Chapter 1 You Should Have Come Home

Rina’s POV

My father’s blood had soaked through the living room rug by the time I found him.

For several seconds, I stood inside the doorway with my keys still clutched in my hand, staring at the body beside the sofa while my mind fought to turn it into something else. A shadow. A pile of clothes. One of the ridiculous pranks Dad pulled whenever he thought life had become too serious.

Then I saw his eyes.

They were open and fixed on the ceiling, his face frozen in an expression I had never seen him wear while he was alive. Blood covered the front of his pale blue dress shirt and spread beneath him in a dark stain across the cream rug my mother had spent six months searching for.

My purse slipped from my shoulder and hit the hardwood floor.

“Dad?”

The word came out weak and broken.

I rushed toward him, dropped to my knees, and pressed both hands against his chest as though I could force the blood back inside him. His body shifted beneath my touch, heavy and lifeless, and the coldness of his skin sent terror ripping through me.

“No. Dad, please.” I touched his face with shaking fingers. “Wake up. Please wake up.”

Something crashed deeper inside the house.

I jerked upright.

“Mom?”

The silence that followed seemed to swallow everything, including the sound of my own breathing.

I stumbled to my feet and followed a streak of blood smeared across the hallway wall. Family photographs hung crooked above it. One frame had shattered, leaving a bullet hole through the picture of my parents standing beside me at my college graduation.

“Mom!”

I found her outside the kitchen.

She lay curled on her side with one hand resting against her stomach. Her cream sweater was soaked in blood, and several gunshot wounds marked her chest. Her wedding ring caught the kitchen light as though her hand had moved only seconds earlier.

A scream tore from my throat.

I crawled to her and pressed my fingers against her neck even though I already knew. My vision blurred so badly I could barely see her face, but I kept searching for a pulse that wasn’t there.

“Mom, no. No, no, no.”

Something white lay on the floor beside her hand.

An envelope.

My name had been written across the front in Daniel’s precise handwriting.

I stopped breathing.

My fingers left my mother’s neck and closed around the paper. The envelope had already been opened, as though he wanted to make certain I found the message waiting inside.

There were only three lines.

You should have come home.

They made you believe you could leave me.

You’re next.

I don’t remember calling 911.

I remember the dispatcher asking whether the shooter was still inside. I remember crawling into the pantry with one of my father’s golf clubs clutched against my chest while every sound in the house convinced me Daniel was coming back.

When officers arrived, one pried the club from my hands while another tried to stop me from returning to my mother.

Red and blue lights flashed across the walls while strangers moved through rooms where my family had eaten dinner and celebrated birthdays. Someone wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. Another officer kept asking questions, but every answer dissolved before I could force it past my lips. All I could see was my mother’s hand beneath the kitchen light and the blood beneath my father.

Daniel was arrested the following morning at a Volkov-owned marina outside Savannah.

The police found blood inside his car, gunshot residue on his clothing, and a handgun registered to one of his family’s security companies. Traffic cameras placed his vehicle near my parents’ neighborhood shortly before the murders.

For once, the Volkov family’s money couldn’t erase everything.

During the preliminary hearing, Daniel was led into the courtroom with bruises from his arrest and shackles around his wrists.

I sat behind the prosecutor with an armed detective beside me.

Daniel searched the courtroom until he found my face.

Then he smiled.

His lips moved slowly enough for me to understand every word.

I’ll find you.

Three days later, the detective helped me disappear.

I buried my parents beneath a live oak tree while two armed officers watched from the edge of the cemetery. I stood between their graves and listened to the priest speak about peace, mercy, and eternal life while hatred burned through every part of me.

After the funeral, I returned to the house one final time.

The cleaners had removed the blood, but the pale outline of the stain remained on the living room rug. I slipped Daniel’s engagement ring from my finger and placed it in the center of the mark where my father had died.

By midnight, Rina Blakely no longer existed.

The detective gave me identification bearing a different name, a prepaid phone, and a bus ticket purchased with cash. I cut my hair in a gas station bathroom outside Atlanta and dyed it dark brown before boarding another bus headed west.

At every stop, I expected to see Daniel waiting beside the bus. I watched each passenger who boarded, memorized the exits, and kept my identification clenched inside my pocket until its edges softened beneath my fingers.

I didn’t know where I would live when I reached New Mexico.

I didn’t know whether Daniel would stay behind bars or how far his family’s reach extended.

I only knew Charleston had taken everyone I loved.

So I kept moving until the green marshes disappeared, the air became dry, and the world beyond the bus window turned into endless stretches of desert.

Somewhere between Texas and the New Mexico state line, I looked down at the unfamiliar name printed on my identification.

Natalie Blake.

I whispered it under my breath, but it sounded like I was speaking about a stranger.

Maybe that was the point.

The bus rolled into a dusty station shortly after sunset.

New Mexico greeted me with dry heat, flickering fluorescent lights, and a vending machine that swallowed the last five-dollar bill in my wallet. I had one suitcase, forty-three dollars in cash, and no plan beyond putting as much distance between Daniel and me as possible.

A bulletin board hung near the exit, crowded with advertisements for cheap rooms, missing dogs, and jobs no one else wanted.

One flyer had been printed on black paper.

DANCERS WANTED. CASH PAID NIGHTLY. NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY.

At the bottom, beneath the image of a red devil wrapped around a silver pole, someone had written an address.

The Devil’s Den.

I tore the flyer from the board and folded it into my pocket.

The Devil’s Den wasn’t the kind of place Rina Blakely would have ever stepped inside.

That was exactly why Natalie Blake could disappear there.

I didn’t need a new life. I needed enough cash for a cheap room, food, and another bus ticket if anyone came looking for me.

I tightened my grip on my suitcase and walked out of the station into the New Mexico night.

Rina Blakely was the woman Daniel Volkov wanted dead.

Natalie Blake only had to stay hidden.