“Nene, what are you doing here?” she asked gently, switching on the safety of her gun. She pulled up the back of the gray LAPD T-shirt she was wearing and stuffed the Smith & Wesson in the back of her jeans.
“I don’t like you all alone here, Mama.” He crossed his arms, hammer and all, and braced his feet wide apart, his dark brown eyes all defiance. Her little man. “Not after what happened to Papi.”
Daniela’s heart clenched at the mention of her children’s father. “Corazon, I need you to go back to Jasmine’s. It’s not safe for you here.” She tugged him into the living room, where an inexpensive cordless phone lay on the end table near the terrible orange-flowered sofa the boys had picked out for her last birthday. “I’m going to call—”
“No, Mama. I’m staying here with you.”
So like his father, in every good way. Bracing her hands on José’s narrow shoulders, Daniela bent down to look her son in the eye. “Sweetheart, I need you to do something for me,” she said. “I need you to go back to Jasmine’s and watch over Sabrina, Patricio and Daniel.” His stout little form remained rigid. “I don’t like being apart from you, either,” she continued, “but I have to find out what happened to your daddy. And I’ll only be able to do it if I know you’re protecting your brothers and your sister.”
He glared fiercely at her, then his lower lip trembled as he threw his small arms around her waist. “I miss you, Mama.”
She wrapped one arm around him while pulling the gun out of her waistband with the other to keep it away from his clutching fingers. She set the weapon on the table near the phone and bent to hold her son.
And then she heard the faintest noise from the curving staircase in the front foyer. The kind of noise that sounded like something coming from the outside or something you’d imagined.
They hadn’t sent an amateur after all.
She squeezed José by the shoulders, moving him away from her body. With her finger to her lips, she guided him around the awful sofa, over to the far wall, her fingers fumbling for the small level she knew was there. That was the thing about old Victorian houses—lots of drafty alcoves, dark places, secret corners where people could hide. And one of them lay just beneath her scrabbling fingertips.
Just big enough for one small boy.
José opened his mouth to say something to her, but she placed her fingers over his lips, then gestured for him to crawl inside the opening she’d uncovered. He shook his head.
Her cop-sense told her someone had moved into the hallway behind them.
“Please, sweetheart,” she whispered. He must have heard the urgency in her voice, because he quashed his stubborn streak and moved.
“Don’t say a word, my angel,” she whispered as she helped José tuck himself inside. “Not until the police come.”
Another footstep, this one closer.
“Turn your head, baby,” Daniela whispered at the wall behind which her son lay. “Close your eyes.” José could escape when the time came. Now all she needed was a miracle.
The softest exhale came from the doorway.
Daniela turned, stretching her arms out to make herself large enough to protect her boy. Time slowed to a crawl, measured in her own thundering heartbeats. Her head swiveled toward the doorway. A shadow moved into her line of vision. She threw her weight to the side. The man before her raised his arm and pointed at her pounding heart. Her body arced toward the end table. For a few exhilarating seconds, she was flying, her hand nearly closing on the gun that lay on the end table.
She wasn’t fast enough.
Chapter One
Stumbling over a loose brick, the boy lurched down the well-worn path. The open doorway before him grew taller and wider and blacker, like something out of Alice in Wonderland. But it was no white rabbit he was chasing.
Urgency wrapped itself around his narrow chest, threatening to squeeze the air out of his thin frame. And even though he knew he had to go inside, he skidded to a stop, breathing hard. The doorway of the large Victorian house stretched and undulated above him.
He looked down at the scuffed white tops of his Nikes. He was small. Weak. And the house, which was so beautiful during the daytime, frightened him to the core in the dark.
“Mama,” he breathed, looking down at his hands. They were the hands of a ten-year-old, and the sight of them made him feel that something was very wrong. They should have been bigger hands, stronger hands. Squinting his eyes shut, he willed them to grow into the hands that should have been his. When he looked at them again, he saw they had not.
He jerked his head up, and the scenery around him blurred and darkened. Then he was inside.
“Mama?” he called, pitching his voice as low as he could to keep from sounding like a crybaby, even though he felt like one. A floorboard creaked above him, and he saw a ripple of movement in the shadows on the stairway. A breeze blew across his cheek, sending the door crashing shut behind him.
He cringed at the sound and hurled his body toward the wall, seeking the security of something to grab onto. His hand closed around one of the carved wooden newel posts flanking the large staircase in the front foyer. He traced his fingers around the whorls and dips of the carved shape of a horse’s head that had inspired many a boyhood fantasy of knights and castles and flashing swordfights. The familiarity should have been comforting. It wasn’t.
His head throbbed with a sudden, sharp pain, and he pressed his hands against the sides of his skull. “Nooo,” he moaned, not wanting to go any farther into the house, not wanting to see. Then his mother’s face floated into his line of vision, a pale oval framed by dark hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. The slight lines around her large, brown eyes crinkled with love and concern as she looked at him. They also held an unspoken message—he shouldn’t have come.
She reached for him, brushing his hair away from his forehead with the softest of touches. “Close your eyes, José Javier,” she whispered. He did.
He felt her hand on his chest, and then, with a vicious, sudden force, he was pushed back, back, back into a long black tunnel, away from his mother, away from everything. He scrambled for purchase, trying to climb out and save her from what he knew was coming. But his body kept sinking, farther and farther away.
A disembodied voice next to him, inside the tunnel, inside his head, whispered soothingly in his ear: “Turn your head, baby. Close your eyes.”
And then he heard his mother scream.
“SIR? SIR!”
He batted at the fingers that gripped his shoulder and groaned. Let go of me.
“Sir, please wake up.”
Let go.
“Wha—?” Blinking rapidly, Joe Lopez shook off the last net-like strands of the dream holding him under the waterline of consciousness. He scrubbed a hand across his face, opening his mouth wide for a loud, gaping yawn. Once he’d rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, the dream evaporated from his memory, and he finally managed to register the presence of one very flustered flight attendant. Her well-manicured hand was still on his arm.
“Sir, I’ll need you to put your seat back and tray table in its upright position, please. We’re about to land.” The woman straightened, tucking a stray lock of her sleek, blond hair behind her ear. The scowl on what would otherwise