Eliza Truman had never been on campus this late before. Sure, technically she lived on campus, but she had never been out and about at almost five in the morning, and never with weather this bad.

 

When she was younger, she’d never been one of those bar girls or clubbers who went out with all of her dorm friends to enjoy Blackwoods’s downtown, then stumble home in the wee hours of the morning high on laughter and a little sick with alcohol and fast food churning in her gut. Eliza had been disciplined. High school was her time to fool around because she’d actually had a really good group of friends to fool around with. But college was different. Law school was different. Everyone was hyper-competitive for jobs and grades and internships, and she just never really felt that draw to anyone.

 

Well, no, that was a lie. The strongest connection she felt, the greatest pull of her life, was to a man she knew she couldn’t be with anymore. Nash was determined to throw her father under the bus, and even if she had fallen for him, she knew her father deserved more from her than to hop onboard with Nash’s ludicrous theories that her father, Dean Darryl Truman, was secretly running a drug operation and murdering bikers in his spare time. It simply didn’t make sense. Eliza wasn’t naïve to her father’s true nature. He was strict, always had been, but he’d raised her on his own and pushed her to succeed.

 

Even if her idea of success wasn’t the same as his. Law school, while she was finally doing well at it again, just wasn’t for her. But the guilt of not finishing was just so great that Eliza didn’t see any other option for her future. Her father had forced her to study, to achieve, and to excel on her own merit. He was her driving force. And he was innocent—she knew it from the very depth of her soul.

 

She’d already gathered evidence to show Nash that he had it all wrong, that her father couldn’t have possibly been the one to commit the murders. Unfortunately, Nash had poked holes in every piece she’d dug up. He’d challenged her, but not in a cruel way. At the time, of course, it had felt cruel, as if he didn’t value any of the time or effort she put into her sleuthing, but now that she’d had some distance from that night, she realized that he had a point. If she’d presented her hold evidence to a judge and jury, the opposing lawyer would have shredded her defense in seconds.

 

So she needed something better. Without demeaning her or threatening her or belittling her, Nash had made her realize that she needed to step up her game if she wanted to prove her father’s innocence, and tonight, that was exactly what she’d done.

 

Very seldom did Eliza actually take advantage of the fact that she was the dean’s daughter. In fact, if she could help it, Eliza tried to hide her last name as much as she could, to avoid any external bias from classmates and professors. But with the security office that housed videotapes and recordings of almost every inch of the Blackwoods University campus, Eliza flaunted her status as someone of importance—only to gain access to materials that were off-limits.

 

They’d put up a fuss at first, as they should have. After all, Eliza was after videos of her father, and no one in their right mind, especially if they were privy to his wrongdoings, would just hand over evidence like that. But Eliza had talked her way in somehow, and before long she was going over footage from all the nights her father was under suspicion for…all the nights Steel Phoenix members were murdered.

 

And after hours of watching footage, lining up where her father had said he had meetings from his personal journals and where he’d actually been, Eliza had come to the conclusion that he wasn’t involved. Or, at the very least, it would have been very difficult to tie him to any of the murders given his various—recorded—alibis. What would come next would be looking at the university’s financial movements, but given the time, Eliza opted to tackle that another day. In just a few short hours she was supposed to have class, but as she trudged out of the admin building, she decided that she was going to sleep until noon, then skip class to continue on with her investigation.

 

Time was of the essence, after all.

 

With her hood up and coat wrapped snuggly around her, Eliza braved the elements as best she could, teeth chattering as she navigated her way back through campus. On a Saturday night, there were bound to still be people around, but seeing as it was the middle of the week in the middle of a storm, the grounds were dead. Dead and dark. Normally familiar sights sent a chill down her spine, statues of famous alums seeming warped and grotesque in the shadows.

 

She wanted to go home, shed this wet outer layer, and curl up under her quilts and blankets. Warm up. Sleep the day away. Forget for a little while that all of this horror was going on around her. But just as Eliza was headed for the path that would take her to her dorm, she stopped. Something had caught her eye. Something not quite right.

 

There was a light on in her father’s office. Now, it wasn’t unusual that he worked late, but this was very late, even for him. If he’d fallen asleep at his desk, she figured she ought to wake him and send him home—or, at the very least, move him to the couch so he wouldn’t deal with back and shoulder problems when he woke in a few hours. Nibbling her lower lip, she paused for a moment, rain pummeling her, leaking through her clothing and trickling down her neck. What if it… wasn’t her father in the office?

 

His secretary would never leave the lights on before she left for the night. The cleaning crew wouldn’t either—or so she assumed. It was just recently that Eliza had broken into the usually off-limits office of the dean, so was it really such a leap that someone else might have done the same?

 

What if it was Nash?

 

Or someone worse?

 

She swallowed hard, and without another thought took off at an easy pace toward the building. It was still open, and she hurried to the upper floors as quietly and carefully as she could, trying her best to keep her pace steady. The light had been on. She swore it had. She saw it through the office windows. If it was suddenly off by the time she arrived, Eliza would know something was wrong. Down the hall from the dean’s reception doorway, she paused and dug out her phone, then punched in 911 without pressing the call button. If someone was rifling through her father’s things, and that someone wasn’t Nash, she planned to have the proper authorities there in moments.

 

The lights were off in the reception area, but just standing in the doorway she could see the lights on in her father’s office through the outline of his closed door. Nearby windows illuminated the pristine reception desk, the recently vacuumed carpet, the dust-free seating area. Her father’s secretary had clearly been in to tidy up and arrange things before she left. That must have been hours ago.

 

Gripping her phone tightly, Eliza pressed onward. Each step was purposeful, deliberate, her breath held and released so painfully slow if only to keep any noises she made to a minimum. Even her feet pressing into the thick, new carpet seemed too loud for all the silence around her, and she could feel her heartbeat in her ears, throbbing steadily and rapidly.

 

Before pushing the door open, Eliza waited, listening for any sounds in her father’s office. She was used to the noises he made, given it had just been him and her in a house together for a long time, but nothing familiar hit her as she stood there. She should have been exhausted, but something about the moment kept her wired, kept her functional. Swallowing hard, she pressed her hand to the door, palm flat and fingers spread, and it was then she noticed a slight quake in her wrist.

 

The doorknob squeaked when she turned it, and the door itself creaked like some ungodly terror as she gently, gently, pushed it open. Her heart was just about ready to come flying out of her mouth—she half-expected to find some thug rooting around her father’s things, and she was ready to flee the second she saw a stranger.

 

But she didn’t see a stranger. Not even close.

 

She saw her father.

 

Only in the condition she found him in, he certainly looked like a stranger. Familiar yet not. It was the man who had raised her, but right then and there, he looked nothing like Darryl Truman to her.

 

“Oh my god!” she cried, rushing into the room and practically falling over herself to get to his desk. “Oh my god…”

 

Tears obscured her vision, as she tried to take in the carnage, a trembling hand coming to rest on her father’s shoulder. He was coated in blood, and given the extent of the injuries to his face, she assumed it all belonged to him. Someone had beat the holy hell out of him; there was no other way to describe it. Dried and crusted blood gathered around his nostrils. Both bottom and top lips were split. Bruising had already started to take place around his eyes, and blood dribbled down from his hairline and into his eyebrows.

 

For a moment, Eliza was too stunned to react. How does one react to seeing a parent so badly brutalized? The parent is supposed to put the bandage on the child. When you fell and skinned your knee, your parent fixed you up.

 

How was she supposed to fix this?

 

“Dad?” she whispered, voice quivering. Fat tears rolled down her cheeks, and she forced herself to look away for a moment, taking in the state of his office. His desk was a mess. Blood splattered the computer screen. His journals were gone.

 

A raspy breath, loud yet weak, brought her back to him, and Eliza crouched over him when he whispered her name. At least he was conscious, but she couldn’t imagine the horrible agony he must have been in. His face had been bludgeoned, obviously, but what else was broken and beaten?

 

“Dad, t-try n-not to move,” she stammered, a hand on his shoulder as she unlocked her phone. Where was she supposed to touch? Was anything broken? “I-I’m going to call for help.”

 

“What are you doing here, Elizabeth?” her father murmured. A hand suddenly settled atop hers, and her eyes widened to see the knuckles so bloodied and damaged. He’d fought, at least. Her father, always the fighter. “Y-You should be s-sleeping… What time is it?”

 

“Try not to talk too much,” Eliza urged. In that moment, she knew she had to be the calm one, the rational one. Right then and there, Eliza knew she needed to be the parent, the one who cleaned up the mess. “I’m going to get us some help so we can get you cleaned up, okay?”

 

“Elizabeth, you should go. They might come back.”

 

She ignored him—and the fear his statement brought that clawed up her throat like an unwanted scream—and dialed for the emergency services. The second the responder answered, she cleared her throat and said, “Yes, I need the police and an ambulance to Blackwoods University. There’s been an attack in the dean’s office…”