HUNTED
Alison Golden
Gabriella Zinnas
Contents
FREE PREQUELS
PRAISE FOR THE DIANA HUNTER MYSTERY SERIES
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
SPECIAL OFFER
DIANA HUNTER WILL RETURN…
SNATCHED
THANK YOU
OTHER BOOKS IN THE DIANA HUNTER SERIES
ALSO BY ALISON GOLDEN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HUNTED
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PRAISE FOR THE DIANA HUNTER MYSTERY SERIES
“Awesome.”
“On the edge of my seat…”
"Page turner.”
“I cannot tell you the last time a group of characters endeared me as quickly...”
“Diana Hunter is a strong, intelligent, and very likeable heroine.”
“Grabbed me from the first page, and I sat up until 4:30 in the morning reading it.”
“The story line is quick-paced and attention-holding. This one deserves 5+ stars.”
“This book will keep you turning the pages to find out the who, what, why, and how.”
“Couldn't put it down!”
“Left me wanting more.”
“Peter and Diana have a great chemistry.”
“I love the author's writing.”
“A pleasure to read.”
“Really captivating.”
“Fast-paced, well-written, fun stories.”
“I can't wait to read the next book in the series.”
“I'm hooked.”
“Kept me reading until the wee hours.”
“Diana Hunter is becoming one of my favorite characters”
“Super read. Cracking heroine.”
“One of the most enjoyable books I've read in a long time”
“A gem.”
“Diana Hunter is knowledgeable, experienced, quick-witted, and even sexy.”
“Can you write quicker, please?”
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Hunted is a prequel to the other books in the Diana Hunter series of mysteries. The events in this story take place a few years before Snatched, the next book in the series. It is set in Vancouver.
Unlike the other books, Hunted is not a complete mystery. It relates the events that create the backdrop to the series and fills in some of Diana’s personality and motivations.
The Diana Hunter mysteries can be read and enjoyed in any order. I’ve made sure not to include any spoilers for those of you who are new to the characters and any existing fans of Diana’s adventures will still find plenty of fresh action and mystery as well as perhaps a few answers to questions you may have. All in all, there is something for everyone.
I had an absolute blast creating this book – I hope you have a blast reading it too.
CHAPTER ONE
DO YOU REALLY have to go?” Lydia Hunter asked her daughter as she helped pack her things into boxes. She was trying to hold back the tears but was failing miserably.
“You know I have to, Mom,” Diana replied.
“But why?”
“Because I’d rather not waste time commuting to school. I’ll have plenty of work to do without going back and forth.”
“But we live in South Cambie, not the North Pole! It’s not even a 15-minute drive.”
Diana sighed. They’d had this argument repeatedly. “Mom, I’ve signed up for two undergrad programs. I’m going to be spending every waking moment studying. Are you really going to be happy knowing that I’m out driving around at midnight?”
Lydia sighed, her light blue eyes glossy with unshed tears. “I know you’re right. I know we’ve talked about it a million times, and your father agrees that it’s safer for you to be on campus, but you’re only sixteen! You’re my baby.”
She was sniffling by this point, trying to look anywhere except at her logical and highly driven daughter.
“It’ll be okay, Mom. You’ll see. You can come see me all the time, and I promise I’ll come home at least once every weekend.”
Diana smiled and pulled her mother into a hug in a rare exhibition of affection. It wasn’t that Diana had any problems expressing love per se. It was usually a matter of her mind working on some problem or other and her simply not realizing what other people needed from her.
Lydia sighed again. “Why did I have to have a genius for a child?”
“Genetically speaking—“
“I didn’t ask for a fully-fledged scientific explanation,” Lydia cut her daughter off with a chuckle.
Diana was more than intelligent. She was far above the norm. She was reading by the age of two and a half. By the age of five, she was doing math far above the level of even a first-grader. By the time she had started second grade, she was so far ahead of the other children that she had become a problem in school. When the school counselor called her, Lydia had been worried. In the end, it was to suggest Diana be put into a special program for gifted children. And what could she do but agree? Diana was bored, and she was letting everyone know it.
Had it been up to Diana, she’d have already started her undergraduate courses by now. Probably finished them too. But Lydia had been adamant. Her daughter wouldn’t spend her entire life with her nose in books. She needed to have as much of a normal childhood as possible. So, they had come to a compromise. She wouldn’t head out to university until she was at least 16. After that, it would be Diana’s decision what she did and how quickly she did it.
That’s why Lydia wasn’t surprised when Diana had chosen two undergraduate programs, biotechnology and computer sciences. Lydia didn’t understand it. The two programs couldn’t be more dissimilar. But then again, it had been a very long while since she’d been able to understand her daughter when it came to her academics.
She’d known the day she had discovered she was pregnant that her daughter would be special. That she’d do amazing things with her life. Of course, every mother feels that way, but it turned out Lydia had been right. Her daughter was special. And now, here they were. Her daughter was leaving home. And it was much too early, if you asked Lydia. But she couldn’t, in good conscience, hold Diana back.
“I’m going to miss you,” Lydia whispered.
Diana grinned. “I’ll miss you too, mom.”
Lydia glanced around her daughter’s bedroom. There were no posters of her favorite actors or bands on the walls. There were no flashy clothes they argued over littering the floor. There was no make-up. There was nothing that would indicate this was a 16-year-old girl’s bedroom. In fact, it looked more like a professor’s study, with books covering every possible surface. A computer sat on a desk facing the windows. Every other available surface was covered in papers and notes, most of which Lydia had little chance of comprehending.
At one point, Diana had been interested in electronics, but thankfully, that messy phase had passed. Now her room was no longer covered with circuit boards, wires, and a myriad of tools. It was actually quite neat, compared to those days.
Her bed was a simple box frame tucked into the corner of the room. Her sheets featured a red and black geometric design. The rest of the room was dedicated to shelves for her books and various other projects she sometimes tinkered with.
Diana’s closet mainly consisted of jeans, t-shirts, and sneakers.
Fashion wasn’t her thing. She wanted to be comfortable, and she really had no interest in clothing. As long as it was functional, covered her up, and didn’t get in her way, Diana was happy. She was a girl who liked the simple things in life except when it came to solving problems. Then it was a case of the more complex, the better.
Lydia glanced at her daughter, who was stuffing some books into another box. “You do know you won’t have that much space in your room on campus, right?”
Diana looked up. “I’ll find a place for them,” she said knowingly.
“I’m sure you will,” Lydia smiled.
Knowing her daughter, she’d probably invent some trans-dimensional bag that would allow her to store an entire library’s worth of books in a space no bigger than a purse. Lydia rolled her eyes at her own thoughts. She’d been spending too much time watching science fiction shows with her daughter. Though Diana tended to shout at the screen about the poor science on which these shows were based, she still loved them. They were her guilty pleasure. But to anyone who asked, she vehemently maintained she only watched them for research purposes, namely to see what she shouldn’t do if she ever decided to write a book or a screenplay. Lydia just smiled knowingly without making a single comment.
“Are you two ready?” Diana’s father, John, yelled up the stairs.
“Nearly, Dad. One more box to go.”
“Well, hurry up. You’d think you were moving to the other side of the world, not basically down the road.”
Lydia smiled to herself. Her husband was trying to pretend everything was all right, but he was even more worried about their daughter’s move than she was. He’d signed her up for every self-defense class he could find when Diana had hit puberty. As a homicide detective, he saw the worst side of Vancouver every day, and he wanted to make sure his daughter was safe.
Lydia, though, had put her foot down when he’d wanted to sign her up for a firearms course. Diana had been fourteen at the time, and Lydia had told her husband point-blank that their daughter would not be learning how to operate those instruments of death at such a young age.
She’d also calmly reminded him that there was no way he could prove Diana was in imminent danger and that police protection wouldn’t suffice, which was pretty much the only way a civilian could carry a concealed weapon in Canada. Of course, he’d ignored the logic of her arguments and had pouted. Then he’d wheedled. Then he’d begged.
He’d brought home photos of crime scenes and said that even if she couldn’t carry a gun, it would still be an extra skill in Diana’s arsenal, and it couldn’t hurt. He’d also launched into a long lecture about how learning to shoot would improve her hand-eye coordination, her mental discipline, and her self-confidence. Lydia had just rolled her eyes. She held her ground, reminding him that there were many other activities she could engage in that would have the same effects without guns being involved.
Thwarted in his attempt to arm Diana, now that she was moving out, Lydia was surprised her husband hadn’t turned into a raving lunatic. He was too calm. Something was up, and she planned to find out what it was, but not right this minute. Though she was sorely tempted to go downstairs and uncover precisely what was going on, Lydia refused to waste the last few minutes she had with Diana before she left home.
Half an hour later, John carried the last box of books to the car, shutting the back door of the black Ford Explorer parked in the driveway.
“Are you sure you didn’t forget anything? Like the kitchen sink?” John asked with a cocked eyebrow.
“Don’t be mean, Dad,” Diana admonished as she swatted him on the arm.
“Ow!” he complained good-naturedly.
“Really, Dad?” Diana shook her head.
John sighed and pulled Diana into a hug. “I’m going to miss you, Didi,” he said into her hair.
“Stop calling me that!”
Lydia smiled at the scene unfolding before her. Despite the fact that Diana hated the pet name, she didn’t budge from her father’s embrace. The two of them had always been close. And that was one thing Lydia had always been extremely grateful for.
“I’ll miss you too, Dad,” Lydia heard her daughter’s muffled whisper. It had an edge to it, as if tears were about to fall. John glanced up at her, and his eyes were also suspiciously moist.
A few moments later, Diana began to fidget. “For you to miss me, I have to actually go, you know,” she said.
Her father chuckled, letting her go, albeit half-heartedly. “Now, do you remember—”
“Not the lecture again, Dad,” Diana groaned. “I’ve heard it five times already, and that’s just in the past two hours.”
Her father glared at her. “You don’t know what—”
“Yes, yes, I know. The world is full of horrible people who are all out to get me, and boys are the spawn of evil who just want to impregnate me due to their biological drive to procreate with anything that moves. They don’t care about me or my feelings.” Diana recited in a monotone voice. “That about right?”
John’s eyes narrowed. “Precisely. And, remember, don’t go out—”
“…after dark because all the stalkers, rapists, and serial killers hang out right outside my dorm room just waiting for me, Diana Hunter, to walk out so they can grab me and do terrible things to me.”
“Exactly, and—”
“I think she’s got the point, John,” Lydia said with a chuckle.
John looked at his wife with indignation. “If you saw what I do every day, you’d wonder how I let her leave the house. Either of you,” he added, looking at his wife with concern in his gaze.
Lydia shook her head, but a loving smile curled her lips. “Do remember, honey, that we do see everything you do every day because you make a point of showing us the pictures. Let us never forget that we live in the city of Vancouver, which, despite so many people around the world thinking it is a lovely place, is a pit of evil and the crime capital of the universe, apparently.”
“But it is!”
“This is fun and all, but can we get going, please? Pretty please?”
The puppy dog look Diana was giving her father was her most powerful, effective weapon. That, and her tears. Diana hardly ever cried. But on the rare occasions that she did, it destroyed her father. He was capable of taking on an entire army of serial killers by himself with only a rusty spoon, just to put a smile on her face. When she gave him that pleading look, though, he turned from one of the biggest hard-ass detectives into a complete sap. Lydia sighed. Diana had him wrapped around her little finger.
“Okay,” he said, “everyone in the car.”
When Diana had hopped in the SUV and closed the door, Lydia saw her chance. “What did you do?” she asked her husband pointedly.
“Me? What are you talking about?” His far-too innocent look said more than words. He knew precisely what she meant.
“John,” she said warningly.
He ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “I may or may not have gone down to the local precinct near her campus and had a word with the boys there. And they may or may not have promised to keep an eye out for her. And they also may or may not have had a word with the campus security to keep her safe unless they wanted to deal with half the Vancouver Police Department breathing down their necks.”
“Only half?” Lydia chuckled.
“Yeah, the other half will be busy dealing with the lowlife who hurt her,” John replied sheepishly.
“You’re impossible. You know she’ll kill you if she finds out.”
“If she finds out.”
“You do know that your daughter is incredibly perceptive, right?”
“Well, it’s my prerogative as her father to be overprotective.” He paused for a moment. “She’s our baby, Lydia. And she’s leaving home.”
“Don’t start. If you start, I’m going to start crying, and she’ll really kill us for making her late.”
He nodded, enveloping his wife in a hug. “She’ll be alright.�
�
“Yes, she will.”
“Are we going to be leaving this century?” Diana interrupted them.
“We’re going, we’re going,” John mumbled.
They got into the car, and within moments, they left behind the three-bedroom townhouse that had been Diana’s home almost since she had been born.
CHAPTER TWO
Three years later…
THE BLARING ALARM on his phone roused John Hunter out of a very deep and pleasant sleep. With his eyes closed, he hunted for the offending device and put the alarm on snooze. He groaned as he turned over, throwing an arm over his wife and nuzzling deep under the covers.
“We have to get up,” Lydia said in a groggy voice.
“Five more minutes,” he murmured. “I was having such a nice dream.”
“Were you?” She scooted a little further back, cuddling into his warmth.
“Mhmm. It involved you, me, Paris, and a very, very romantic evening, if you get my drift,” he purred.
Lydia giggled. “Now that I could get on board with. Of course, it would be nicer if it were more than just a dream so I could actually join in,” she said with a soft sigh.
“We need a vacation,” he grumbled.
“Yes, we do.”
“You know what? How about we just do it? I mean, we both have plenty of vacation time we can take, and Paris isn’t that far.”
“It’s only halfway around the world. And do you have any idea how expensive a trip like that would be?”
Lydia had always been the practical one, at least in terms of finances. And that’s precisely why she was in charge of all their money. Had it been up to him, they wouldn’t have managed to buy a cardboard box, let alone own a house, have savings, and still lead a very comfortable life. But sometimes Lydia was way too tight with the money, like now.
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