Slowly, I approached the door. The old hinges were broken and the wooden door smashed. Someone had kicked them through. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my gun. I fixed my hat so I could see the whole hallway as I crossed the threshold.

The second I did, a vile smell assaulted my nose. “Shit!” I hissed as I covered my nose and mouth with my forearm. Standing as still as a stone, I listened for any sounds. There were none. Moving as quietly as possible, I checked the first-floor rooms. They smelled musty; the furniture had been covered with sheets for years.

They still looked exactly the same.

My heart sank as I reached the bottom of the stairs. “Ellis . . .” I said under my breath. I raced up the stairs two at a time. The closer I got to the room where she had been holed up for years, the stronger the putrid smell became. “Ellis!” I called out. I felt an increasing sense of dread as I approached the door. It was open. No noise came from within.

I raised my gun and stopped beside the wall. I took a deep breath. Relying on the intensive Ranger training I’d been through in recent months, I crept slowly into the bedroom—Ellis’s bedroom—heart in mouth. My breathing seemed to stop as I paused before turning the corner to look at her spot, the place she always sat. I closed my eyes for a second, then counted to five and turned to face the rest of the room. I froze. Ellis’s chair was missing. Her dark clothes, the clothes she always wore, were in a heap on the wooden floor . . . and then I felt the blood drain from my face. A pair of feet poked out of the shadows, near the bathroom. I forced my feet to move, one reluctant step after the other, until I felt something beneath my shoe. I looked down and saw a pool of congealed blood, now nearly black in color. “Ellis,” I whispered, feeling the muscles in my chest tear in two, only to freeze when an older body came into view.

I tiptoed closer and closer still until I saw the blank, death-masked face of Mrs. Jenkins. It seemed as if she was staring toward the window Ellis used to sit and stare out of. I crouched down, making to check for a pulse, when I spotted the deep gash across her throat. The wound was a faded red, the skin split wide open, revealing the flesh beneath. But the blood was dried and cold, caking her skin and the floor around her.

Heart pounding, I kicked into action. I tore through the house. “Ellis!” I roared, gun held out before me, searching for anyone who remained alive. Where was my oldest, best friend? “Ellis!” I zipped through back hallways, hallways I hadn’t even known existed. I ran up stairs and through rooms, dread seeping into the very marrow of my bones, until I came to a stop.

A total dead stop.

There was a hole in the wooden floor before me. It was uneven, the edges hard, clearly carved with a saw.

What the hell . . . ?

Carefully, I shuffled forward and looked down. A rope lay pooled on the floor below, surrounded by fragments of wood, the remains of a chair. I looked closer and recognized it instantly. “Ellis,” I said softly, my eyes widening as I realized what must have happened.

Someone had taken her.

“Ellis!” I instinctively called again and reached into my pocket for my cell. I pressed the number for the third person on my speed dial. “Uncle,” I wheezed, out of breath, as I ran back to Ellis’s room and the rotting body of Mrs. Jenkins. “You’ve got to get to the Earnshaw estate now. We have a kidnapping on our hands.”

* * *

“Where’s Earnshaw?” my uncle asked as the forensic team took samples from the room and the folks from the mortuary began removing Mrs. Jenkins’s body.

I ran my hand through my hair, gripping my Ranger hat in my free hand. “Left years ago. He ran his business from here, with his associates, for decades. I used to come here to play with Ellis when we were kids. They all left years ago when there was some kind of problem with the business.” I shrugged. “No idea where they went. It was . . . weird.”

My uncle’s brow furrowed in concentration. “And Ellis?”

My chest tightened. “She had a breakdown years ago, when she was in her mid-teens.” I looked at the spot where she would always sit. I had visited her every week since I found out she was sick. I talked to her. But she never said a thing. Just stared out of the window, silent, eyes completely devoid of life. I thought back to when we were kids. “She was never allowed off her property when we were young. I once asked my mama why. She told me that Ellis had some issues.” I shrugged. “Anxiety and such about leaving her home. It’s why she was homeschooled. Her papa told my mama that it only got worse when her mama died.” I shook my head in sadness. “Don’t think she ever left this place . . . then she had her breakdown. Guess she always had a fragile mind.”

“Then she could have snapped and killed the nanny herself, perhaps?” my uncle mused.

Vehemently, I shook my head. “No, you don’t understand,” I snapped. “She was practically a zombie. And even if she had somehow found a way back to herself, there’s no way she would do something like this.” I looked around the tired pink room. “Ellis Earnshaw is the sweetest, most innocent person on this earth.” My stomach flipped when I thought of how, as a kid, she would dress up as Alice in Wonderland and pretend she was drinking tea. “She’s delicate.” My heart broke for the shell she’d become. “She was almost too fragile for the world. Easily manipulated. Too vulnerable.” My mouth, which had a formed a nostalgic smile, fell. Only one person came to mind. The prick who had taken her from me. Took away my best friend and molded her into his lap dog . . .

Heathan fucking James.

But he was dead. Or at least presumed dead. Disappeared when we were kids, leaving Ellis heartbroken. He was always selfish. I’d tried to see her once, months after he had left, when I found out from my mama that he’d left her all alone. But it was the start of Ellis’s spiral into darkness. Heathan fucking James left her and ruined her goddamn life.

That dick was better off dead and gone. There was always something weird about him. As if he lived with evil in his veins. And the minute he set his sights on Ellis, he did nothing but corrupt her, and devour her spirit and grace.

The ringing of my uncle’s cell cut through my smoldering anger. I blinked away the image of Heathan, with his strange clothes and eerie gray eyes. I focused instead on my uncle’s eyes, which had fallen on me.

“I’m on my way.” My uncle ended the call and tucked his cell back into his pocket.

“What is it?”

“Murder,” he replied. “Amarillo.”

My heart started racing. My uncle was pretty high up in the Texas Rangers. From being a kid, I had wanted to be him. I started training the minute I turned eighteen. At twenty-two, I was now truly learning my craft. Even when I was officially on leave, I didn’t take the day off. Instead I shadowed him, the best. Yeah, it was a blatant case of nepotism, but my uncle let me. He could see how much I wanted it. I had two weeks of vacation time. For me, it translated into two weeks’ worth of the most important cases to observe and understand.

“When are we leaving?” I followed him as he turned and raced from the room.

“Now.”

* * *

“Holy shit,” I whispered under my breath as I drank in the scene before me. We’d passed bodies on our route to an office in the secluded house we’d been called to. Guards. When the next shift of guards had started, they’d immediately called in the murders.

It was carnage.

I followed my uncle into the office. And I had barely taken one step inside when I stopped in my tracks. A man, stabbed to death, slumped in his office chair against the wall. I tore my eyes from the bloody sight of his corpse and up to the writing above. The scrawl was messy, almost childlike. I squinted to make out what it said. Just as it swam into focus, my uncle gave it voice: “Sick Fux.”

He stepped up to the writing and ran his finger over the edge of one of the letters. He brought the pink stuff it had been written in to his nose, then rubbed it between his fingers. “Lipstick?” Eyebrows pulled down, he drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his fingers.

On closer inspection of the writing, I saw he was right. “Lipstick?” I asked. “And what the hell is Sick Fux?”

My uncle put his hands in his pockets. “I’m gonna say the person, or persons, responsible.” He crouched down beside the body and gazed over the wounds. “They toyed with him.” He studied the tape around the man’s wrists. “Tied him down and played with him like he was a piece of meat.”

Without looking behind him to the deputies assigned to the case, he asked, “We have a name?”

A deputy flicked his notepad open. “A Mr. Lester Knowles.”

That name sounded familiar. I racked my brain trying to work out why. I moved to the desk and searched through some of the papers, his name playing over and over again in my head. Lester Knowles . . . why do I know your name?

My blood cooled when the answer hit me. I spun on my heels to look at my uncle. “Lester Knowles was one of Mr. Earnshaw’s colleagues. An associate in his business.”

My uncle came toward me. “Earnshaw? The missing girl?”

“Ellis,” I said and felt everything inside of me frost over in trepidation. “She called him her uncle. He wasn’t by blood. But that”—I pointed to the corpse—“was one of her father’s best friends. He practically helped raise Ellis.” My face blanched. “Do you think they’re connected?” I heard the fear lacing my voice. “Ellis’s kidnapping, Mrs. Jenkins’s and his deaths . . . Do you think they’re linked?”

My uncle gazed around the room. I knew he was thinking. I had seen him do this over the years. “Perhaps,” he said out loud. “You said ‘they’—the so-called uncles and the girl’s father—dispersed from their properties?” I nodded. “Why?”

“They had to move when their business went elsewhere. That’s all I know. One day they were all there; the next, they were gone, leaving Ellis behind for Mrs. Jenkins to care for. Mrs. Jenkins claimed Ellis couldn’t be moved, needing to be close to her doctors. For her mental breakdown.”

“How many of these uncles were there?”

I blew out a breath. “Five, six maybe? I was young when I knew them. They talked to me, quite a lot, even asked me to stay for dinner and such. But you know how mama is about family dinners. She never let me miss one, so I never got to see Mr. Earnshaw and Ellis’s uncles much beyond those passing comments.”

My uncle looked over my shoulder at one of his Rangers. “We need to find out who all the associates of Earnshaw were and where they live.” He glanced to me, then back to his deputy. “We also need a missing person’s notice put out for Ellis Earnshaw.”

“You do think they’re connected,” I said. I looked at Uncle Lester sprawled on the chair, bathed in his own blood. I thought of Mrs. Jenkins, also murdered brutally . . . then I thought of Ellis. If they had her . . . if they hurt her . . .

My fists clenched.

“The Sick Fux,” my uncle said as he stared at the scruffy pink-lipstick scrawl. “It implies more than one person, maybe a group?”

“A group responsible for several dead bodies and a kidnapping,” I added.

My uncle shook his head. “They’ve only tagged this one murder as theirs. Maybe they are connected to the Earnshaw case, but right now we don’t know.”

“So what’s next?” I followed my uncle from the room, breathing in the fresh air as soon as we walked outside.

“We try to get camera footage—security, mainly. Hope they haven’t destroyed it. Then we work out who these people are.”

I nodded. “You think they’ll strike again?”

My uncle pulled a smoke from his pocket and lit it up. He stared across the fields surrounding the quiet property. “We’ll see.” He tipped his head to the sky. “I want to speak to all of these ‘uncles’ and Earnshaw himself. Could be an isolated incident. Might be linked. But regardless, we need to tell Earnshaw his daughter is missing.”

Ellis, I thought as I stared out across the fields too. I’m gonna find you, I promise. And we’ll get you better. Get you better help.

Resolve settled in my gut, and I fixed my hat in place. I wouldn’t let anyone hurt her again.

Not after that walking demon Heathan ripped out her heart and vaporized it.

It was my second chance to save her. To bring back to life the sweetest girl I’d ever known.

I promise.