John, Eric, and Rhys all stood beside Captain Scanlon and the officer from public affairs who had showed up on scene shortly after the captain. It was typical for them to hold a short press conference with the captain reading a statement and fielding questions.

It made John itch to be on show like that, but this was one time he was glad to watch the show. They were announcing the arrest of two of the suspects. It would be better if all three had been apprehended instead of one suspect being shot and killed, but at least it was over. John had no qualms about having shot Adam Carr.

It would haunt him. Taking a life always did, but he wouldn’t doubt the decision to shoot. Adam had been dangerous to John, to Ava and her sister, to all of Dark Falls. They had watched the man unravel over the course of the last few weeks, and there was no doubt in John’s mind, he had taken a dangerous killer off the streets that night.

The Captain finished reading her statement and opened up to questions.

John didn’t recognize the small redhead who spoke first, but he saw Eric stiffen noticeably when the woman introduced herself.

“Merritt McKenna, Dark Falls Daily. Can you tell us if anyone else was injured in today’s takedown?”

There was nothing wrong with the question. No reason Eric should have stiffened. John tried to catch his eye, but his partner was staring dead ahead, unseeing, into the group of reporters.

Strike that, Eric was very carefully not looking at Merritt McKenna, whoever she was. They all knew most of the regular journalists who covered Major Crimes in Dark Falls. She was new.

“I expect the story later,” John said under his breath.

Eric’s jaw tightened.

“That’ll be all,” the captain was saying. The press tried calling out a few other questions, but when Captain Scanlon said she was finished, she was finished.

John needed to go back to the station to give his statement about the shooting. He’d be put on paid administrative leave and the Use of Force Task Force would call in someone from a neighboring agency to investigate the shooting and make sure it was righteous.

He was okay with that. They’d already heard from Nate and Zaragoza. The two other friends had confessed to the robberies. They saw Adam shoot Josh in that alley and took off, afraid he’d turn on them next. They’d been arguing about whether to go to the police ever since.

So, yeah, John was ready for a break. He would be spending that break with Ava, and that was fine by him. More than fine.

Two days later, John stood at his ex-wife’s wedding, of all things. He was holding his ex-and-now-current girlfriend’s hand and watching his ex-wife get remarried with a dopy smile on his face. A smile he couldn’t have hidden for all the world.

Ava squeezed his hand and smiled up at him. The last two days had been stressful in a lot of ways. Janna was understandably stressed and anxious after what she’d been through. She was having a hard time leaving the house and hadn’t even wanted to go to the jewelry store to work.

It would take time to get her past it. John planned to be right there with Ava as she got her sister through this.

Ava’s dad seemed okay with that, shaking John’s hand and thanking him for saving his girls when John came to the house after processing out at the police station after the shooting.

Right now, they were spending quiet days and evenings at Ava’s house, playing games with her dad and Janna and watching movies all together at night. It was sedate and boring and sheer heaven.

John knew he’d be itching to go back to work soon, but that feeling hadn’t come yet.

He returned Ava’s smile with a wink, then watched as Lucia and Carlos were pronounced husband and wife. Carlos rested one hand on Lucia’s pregnant belly as he leaned in to kiss her. They were well past the point where Lucia had lost their babies, and John prayed they would make it through to term.

He wasn’t ready to hope for that himself yet. He wasn’t sure he could get up the nerve to put Ava through what he’d put Lucia through trying for a baby, but he was trying to get there. And for now, he was just happy getting to know Ava again, getting to be with her every day. Getting to be there for her and be part of her life.

They watched as a grinning Lucia and Carlos walked hand-in-hand up the aisle. Lucia caught John’s eye and waved, giving him a thumbs up with a pointed look at Ava. He didn’t know if Lucia recognized Ava from college or realized who she was. He had a feeling she wouldn’t care either way. They’d moved past the point where there were any bitter feelings between them.

Ava laughed and waved at Lucia before turning to John. “They’ll be taking pictures and things for a bit before they head to the reception.”

John turned, pulling her into his arms, ignoring the crowd in the church around them. “Mm-hmm. Did you have something in mind to help us kill the time?”

She shrugged a shoulder with feigned innocence. “We haven’t had a whole lot of time to ourselves lately.”

It was true. They’d been with her dad and sister almost constantly since the shooting. Ava seemed to need that as much as Janna and her dad had, and John didn’t blame any of them.

Still, he liked where she was headed with this.

Ava glanced around. People were emptying out of the pews and heading toward the entrance to the church.

She ran her hands up his chest to his shoulders. It was stupid how fast his body responded to her. Church or no church, he pulled her closer.

“I just thought,” she said, playfully trailing her fingers up the back of his neck, “that we could maybe park somewhere.”

John laughed. “You want to park and make out with me?”

“I do,” she said.

John stilled, her words striking at his heart in a way he couldn’t escape, didn’t want to escape. He cupped her face with his hands. “I love you. I know it’s probably too damned soon to say it, and maybe that will scare you off, but I love you, and I don’t want to let another day go by without telling you that.”

Her eyes went soft, and he could hear a small intake of breath. “It won’t scare me off at all. I love you too much to be scared off.”

John lowered his mouth to her ear. “Let’s skip the reception and sneak back to my place for the night. You have your cell if Janna or your dad needs you. And if they don’t—”

“If they don’t, we’ll have the whole night together,” she finished, wrapping her arms around his neck.

John caught her gaze and held it. “We have more than a night together Ava.”

She stood on tiptoes and kissed him. “We do. And I don’t want to miss a minute of it.”

The Dark Falls series continues with books from some of your favorite authors! Keep reading for a sample of from Savannah Kade and from Trish McCallan!

Grace didn’t usually spray luminol and pull out her black light when she entered a motel room. But today she held the light up and frowned at the blood revealed by the generously applied chemiluminescent.

Old blood was everywhere. Small spots peeked out from under the edge of the bed where the old polyester blanket touched the carpeting. It looked to Grace as though something had happened in that spot and the bed had simply been moved. In one corner, another streak of luminol glowed cautiously, the remnant of a merely passable scrubbing. Some of the luminescent spots revealed that her suspicions had been correct about the old carpeting, about this motel room, and about the stains.

Crap. This was the last thing she needed.

She’d requested this room specifically. She didn’t always spray Luminol and pull out her black light when she rented a room. Then again, she couldn’t recall ever renting a room this awful in her life. She could imagine Jimmy here, though. If he was on one of his serious benders this would be nothing. Unfortunately, that meant there was nothing obvious here that supported her theory about her brother. She’d have to wait for lab results.

“Oh, Jimmy,” she lamented out loud to the dark room. “What did you get yourself into?”

The way her heart clenched couldn’t be stopped. No matter what the room looked like, no matter what she might be able to prove, none of it would change the facts. Jimmy was dead. Gone, after a life that had been a struggle from the beginning and continued to be one well into adulthood. Grace blinked back the tears that threatened.

Many people didn’t know what it was like having an addict in their lives. They were lucky. Addicts stole, they lied, they betrayed. And they often left you with only one option—completely cutting yourself off.

She hadn’t been able to do it. Neither had her parents. So they’d all suffered alongside her little brother.

But, dammit, she’d really thought these last five years had seen a turnaround. He’d been clean and four months shy of his five-year chip. But the Dark Falls Police Department had written of Jimmy’s death as just another junkie overdose. Case closed.

Grace wasn’t buying it. Jimmy wasn’t using again. She knew it. She’d spoken to him just a few days before he died.

No one would believe her. No one did. Even her parents were skeptical, but she believed. She’d lived with Jimmy, and watched him turn to alcohol at age ten, then cocaine at thirteen, she’d gotten good at spotting the signs. Lots of siblings did. Sometimes parents tried to deny it. They turned their kids away, or they made up excuses and always believed the best. But siblings of addicts had a radar for it. Their investment was entirely different from a parental bond.

Grace knew. She’d talked about it in Al-Anon meetings. She’d gone steadily for almost two years, then off and on for another handful. The siblings of addicts all had similar stories. They knew. They could tell when their brothers or sisters were using again. Grace couldn’t count the number of times someone had showed up at a meeting with a suspicion, then even several months later said, “I was right.”

She’d had that feeling about Jimmy before. It happened the first time he’d gotten clean. He’d stayed clean for six months before relapsing. The second time—after their parents had paid to put him through an expensive rehab program—he’d stayed clean a year and a half. But Grace knew that his eighteen-month chip was an excuse to celebrate, to think he’d been cured only to have him slide back. But she didn’t have that feeling. Not this time. The third time seemed to have stuck.

Jimmy had moved to Dark Falls, something their mother had protested with every fiber of her being. He should be close to home. Part Vietnamese, part Chinese, and gay as the day was long, Jimmy wanted to get out of the South. Grace understood. She’d supported him. They texted daily, and she talked to him just a few days before he died. She did not believe he was using again.

She’d even demanded a full autopsy. She checked off her mental list as she looked around the room at the various splotches her quick test had revealed. She’d want samples of them all. Jimmy’s death was listed as an overdose. Had there been fresh blood, the police wouldn’t have been able to write it off so easily.

Grace had only pulled out the Luminol on a whim when she’d seen the dark patches in the carpeting. It could have been wine or cheap beer, but her senses told her to test it. Shit. She looked around behind her, holding the light up. A lot of it was faint, old, but she needed to know what it was.

She had her work cut out for her.

After gathering samples from at least five spots around the room—samples that she highly suspected would be all different—she turned off her black light and clicked the regular light back on.

Surveying the horrible room she didn’t want to be in, she pulled out her phone and called her oftentimes partner, Brad, back home. “Brad, I was right.”

Rhys suspected the victim had been murdered. His instincts had been humming since he’d gotten the call an hour earlier. The location and markings were too damn suspicious for anything else. Unless…unless some malicious prick had found a dead drifter and decided to play a nasty prank on the town.

He crunched his way across the first perimeter, his skin and chest tightening beneath the constant furtive glances that followed him. Sevier was waiting at the second perimeter tape—red this time.

“You’re late.” There was no accusation in the comment, instead concern narrowed the light brown eyes studying him. “You okay?”

The question stopped Rhys in his tracks and tensed the muscles of his back. Fuck…he’d expected the concern…the questions…those little sidewise looks everyone was giving him. He just hadn’t expected them to dig under his skin like slivers of ice.

“I’m fine.” He kept his voice neutral, his face blank and ducked beneath the tape to join Sevier. “When did you start buying into Cantu’s theory of over sharing?”

Eric Cantu was Sevier’s partner. He was also the Major Crime units company comic and pop psychologist. Christ, it was bad enough having Cantu mothering the hell out of them, encouraging everyone to express their feelings. Having two dithering hens in the unit, would be two too many.

Sevier simply shrugged. “The boss fill you in?”

“About the carvings? Yeah.” Rhys buried his immediate visceral reaction. But remnants of the nightmare slipped through.

A white face frozen in terror…glazed blue eyes…icy blonde hair stuck to the snow…a dark red X-9 carved into a bleach-white forehead…

He locked down the corresponding surge of rage and horror. Even now, so many years later—those early, raw emotions dug their claws into him sometimes, catching him unprepared. He’d spent the past forty-five minutes drinking coffee and girding himself to make sure they didn’t latch onto him here…now.

“Whoever did this…the perp? He’s a mimic. A fucking copycat.” Sevier scowled and blew out a deep breath that hung in the air like a frosty question mark.

Rhys grimaced. No shit.

While he’d been a clueless kid when Kenneth Hamilton had been carving up young women and dumping their bodies in this section of the Colorado State forest, he knew many of the detectives who’d been instrumental in catching the bastard.

Hell, Gerald Osborn and Craig Patel had been the lead detectives on the case back then. They were sharp as needles, methodical, and unbiased. They didn’t jump to conclusions, they followed the evidence. There was no fucking way Hamilton would have been arrested and convicted without a sea of evidence supporting the case.

The bastard had been guilty. There was no question of that in Rhys’s mind. Regardless of how vehemently Ariel had insisted that her father wasn’t the killer…couldn’t possibly be the killer—

Rhys swiped a hand down his face. Christ, he needed to get his mind under control. These damn memories were not helping.

He sighed and pinched the flesh between his eyebrows. This new victim with her blonde hair and blue eyes and the X-10 carved in her forehead had just muddied the Hamilton case significantly.

Someone was out to fuck with them.