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Rushing to push the door farther open, he found the missing guard, lying motionless and bleeding profusely from the head on the tiled floor inside.
“Help!” Ace yelled toward the hallway. “We need help inside here!”
At his shout, a movement caught his eye. It was the blanket, sliding down his father’s chest as he jerked, his head turning and his eyes widening.
His own heart skipping a beat, Ace murmured, “Dad?” And heard his father make a strangled sound as he struggled to lift his hand—to point at him?
Reading the absolute terror in his father’s eyes, Ace felt his heart break to imagine that he, recalling their last argument but perhaps not what came after, might well fear him. But with the guard lying injured, or possibly worse, on the floor behind him, there was no time to—
His father gave another, far more urgent grunt, only this time an electric jolt of comprehension fired along Ace’s nerve endings as he realized that his dad wasn’t staring so much at as past him. Instinct taking over, Ace whirled around...
And came face-to-face with a slightly built stranger wearing an Arizona Sun Devils sweatshirt, a man in his midtwenties with a mop of wild, dark hair. But the look in his eyes was even wilder as he aimed his shaking gun directly at Ace’s chest.
“I’m sick of waiting for you to leave, and I’m running out of time here,” he ground out through clenched jaws, “so I guess I’ll be staging a murder-suicide instead of just finishing off what I started here today.”
“You!” Ace roared. “You’re the man who shot my father? Who the hell even are you?” Although there was something vaguely familiar about that face. But why would he—
“Sh-shot me!” Payne was breathing heavily, the effort to speak, after months of silence, clearly costing him. “Him—he did!”
“Shut up, old man!” yelled the stranger, who must have been hiding around the corner in the sitting area portion of the unusually large room.
As he shouted, his aim drifted from Ace to his father for an instant—an instant Ace seized upon to leap at the younger man.
The gunman cried out in alarm, backpedaling to keep from being knocked off his feet as Ace slammed his shoulder and sent the gun flying. It clattered to the floor, along with the phone Ace had been holding.
Younger and apparently more agile, the stranger twisted around like a trapped animal and dove for the loose weapon. But before his hand closed on the pistol’s grip, Ace’s booted foot caught his jaw.
The kick snapped the intruder’s head backward with a loud Oomph! As he recoiled from the blow, Ace, now seeing a clear path, leaped, his arm stretching toward the gun. His first desperate grab, though, only sent it spinning another two feet farther. It took another leap onto his stomach—and what felt like a few popped stitches from the chest wound Ice Veins had given him—before Ace finally had the weapon in his hand...
A weapon that he swung around to aim at the empty air and the fast-fading sound of running footsteps down the hall outside the room.
Ten minutes earlier
Though Sierra had managed to dress in the now-rumpled outfit from the previous evening and had even found her keys and wallet still zipped inside her jacket’s pocket, she hadn’t gotten far before someone must have figured out that she was missing. Or at least that was what she figured when flashing lights and an unfamiliar code announcement—both of which made her head swim—sent hospital personnel scurrying into the hallways so quickly that Sierra had no choice but to duck into the first doorway she encountered.
It turned out to be a break room, with a couple of round table and chair groupings, a countertop microwave, sink, a small refrigerator and a half-full coffeepot, along with a number of insulated mugs, which sat on open shelving. But what immediately caught Sierra’s eye was a white lab coat some careless employee had left draped over one of the chairs. Sierra decided on the spot it would make a good start on a disguise.
She was even more excited to see a hospital ID had been left clipped to the lapel. Though she had zero chance of passing as Dr. Jonathan Wong from the radiology department, the white coat fit her well, at least, and by flipping around the ID backward, donning a pair of tortoiseshell-framed reading glasses she discovered in a cubby, and winding her hair into a messy bun style, she decided she could pull off “harried medical professional” if spotted from a distance.
Or if there weren’t an entire floor full of very real employees of this hospital, along with the very capable Callum Colton, looking for her specifically. The thought made Sierra’s heartbeat quicken, as did the realization that a good number of those people might have seen Sergeant Colton on the television news last night or read about her so-called “murder” in the newspaper first thing this morning. In a community the size of Mustang Valley, such an event would be widely shared by friends and neighbors on social media, as well.
Fear splashed through her with the thought. Had photos of her—one of those photos—run with the coverage? Cringing at the thought, she remembered how her father had convinced her it would be great for business for her to do some feature with a glossy Las Vegas-area magazine last year and how they’d insisted on photographing her badass-babe style, holding various weapons, wearing a pair of outsized boxing gloves, and even straddling some chromed-out motorcycle she wouldn’t have ridden on the job in a million years. If she weren’t already supposedly dead, she’d keel over from humiliation to imagine those ridiculous pictures circulating widely.
Or would she be risking blowing the even better cover of her murder by allowing herself to be seen?
Realizing that she had little time for indecision, she peered out into the hallway to make sure the coast was clear before hurrying toward where she spotted a sign for the staircase—probably her best shot at getting outside the building undetected.
Voices around a corner alerted her someone was coming. Sierra caught the words room by room search, and ducked into what turned out to be a utility closet, mostly occupied by a large bin half-full of bags of soiled linens to be laundered. By the time someone came to check that closet, less than a minute later, Sierra was deep inside the bin, with several of the floppy cloth bags strategically arranged above her.
Holding her breath as the searcher rattled brooms, mops, buckets and other items around her, she strained her ears until she heard the male voice call, “Closet’s cleared,” an instant before the door slammed shut behind him.
Still, she stayed in her hiding place a while longer in case someone else came, her heart pounding in time with the aching of her head and injured ribs. When no one else arrived, she climbed out again, a painstakingly slow operation because of the room’s near-total darkness and her fear of knocking over anything that would bring another searcher running. By the time she was peering through the door again, she was sticky with perspiration and feeling more than slightly claustrophobic.
But she reminded herself that, during her professional efforts to get the drop on fugitives, she’d hidden in far tighter spaces. Sure, she wasn’t in peak form now, considering her injuries, but she was an athlete and a competitor—and absolutely determined to once more take charge of her own future. A future where she would never again have to be tempted by Ace Colton’s all-too-handsome face into imagining she was something more than the same Sierra Madden whose own mother hadn’t seen fit to hang around, whose father hadn’t paid enough attention to protect her from...
She closed her eyes, pushing back against the pain of wounds she hadn’t thought about in years, wounds that had more to do with her reaction to being forcibly corralled here than she would ever admit. Taking a deep breath, she let go of her angst for the time being, finally cautiously cracking the door open.
Peering through the narrow gap, she spotted the marked stairway door where she’d been heading when the commotion had broken out. She gave a low growl of frustration, seeing a woman she recognized as a nurse’s assistant stationed near that exit, her glossy, high-set ponytail swinging back and forth as she looked up and down the hallway.
