had found the medicine, Jaymi’s key, and the door unlocked.
When he had pulled up the camera footage for the sheriff, they had seen the abduction, which had been taped just hours before Logan made that desperate 911 call. She had been taken at the same time witnesses had seen him and his cousins getting gas in town several blocks away.
Ryan Calvert, the recruiting officer who had taken an unusual interest in him and his cousins, had managed to get a copy of that security footage before the sheriff had gotten to it. Gunnery Sergeant Calvert hadn’t rushed to the jail to bail them out, or to hire the nearest lawyer. The minute he’d heard the report over his radio and remembered seeing the Callahan cousins in town as he drove to his hotel, he rushed to the combined truck stop/gas station and restaurant and made nice with the manager, Missy Derringer.
Thankfully, Missy was a friend. Perhaps not a friend that publicly claimed the Callahans, but a friend nonetheless. They did have a few, sometimes.
Being the owner’s daughter had helped. She’d quickly copied the security footage before her father could order otherwise and gladly gave it to the brooding Marine demanding it.
It hadn’t helped.
They were still sitting there in a damn jail cell two days later wondering how the hell it had happened.
And Rafe couldn’t get the memory of it out of his head.
The sight of that smile, so filled with love as she whispered Tye had come for her. It sent a chill up his spine, even now. The sense that she had only been waiting, always been watching for him to come for her had swept over him.
Jaymi had made Rafe swear he would protect Cami. She was sick, alone in Jaymi’s apartment, according to Jaymi’s friend and neighbor. Cami cried continually. She was begging for Jaymi, and Cami’s aunt and uncle were considering having her hospitalized due to the severity of the bronchitis.
Rafe could still hear Ryan screaming about a vagrant who had been found with Crowe’s knife in his side, his pants undone, and Jaymi’s blood on him.
Ryan was yelling furiously about taking his own samples to a Denver lawyer and having them analyzed. He was demanding the sheriff release his nephews now, by God, before he sued the county for an illegal arrest. “That fucking security tape is all you dumb shits need,” he raged. “Now let them the hell out now.”
Rafe shook his head.
He and his cousins knew Ryan Calvert was a Callahan, but no one else had, until now. Their grandparents had given Ryan up for adoption, when they couldn’t afford to feed their children any longer, long before Samuel, Benjamin, and David had really been old enough to understand their baby brother was gone.
Rafe didn’t know the whole story; he’d only just learned that the recruiter who had come to Sweetrock was actually the youngest Callahan son. Ryan’s search for his birth family had spanned more than ten years. His commitment to his nephews only grew stronger with the knowledge that his parents, as well as his brothers, were gone.
When his brothers returned, it was learned the child their parents had had so late in life, was dead, or so they believed, and their ranch supposedly sold and split between the Corbins, Raffertys, and Robertses. Their entire lives had been torn apart and all anyone cared about was convincing them to leave Corbin County and accept the losses.
And now that Callahan son was back and raising hell.
Ryan was screaming something about DNA, vagrants, serial murders, and alibis, and Rafe was wondering why he gave a damn.
Standing up, Rafe moved to the door, his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, his gaze focused on the night Jaymi died rather than at the stone wall across from him.
How was Cami? He had promised Jaymi he would look after her.<
br />
But how was he supposed to take care of her? He’d promised, but he had signed up for the Marines last week. He, Logan, and Crowe. They’d had enough of Corbin County for a while, they’d decided. Like their fathers before them, they thought the military seemed the best option.
For the same reason, perhaps. Because they were tired of the bullshit.
And it all went back to the three families who ruled Corbin County like their own personal little fiefdom.
Generations before, James Randal Callahan had acquired eight hundred acres of prime ranch land from the government as had his three partners James Corbin the First, Andrew Roberts, and Jason Rafferty.
At the time, the four men had been the best of friends as well as business partners. They had acquired the land they needed, the cattle and the horses, then they’d found wives.
They’d settled the land tucked between the rising mountains and proceeded to build a dynasty. But somewhere in those first years, something had happened to change those friendships and the wealth that first James Randal Callahan had brought with him. While the others had thrived, the Callahan family had slowly begun to wither away until Rafe’s grandfather had nearly died of some lung infection.
Hospitalized, weak and fighting for his life, he hadn’t even been aware that the world believed his youngest son was dead. In fact, his wife, Eileen Callahan had contacted acquaintances that she had known were desperate for a child. She’d sold her baby for the money needed to save the rest of her family and the ranch that amounted to everything they possessed.
Until the morning of their deaths, they had been worth a fortune. For some reason, that morning they had withdrawn every cent they had at the bank, and accepted a paltry couple of hundred thousand for a ranch that was worth three times as much in stock alone.
That night, they had been racing toward Colorado Springs along the curving mountain road with its sheer drops and spectacular cliffs. Somehow, JR Callahan, the great-great-grandson of James Randal Callahan, had lost control of the truck and plunged down one of those cliffs.