Main Dishes

I am Captain Elena Vaughn. In my squad, they call me Maverick for my grit. In my father’s $120 million estate, he calls me a mistake. Tonight, at Calvin Vaughn’s retirement party in the Hamptons, in front of 300 guests eating lobster and drinking champagne, my father snatched the microphone and pointed at my uniform….

The storm had come down out of the Rockies like it had a personal grudge. By four-thirty in the afternoon, the sky over Red Hollow, Colorado had turned the hard gray color of old steel, and the wind had started throwing loose snow across Main Street in long, angry sheets. Store owners pulled their shades…

The Admiral’s polished shoes hammered against the sun-scorched pavement, a sound so out of place amidst the brass band’s distant tuning that it cut through the crowd noise like a blade. Admiral Vincent Lawson wasn’t jogging; he was sprinting, his chest full of ribbons bouncing against his white jacket, his cover blown off his head by…

Part 2: The Invisible Girl Who Heard Everything I didn’t know then that the bombs were a lie. I didn’t know that the real threat wasn’t ticking under the concrete; it was standing ten feet away, wearing a white coat and watching my every move. All I knew, standing there in the middle of the…

PART 2: THE WRAITH RISES The Apache lifted off the concrete like an angry hornet ripped from its nest. Dust and grit exploded outward in a blinding halo, peppering the hangar walls with a sound like hail on a tin roof. I felt the familiar lurch in my stomach as gravity tried to push me…

The ride to Sutter’s Lane took eight minutes. Eight minutes in the saddle of a roaring Harley with the February wind cutting through my leather like it had a personal grudge. Eight minutes with Dutch on my left and Ricky on my right, three black machines eating up the asphalt of County Road 9 while…

Part 2: The Evidence in the Walls Officer Andrea Taylor didn’t touch me. She didn’t offer a pitying look or a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. She simply stood there, her posture straight, her dark eyes scanning the scene with the practiced efficiency of someone who’d seen too many domestic disputes in too many expensive…

I grabbed the phone off the nightstand before the vibration could wake Diane. She stirred beside me, her bare shoulder shifting under the thin hotel sheet, but her breathing stayed slow and deep. I watched her for a long second—the way the first pale light of dawn caught the gray strands woven through her auburn…

Part 1. The kitchen smells like burnt toast and the end of something. I’m standing at the counter, scraping a blackened crust into the trash, when he comes in. He’s already in his evening uniform: the expensive joggers, the shirt that costs more than my last dental visit. He doesn’t look at me. He looks…

“You can’t keep me from my son.” I didn’t look up from the coffee maker. The drip was the only sound I wanted to acknowledge. He slammed the granite countertop. Hard. The * piece of mail from the clinic skidded across the island and landed next to the fruit bowl. “I said, you cannot keep…