Six-Gun Showdown

He got another glimpse of the shadowy figure and decided to confront this head-on. Literally. Jax drew his gun and hurried to the entry. It was dark inside, but not so dark that he didn’t see the person lurking behind the back end of one of the trucks.

“Paige?” Jax whispered.

He could have sworn everything stopped. His heartbeat. His breath. Maybe even time. But that standstill didn’t last.

Because the person stepped out, not enough for him to fully see her, but Jax knew it was a woman.

“You got my message,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

Paige. It was her. In the flesh.

Jax had a thousand emotions hit him at once. Relief. Mercy, there was a ton of relief, but it didn’t last but a second or two before the other emotions took over: shock, disbelief and, yeah, anger.

Lots and lots of anger.

“Why?” he managed to say, though he wasn’t sure how he could even speak with his throat clamped shut.

Paige cleared her throat, too. “Because it was necessary.”

As answers went, it sucked, and he let her know that with the scowl he aimed at her. “Why?” he repeated.

She stepped from the shadows but didn’t come closer to him. Still, it was close enough for him to confirm what he already knew.

This was Paige.

She was back from the grave. Or else, back from a lie that she’d apparently let him believe.

For a dead woman, she didn’t look bad, but she had changed. No more blond hair. It was dark brown now and cut short and choppy. She’d also lost some of those curves that’d always caught his eye and every other man’s in town.

“I know you have a thousand questions,” she said, rubbing her hands along the outside legs of her jeans. She also glanced around. Behind him.

Behind her.

“Just one question. Why the hell did you let me believe you were dead?” But Jax couldn’t even wait for the answer. He cursed. “I saw pictures of you after the Moonlight Strangler had gotten his hands on you. There’s no reason you should have let me believe that’d happened to you.”

“It did happen.” She stepped even closer, and thanks to the sunlight spearing through the door, he saw the scar on her cheek.

The crescent-shaped knife cut that the Moonlight Strangler had given all his victims.

There were marks on her throat, too. Scars from the piano wire that had sliced into her skin when the killer strangled her.

“Yes.” Paige touched her fingers to her neck. “It’s healed now. For the most part.”

She was wrong. It would never heal. Never go away. Not in his mind, anyway.

“But clearly you’re not dead,” he snapped. And he didn’t want her to be, but he damn sure wanted some answers. “I’ve been through hell for the past year. Hell,” Jax emphasized. “You didn’t just put me through this, either. Matthew went through it, too.”

Even though his son had been only a year old when Paige died, it’d broken Jax’s heart to hear his son call out for his ma-ma.

“Matthew.” Her breath hitched, and tears sprang to her eyes. “I did this for him. For you.”

“You didn’t do anything for me.” There was no way for him to rein in the anger in his voice or any other part of him. “You let me believe you’d been murdered.”

She nodded, came even closer. So close that he caught her familiar scent. But she also glanced around again. “Because if I hadn’t let you believe that, the Moonlight Strangler would have come after me again. And I was afraid he’d use Matthew and you to get to me.”

He cursed again, dismissing that. “I’m a deputy sheriff.”

“And that didn’t stop him from getting to me,” Paige reminded him just as quickly.

Good grief, she might as well have slugged him with a two-by-four. Because it was the truth. And it was a truth that Jax had struggled with for the past year.

He hadn’t managed to save her.

But someone obviously had.

“What happened?” he demanded.

She paused, gathered her breath. Maybe her thoughts, too. “By the time the San Antonio cops got to the crime scene, I was barely alive. In fact, the first cop on the scene did report me as dead. That’s the report that went out to you and everybody else. But the paramedics managed to revive me in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. I knew if word got out that I was alive, the killer would just come after me again.”

He mentally went through all the details and saw one big question at the end of that explanation. “Who helped you come up with this stupid plan?”

“I came up with it.” She glanced around again. “And I convinced a cop at SAPD who knew about me to go along with it.”

Jax didn’t miss the glancing around, nor the hesitation in her voice.

“Who helped you?” he pressed.

She dodged his gaze. “Other than the cop, Cord Granger helped.”

Jax would have cursed again if he could have gotten his jaw unclenched. Cord Granger, a DEA agent. Also the biological brother to his adopted sister, Addie.

Cord and Addie’s father was none other than the Moonlight Strangler himself. Though the law didn’t have the actual identity of the vicious serial killer, they knew from DNA comparisons that both Cord and Addie were his biological children. Children the killer had abandoned when they were a little more than toddlers, and neither had any recollections of the man.

Too bad.

If they had a name, then they could find and arrest the piece of slime.

Something that Cord had made his top priority.

Jax had never cared much for Cord. And this wouldn’t help. Because Cord was much more concerned about catching his birth father than he was with the safety of the people around him. Jax wouldn’t have put it past the man to actually use Paige to draw the killer out. And now he’d apparently put Paige up to lying to him.

Not just any old lie, either.

But one that’d crushed Jax and the rest of his family.

“You were a fool to trust Cord,” he finally managed to say. Jax shoved his thumb against his chest. “You should have trusted me instead.”

She huffed. Not an angry sound, but more like stating the obvious. “We weren’t exactly in a good place, Jax.”