“There’s more. The perp kidnapped a little girl Chloe was watching named Natalie Moorefield. Chloe’s a tough kid. She wouldn’t let them put her in the ambulance until she told them all she knew. Marguerite’s gone after him.”

“What? How the hell does she know—”

“Chloe said he wrote something over the doorway. ‘Let’s finish it.’ Marguerite took one look at it, left Chloe her cell phone and was gone. Mac called me. I sent him to you right away but I went with a hunch and called the prison where her father was. They’ve released him, time served.”

“But she would have—” Tyler broke off, remembering Marguerite’s behavior when he’d called her from Cape Cod that day. How she’d been so standoffish and prickly, then suddenly desperate in the dim quiet of her bedroom.

He doesn’t know where I am.

How many women had said that? Believed it? Died believing it.

“Bank of Florida building. I’ll bet my life on it. We can be there in two minutes from my place.”

It was ten miles from his house but Violet wasn’t going to argue it. “I’ll call it in.” Tyler broke the connection, headed into the house. Going to his office, he unlocked the gun safe, pulled on the dual shoulder holster and fitted it with his nine millimeter and his Desert Eagle. He slipped the licenses to carry the guns and extra clips into his jeans’ pockets. “Don’t say a fucking word to me about being a civilian.”

“Wasn’t going to.”

Rage and fear mixed together became hard, cold resolve. “He’s intending to take all three of them over. He’s sick as they come, Mac. The only thing he’s living for is to finish the equation. The child’s just a bonus, the bait to get Marguerite there.” The two men left the house, hit the bottom step of the front porch together. “I gave her an engagement ring last night,” he said.

Mac glanced at him, understanding in his expression. “Then I hope you’re asking Violet to give you away, or she’ll be pissed.”

“Marguerite hasn’t said yes yet. She actually was kind of ticked off at me about it.

We have to protect her, Mac. At any cost. She doesn’t deserve this.” Tyler strode out into the driveway. Mac didn’t reply, knew he didn’t need to. From the set of Tyler’s shoulders his mind had only one track now.

Mac’s VTX was parked next to Tyler’s Ferrari. “I can make it there in two minutes on this,” Mac said. “Where will they be?”

“The roof.” Tyler got in the car, slammed the door, fired the engine. “And you won’t beat me there.” The car spun out of the driveway.

Mac had feared for the life of his woman before, knew what it was to find that icy center of control and do things that no person under ordinary circumstances would survive. So he was not at all surprised when Tyler ran through stoplights at busy intersections without pausing, ran up on the shoulder to get past a garbage truck, took turns at velocities only an experienced driver and a car with the Ferrari’s engineering could successfully manage. He just hoped they wouldn’t be too late. If they were…

He leaped onto the sidewalk through the next intersection and then shot back out behind Tyler’s taillights, hearing the scream of brakes as motorists tried to avoid hitting them both.

…he was going to make damn sure Tyler didn’t get there before him.

A light drizzle was falling and it was always colder on top of the building. Natalie might need her coat. Turning up the collar of her rain gear, Marguerite stepped into the foyer of the Bank of Florida building, thinking that everything around her had a surreal quality. All the colors turned up to high volume yet coated with a dull patina that made the world ugly, not vibrant.

Over the years, she had visited this building often enough that the indifferent security detail had accepted her as one of the corporate types. She’d even manufactured herself an ID that passed at a distance as one of those assigned to the major banking office housed in the building. Today her elegant London Fog rain cape worn against the outside drizzle and her determined step made her look as if she was just an employee coming in to do weekend work.

She needn’t have worried. The security officer was not there and the lock on the glass door that had to be deactivated with a buzzer after hours was not engaged. She peered over the edge of the horseshoe desk. Spots of blood were on the visitor’s log, marks that would have passed as ink stains to the unsuspecting mind. She hoped he was knocked out, dragged to a closet somewhere, but then she leaned farther over the counter, saw his body curled under the desk, his eyes staring. He clutched a note in stiff fingers, the print large enough to read, as if the guard had been turned into a macabre form of sign post.

Come on up.

She looked at the guard a full minute, reached down, closed his eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. To him. To his family. To the children whose photos were on the desk, who wouldn’t have him as they grew up. For them, it would be a tragedy, a loss. For her, it would have been a gift from God.

She straightened, went to the elevator, set it to go to the top floor. If she had died that day, a guard wouldn’t be dead. Natalie wouldn’t be in his hands now.

Do you know how it would tear my guts out to lose you?

Tyler’s voice. Rough with need and love, desire.

Some things just weren’t meant to be. But she really wished it had been.

When she got to the top floor, she took the service staircase up to the roof, stepped out into the mist that had become a light rain, the clouds and gathering darkness dulling the earlier promise of a sunny morning. She was watchful, looking before she stepped out, but he came into view almost immediately, directly across from her. He stood at the roof’s edge, not up on the ledge, but next to it. He had Natalie standing on it, though, his hand holding on to the collar of her shirt, the nape of her neck. Her body was trembling, cheeks wet with tears, eyes round with terror. Her hair was frizzy with the humidity, streaked with the rain.

“Miss M—”

When he yanked on her collar to keep her still, her arms flailed and latched on to his side. He shook her off. “Shut up and be still.” There were bruises on her arm where he’d handled her. She was wearing a pale pink cotton shirt and a pair of jeans on her tiny hips. Sneakers that looked no longer than half the length of Marguerite’s hand. The new earrings winked at her. She took in every detail of Natalie’s appearance and used it to steady herself before she turned her attention to her father.

Prison had changed him of course, but it surprised her nonetheless because he had lost so much weight and become lean, burning up with his hatred, far beyond that fateful turning point when she was fourteen. His hair had thinned. The lines of his face were as deep as wounds, the mouth thin and harsh. Evil had completely taken him so there was no way he could live among the world and normal people not see it, recognize the danger and shun him. She thought about the way she had described herself to Tyler, the teenager who could not be close to others, not only because of her own desires and problems, but because of what the others sensed about her. The evil had stamped them all, but it could end here. She wouldn’t, couldn’t let it take Natalie though.

“Marie.”

She inclined her head. “I’m here. And I’ll do what you want. Just let her go back down the stairs.”

“She’s special to you. I know that.” Marguerite wondered if it was fanciful imagining, the red tint that seemed to glitter like blood in the once rich golden brown eyes. His voice was a chain smoker’s voice, the vocal cords scalded by nicotine. “I know everything about you. You thought changing your name would do it, didn’t you?

You’ve been my only focus for twenty years, Marie. There wasn’t a single moment I didn’t know where you were. Did you think you could carry her face, her soul and I wouldn’t come after you?”

“No. I knew you would come one day.” And she realized it was true. She’d lived every day of her life holding herself back from love and friendships, knowing it. But love and friendship had been given to her anyway, offered freely. In Tyler’s case, insistently. She knew that even if Natalie hadn’t been involved, Chloe would have fought him because he was attacking and destroying what belonged to Marguerite. Just things. Ceramic cups, dolls, even the ring on her hand now… But those things symbolized something far more important. The only thing that mattered. Love. It was more important than survival.

Which is why she was glad she’d left her message with Chloe. That Tyler would know she hadn’t intended to leave him. Hadn’t wanted to, ever.

“I always knew you’d come back,” she said evenly.

She walked across the roof toward him, feeling the breeze lift her hair. Thought of Tyler’s fingers threading through it, loosening it. He loved her hair. Had loved making it tumble down. Natalie’s eyes, the irises the color of dark chocolate, watched her approach. The child’s lips quivered, the involuntary flow of terrified tears making her upper lip wet.

“Do you ever think about Mom? David?”

His fingers tightened on Natalie and she whimpered. “Don’t talk about them.”

“Me too. I miss them every day, Dad. It hurts to be without them. Like a burning inside that never stops.”

Their eyes were locked. In that one brief moment, she sensed he was unable to look away, her words reestablishing their bond. It made her think of all the submissives whose minds she’d plumbed, tearing past the curtains to find their souls and hold them against her heart. The outpouring of emotions had been a bath for her own soul which she’d thought was forbidden the same experiences, forbidden to come out into the light and love. Like a Goddess of the Underworld, she’d pulled those souls to her. Now she kept moving across the tarred roof, all vestiges of civilization far below and prepared to take the plunge into her father’s blackness.

“You…” He shook his head, breaking the contact, denying with his body language the words she’d spoken. “You always were her. You look like her, spoke like her. You were my little girl, but then you took her over, possessed her.” Natalie yelped as he thrust her forward, as if he was using her as an extension of his hand, pointed in accusation at Marguerite. “So you could infect me with your poison.” Marguerite forced herself not to look at Natalie, clumsily scrambling for solid ground. His yanking had taken one foot off the ledge, unbalancing her. At least he’d pulled her toward the roof and not away from it. “You didn’t matter enough to Grandma, did you, Daddy? How do you ever get over the betrayal of a parent?” Bile rose up in her. Her focus slipped as his face, the thin cruelty of his lips, the curl of his chest hair in the open collar of his shirt all seemed to expand and fill her vision. Parts of him she knew in a way no daughter should, sickening her. “How do you ever forget him coming to you in the night, raping you, teaching you how gray the line between pain and pleasure is? Knowing I had to take it night after night, or you’d hurt the only person in the world who loved me?”