“Where’s Owen?” Emerson asked as they entered the glamorous sitting room. She’d expected him to be there, waiting.

  “Oh, he’s out taking care of some business. Running a few errands.” A wave of her hand. Casual. Her fingers skimmed over her pearl necklace before Maxine sat on the plush, white couch. “What is this meeting about?” She patted the cushion next to her. “Emerson, sit.”

  She did not. Emerson remained standing. Her gaze swept the room. To the right, a white door was closed. The bedroom door? Slowly, her stare returned to her mother. “Nathaniel Hadaway was arrested tonight.”

  Surprise flashed on Maxine’s face. Surprise and a hint of worry. “For what?”

  “Breaking into my condo. Destroying property. Turns out, he’s been stalking me for quite some time.”

  Maxine’s hand covered her mouth. A brief expression of deliberate shock before her fingers dropped. “I am stunned. Horrified. Your own lover…?”

  Yes, like that didn’t make her stomach churn.

  But her mother seemed to rally quickly as she noted, “Well, you did pick him. We all make mistakes with our partners.” A telling glance at Gray and a bit too much emphasis on partners.

  “Yes,” Emerson agreed. “We do.”

  Gray was right at her side. “We know who ordered Nathaniel to terrorize Emerson.”

  “Ordered?” Maxine frowned.

  “Nathaniel was on your payroll,” Gray continued in a voice that seethed with tension and fury. “You funded his research. You wanted him to keep tabs on Emerson and report back to you. Just like you wanted Rylan Tate to tell you everything that’s happening at the Bureau.”

  Maxine reached for her pearls. “Rylan? The name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “It should. Right before he was hauled away in an ambulance tonight, he was talking plenty about you and how you paid him to give every secret he could discover to you,” Gray snapped.

  Her hand fisted around the pearls. “What ambulance?”

  “It was a big night,” Emerson revealed. Big and exhausting, and it wasn’t even close to being over. “Rylan was shot.” Multiple times. “Nathaniel tried to attack Gray with a knife. Nathaniel confessed that he really enjoyed the stalking job he’d been hired to do on me…”

  Maxine paled.

  “And he liked it so much, in fact, that he was planning to kill Gray. Then I suspect he would have killed me. He loved being immersed in the criminal world. Wanted to see what it was like to actually take a life.”

  “Emerson!” Maxine leapt to her feet. “I had no idea—he planned to kill you?” She seemed genuinely shocked. And her hand still fisted around the pearls.

  “He was told how to terrify me.” Emerson was surprised her voice came out so steady. “He was given the alarm code to my home—an alarm system that Owen installed. Nathaniel was told to break mirrors. To write messages. He was told my schedule, so he’d know when to follow me. Exactly where to go.”

  Maxine shook her head. “Emerson…”

  “Nathaniel was intent on hurting me, but he couldn’t have been the person who sliced my neck when I was seventeen. He wasn’t even in the country back then. That attacker had to be someone else. And, the more I thought about it, I realized that Nathaniel couldn’t have been the one who broke into my dorm in college. Or who terrorized me in med school. He was far away in those instances. Gray checked. We double-checked. Nathaniel is making my life hell now, but someone else had to do it before.” Just saying the words hurt so much.

  She’d been terrorized for so long.

  Gray’s arm brushed against her. She pulled in a breath. Steadied herself.

  “Someone else had to do it before.” Emerson was amazed that her voice came out so level. “Someone who wanted me to be afraid. Someone who wanted me controlled. Someone who wanted me always looking for threats. Being paranoid. Telling others that I was being hunted…hunted.” She nodded. “That’s what you told me that my father used to say, remember? That he felt hunted.”

  “Your father was a-a disturbed individual, Emerson. Deeply disturbed.”

  Her hands curled into fists. Her nails bit into her palms. “But what if he wasn’t?”

  Maxine’s lips quivered. “What?”

  “She said…” Gray’s voice. Angry. “What if he wasn’t? What if someone was playing fucking mind games with him? Making her father believe he was seeing things that weren’t there? Pushing him to the edge? Making his own family members doubt him? So that when he died, there wouldn’t be so many questions. So that a murder could look just like a suicide.”

  Maxine’s hand jerked. The strand of pearls snapped. Some flew into the air. Some hit the floor. Rolled. Maxine shook her head. Over and over and over. “No, no, no. That’s not what happened.” Then her head whipped toward the door on the right. The closed, white door. The bedroom door. “Tell them!” Maxine’s voice rose. “Tell them that’s not what happened!”

  Gray tensed, and from the corner of her eye, Emerson saw him pull out his gun.

  The bedroom door opened. Slowly. Creaking.

  Owen Porter stood there, clad in a white robe. Hair wet. Face grim. Sad. He stared straight at Maxine. “I’m sorry.”

  Maxine fell. Her knees seemed to give way, and she hit the floor.

  Emerson and Gray had known that Owen was in the suite. After all, her mother’s lover was always close.

  “He was in the way.” Owen remained in the open doorway. “You said a divorce wasn’t possible back then, that it would cause a scandal if our affair was discovered. It was an easy way out for you. I planned it all perfectly.”

  This man had killed her father. “He never had schizophrenia, did he?”

  Owen’s head slowly angled toward her, like a snake, following prey. “You saw the files on him. Read reports from shrinks.”

  Yes, she’d read them. Over and over. Always, with terror in her heart. What if I’m like him? That fear had haunted her for so many years. And all along, Owen had known the truth. I never needed to fear that fate. But she had needed to fear the man pretending to be a protector for her and her mother. “With the right pressure, those files can be faked. I’m sure you knew how to apply the right pressure.”

  The lines on Owen’s face deepened.

  “You kept me afraid all of these years. You knew I feared turning out just like him…and you had someone terrorize me. You set the scene so I would question my own sanity.” She shook her head. “How many times? How many people?”

  “Emerson…”

  Maxine began to cry.

  “Your mother wanted you close,” Owen explained with a voice that cracked. “I was just trying to—to control the situation.”

  Rage built inside of Emerson. Battling with her grief. “You wanted to control me.”

  Once more, Gray’s arm brushed against her. “Who the fuck cut Emerson’s throat when she was seventeen?”

  A gasp escaped her mother. Her tear-streaked face turned to Emerson, then back to Owen.

  “He’s long dead,” Owen assured them. “Some crazed protestor who wanted Maxine to change her vote in the senate. I eliminated him the day after the attack. No one will ever find his remains.”

  Nausea rolled inside of her. All of these years…Owen had pretended to care. To be—to be family. And he’d made her doubt her own sanity. Made her so afraid.

  “Emerson…” Her mother’s weak whisper. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know!”

  Owen advanced. His attention was on the senator. “I love you,” he told Maxine. “I did all of this for you. You wanted your husband gone. I made him go. You wanted your daughter close, so I kept her controlled. You wanted⁠—”

  “Hey, asshole!” Gray called out.

  Owen jerked. His head snapped toward Gray.

  “You don’t control shit,” Gray informed him. “Now put your fucking hands up because you’re under arrest for murder. Multiple damn murders.”

  That was when the rest of the FBI agents swarmed. They rushed into the suite because Emerson and Gray had been wearing wires. They’d just caught every bit of the former SEAL’s confession.

  Owen was shoved to the floor. Cuffed.

  Her mother kept crying. Begging Emerson to forgive her. Saying that she hadn’t known. That she couldn’t have known. And Emerson…

  Owen looked up at her.

  “Go to hell,” she told him because that bastard had killed her father.

  He would pay.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “There has to be more to the world than just monsters. I want that more. I’ll fucking have more. I’ll have Emerson.”

  – Gray Stone

  She wasn’t a ticking time bomb.

  Or…maybe she was.

  Her father’s schizophrenia had been faked. He’d been tricked. Manipulated. Murdered. And all in the name of love.

  Love wasn’t supposed to make you into a monster. It wasn’t supposed to twist you and make you kill people. It was supposed to make you a better person. Supposed to enrich you.

  Except…

  Love could be dark. Or maybe for some people, love brought out the darkness already in them.

  Emerson knew darkness lived in her. So maybe there was a ticking time bomb inside of her, after all. Tick, tick, ticking, and one day, it would explode. One day, she might explode. One day⁠—

  “Darling, if you think any harder, I will literally hear your thoughts.”

  Her head swung to the right.

  Gray had entered his office. She’d been waiting for him. After avoiding him for thirty-six hours straight, she’d forced herself to head to the FBI building. To stride right inside and march to his inner sanctum.

  Only the office had been empty. Sort of anticlimactic. So she’d sat in the chair across from his desk. Waited.

  And she’d been so deep in her thoughts that Emerson hadn’t heard him glide into the room.

  He offered her a half-smile. “Decided to stop running, did you?”

  “I wasn’t running, I—” Emerson heaved out a breath. “Avoiding. I was avoiding, not running.”

  He strolled around her and leaned his hip against the desk. His arms crossed over his chest as he stared down at her.

  “I knew you had a lot of work to do, what with closing all the cases.” Cases that had all centered around her. The mess of her life.

  “Your mother held a press conference yesterday.”

  Emerson nodded. “Yes, I saw it. She’s apologetic. She’s the victim. She never saw the monster beneath Owen’s mask.”

  “You don’t sound like you believe any of that.”

  Her hands gripped the armrests of her chair. “My mother never believed me. No matter how many times I told her what was happening.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” Her chin lifted. “You believed me. From the very first moment. You never doubted anything I told you.”

  “Of course, I didn’t.”

  She shot out of the chair. Reached out for him. Stopped herself at the last minute. “Why not?”

  “Because you’re my partner.”

  “A partner you didn’t want.”

  “Oh, Emerson, you know there is no one I want more in the entire world than you.”

  His words made her ache. “I brought so much danger to you.”

  “I don’t mind danger. It keeps life interesting.”

  It did not. “Why didn’t you ever doubt anything I said to you?”

  He smiled at her. A soft smile. Not his megawatt, manipulative smile. “Want to hear a secret, Emerson?”

  “I don’t know.” Blunt. Truthful. “I’ve heard a lot of secrets recently, and they have not been very good.”

  His right hand extended. Skimmed over her cheek. “This one is good. It’s one of my secrets. I have a lot of secrets, you see. And I’ve decided, well, you’re my partner, so you get to know all of them.”

  She exhaled. “How many secrets do you have?” A lot wasn’t a specific number.

  “Oh, tons.” Breezy. “Like…did you know I was a member of the Night Strikers MC?”

  “What?”

  “Yep, that’s why I didn’t sweat the scene outside of O’Sullivan’s. I knew that the Strikers were all around me. Not just the ones who came roaring up on the bikes, either. Others were hiding in the shadows of O’Sullivan’s the whole time. Some were on the rooftops of nearby buildings. Cass had my six.”

  “How is an FBI agent also a former member of one of the most notorious motorcycle clubs out there?”

  He winked. “Did I say that I ‘was’ a member? My bad. Probably should have said that I am a member.”

  Emerson felt her eyes widen.

  “But that’s really not the secret I wanted to share with you. The secret I wanted you to know, the reason I believed you from the beginning, it’s because I loved you from the beginning.”

  She could feel every hard beat of her heart.

  “I didn’t want you as a partner at first because I knew I would cross lines with you. It was inevitable. I looked at you, I talked to you, and I fell for you. I knew I would always want for you to be far, far more than just an associate working cases with me. I would want you to be my whole world.”

  She swayed toward him. Caught herself. “What if…if I’d been wrong? About it all? What if I’d been…” Her words trailed away.

  “Emerson.” A shake of his head. “I could see the truth about you every single time I looked into your eyes. You weren’t weak. You were battle scarred and soul strong. That’s why I loved you. But I knew I couldn’t rush you. You had to tell me your secrets in your own time and in your own way.” A pause. “Just like I had to tell you mine.”

  “It’s been thirty-six hours,” she whispered. Yes, she’d counted every single hour that she’d been away from him. “You didn’t…you didn’t come rushing after me.”

  “No.” A shake of his head. “Because I will never try to control you. Because I know when you need your time. Your space. I want you to choose me, Emerson. A partner not just here at the Bureau, but in life. All your days—I want you to choose to be with me.”

  “There is no one else I could ever want this much.” Truth. “I love you, Gray. I want to be with you forever. You understand me like no one else ever could.” He’d given her justice for her father. Stood by her. Protected her.

  Loved her.

  She loved him so much that it scared her.

  “What do you say, sweetheart? Want to keep hunting monsters with me?”

  Emerson nodded.

  “Want to keep profiling, bringing those dark deeds into the light?”

  Another nod.

  “Want to stay with me always, marry me, maybe have us a daughter with your gorgeous eyes?”

  “Yes.” She couldn’t stay away any longer. Emerson leapt at Gray. He caught her, wrapping his arms around her, and hauling her close. And it was there, in his arms, with his warmth around her, that Emerson finally realized the truth…

  I am safe.

  No ticking time bomb. No deadly whispers in her mind.

  Gray was safety. Gray was her anchor. Gray was the man who’d fight the world for her.

  He was everything she needed. There was no one she could want more.

  He was her perfect partner.

  Because she’d fight the world for him, too. She’d keep his secrets. She’d watch his back. She’d be a pain in the ass when he tried to get too arrogant with her, but…

  She’d love him until she died. Love him and be happy with him, and Hannah McIntyre and all the other killers out there could just go screw off.

  Because sometimes, love was real. Sometimes, people did get happy endings. Endings that you bled for, that you fought for, and that you won.

  A love that you treasured more than anything else. A love that⁠—

  “We are not honeymooning at Sea Island,” Gray told her, his lips right above her own.

  She laughed. For the first time in thirty-six hours, the heavy weight that Emerson had carried lifted. She could breathe again. She could be free of the past. She could focus on her present. Her future. The life that waited. And they would definitely not, one hundred percent not be honeymooning with the stampeding horses. “Let’s go somewhere cold,” she decided. “Let’s get a tiny cabin in the woods, be naked in front of a fireplace for days, and let’s lock out the rest of the world.”

  “Done.”

  She laughed again.

  I love this man so much.

  The perfect partner.

  Her partner. Always.

  Epilogue

  “Do I have a dark side? Yes. You have no idea how dark. But mess with my Emerson, and

  you’ll find out.”

  – Gray Stone

  Gray opened the cell door. He marched inside, grabbed the prisoner from the bed, and threw the bastard up against the bars.

  Nathaniel Hadaway cried out, his whole body shaking, and damn if the little asshole didn’t piss himself.

  Gray shoved him away in disgust. “I can see prison life is treating you well.”

  Nathaniel collapsed on the floor. “Get me out! Get me out! I can’t stay here—the other inmates terrify me! Please, get me out! I have to get out! Please!”

  “You were stalking Emerson. My Emerson. And you wanted to kill me. Bastard, you will never see the light of day again. Just got orders, you’re being transferred to maximum security. Hope you enjoy the ride.” Then, hands fisted, he turned away.

  “No, please! Don’t⁠—”

  He exited the cell. The door clanged shut. Gray didn’t look back. Rage had been riding him hard all day, and he’d needed to make sure certain loose ends were tied up.

  Nathaniel Hadaway was finally being transferred. The shrink had already been targeted by gang members. He was going to be meeting a world of pain at his new home in max security.

  As for Rylan, the FBI agent had recovered from his gunshot wound, he’d pled guilty to the charges against him, and, oh, yes, he was certainly going to have to watch his back for the next twenty years in prison. Former Feds never fared well in general pop.

  Gray marched down the narrow hallway. No guards appeared, per his commands. He’d ordered the place emptied out. The better for him to hunt. He turned to the right. Stopped in surprise.