A text from my sister, Noel, came in while I was in my latest level of Candy Crush.

Noel: I got a really weird call from your mother.

Me: She’s your mother unless it was something awesome. Then she’s my mother.

Noel: She wants to know why you aren’t paying your doctor’s bills.

My brows furrowed.

Nico’s phone buzzed, and I looked over at him to see his eyes furrow.

“What?” I asked him.

“I just got a really, really weird text from mom telling me she wanted to know why you weren’t paying your doctor bills. She asked if you were low on money,” Nico said.

Michael, who’d been talking up until that point, stopped and turned to me.

“You didn’t tell me you were having trouble paying your bills,” he left that hanging, and my face flushed in embarrassment.

“I’m not having trouble. In fact, I’ve already pre-paid for the hospital as of last visit!” I replied huffily. “What the hell? Why would anyone call my mother? That’s like against the law or something…isn’t it?”

Silence fell among the room, and something huge in the air started to radiate around me.

Testosterone paired with fury started to fill the room, and I looked around at the men surrounding me as they comprehended something I hadn’t.

“What?” I asked, settling on Michael whose eyes had gone flat.

He blinked. “Call your mother. Ask her who called.”

Surprised at the way he’d spoken to me, with zero emotion at all, I did just that.

I called my mama.

Dialing her number, I put it on speaker phone and set it on the desk in front of me, keeping my eyes focused on Michael.

He didn’t look right.

In fact, he looked like he wasn’t my Michael at all.

“Nikki?” My mother answered. “What is this about you not paying your bills? You told me Michael was helping you pay when I offered to help you. Why would you lie about that? I only wanted to help you.”

A blush rose to my face and I dropped my eyes from Michael’s flat ones the moment she called me on my lying ways.

No, Michael hadn’t helped me pay.

In fact, I’d paid all eight thousand dollars that I owed out of pocket myself, and I hadn’t asked him for a thing.

Something I was regretting right now if the fury that was coming off of him was anything to go by.

Shit!

“And you know, I’ve supported you even though you sinned. I will always support you. Which is why when you get the bill in the mail, I want you to bring it to me and let me pay for it,” she chastised me sternly, the only way a mother knew how. “And I told them where you and Michael worked, as well as Michael’s home address because you shouldn’t lie about something like that. Bill collectors are not fun to deal with. They’ll call you any time of day.”

I rolled my eyes.

Why wouldn’t she have just asked me herself, instead of sending a text to every one of my sisters?

“Why would you have given them my work address? And Michael’s? He’s not even on the chart at all. They shouldn’t even know his name.”

Had she been hoping that I wouldn’t hear it from my siblings?

“Lolita, this is Michael. Nikki’s paid up in full as of last week. Was it a man or a woman who called?” Michael asked abruptly.

“Oh, Micahel! I didn’t know you and Nikki were together. How are you?” My mother asked, her Spanish accent getting a little thicker with affection now that she wasn’t yelling at her daughter.

“I’m okay, Lolita. Now was it a man or a woman who called?” He asked again, a little less polite this time.

My mother didn’t notice, or if she did, she didn’t care that he was being short with her.

“It was a man. He said he was the doctor, believe it or not. I couldn’t believe it when I spoke with him, but he seemed to be a really nice man,” Lolita chattered.

That’s when things started to make sense.

This wasn’t about any bills at all.

This was about a killer.

A killer who’d just put his sights on me.

Chapter 19

What do we want? Coffee. When do we want it? Right the fuck now.

-Coffee Cup

Michael

“Got a warrant to search his place yet?” I asked Luke.

Luke shook his head. “Not yet. Judge Maddox is out of town, and we had to go to Bender. He’s not our team’s biggest fan since the last warrant that was served was the one where that old lady broke her hip.”

I winced.

That had been a complete clusterfuck and a half.

We’d served an arrest warrant on a kid who’d been selling drugs out of his home, and we’d served it flawlessly, arresting the boy within seconds of breaching his home.

Then the old woman had come out using her walker, and promptly tripped over her grandson who’d been lying on the floor in the middle of the living room, breaking her hip and arm in the process.

It’d been horrible, and I’d felt horrible, but in our defense, we had told her to stay where she was until we could get the boy out.

She hadn’t listened, and now we were still hearing about it three months later.

My eyes moved from Luke to the corner of the command room where Memphis and Nikki were on a computer looking at baby shit, of all things.

I smiled slightly, but it just as quickly fell from my face as I thought about how bad this all could’ve gone without my knowledge.

All because I was trying to protect myself.

Well, look where that got me.

My woman in trouble.

My child in danger.

Me in danger because I was fucking around.

Not to mention all of my colleagues and their wives.

I didn’t deserve to live sometimes.

I was a failure at life.

Then I shut those thoughts down, realizing them for what they were.

I’d forgotten my meds.

Shit!

“I need to go run by my place. I forgot to take my meds,” I told Luke. “I’ll be back in about ten minutes.”

Luke nodded.

“Got it,” he replied, keeping his eyes on his phone.

I got up, walking out without saying a thing to anyone else.

They were all pretty mad at me.

As they should be.

I was no good.

Fuck!

Stop!

By the time I’d arrived at my house, I’d gone through quite a bit of self doubt before I got to my meds.

I had the bottle in my hand and had just popped the pill when I realized that I wasn’t alone.

Rookie mistake.

Turning stiffly, I found myself faced with a man in all black.

“Where’s the wife?” He snarled.

That’s when I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t told Nikki where I was going, and hadn’t asked her to go with me like I’d contemplated.

Thank Christ!

The gun pointed at my head didn’t instill any fear in my heart like the thought of the gun pointed at Nikki’s head.

I’d had this feeling before. The thought that I was going to die.

Nineteen times.

Each of those times I remembered with picture perfect clarity.

And I was sure, if I made it out of this alive, that this time would be no different.

“Call her,” he ordered.

“Fuck you. I’m not calling her,” I told him, crossing my arms across my chest.

I knew if I could stall him, Luke would figure something went wrong.

I wouldn’t have left and stayed home with the chance of that warrant coming in.

John, our computer expert, had already traced the calls to Lolita’s phone, and come up with the Women’s Center.

There were six people on duty at the Women’s Center at the time of the call, and only two of them were men. And one of them had been in the room with a patient for the entire time it took to place the call. So we’d done our research. And had come up with one man.

We’d applied for the arrest warrant for Stan Jones, M.D.

And I had a feeling that was who this man was in front of me.

“So, Stan. What are you going to do to me?” I asked, crossing my arms across my chest.