PROLOGUE
RICK GRAYSON stared into the casket as it sat atop the raised dais in the funeral parlor. Mourners milled around the room, stopped by the casket, whispered their condolences to him and then moved off, uncertain, hesitant in the face of his silence.
Everyone mourned the lovely, vivacious Sienna Grayson, except her husband and the friend she had betrayed.
She was as beautiful now as she had ever been, perhaps more beautiful in death than ever before. Her long dark brown hair curled around her shoulders, contrasting with surprising warmth against the white dress her family had picked out for her to wear through eternity.
Her brown eyes were closed, long lashes feathering against her cheeks. The makeup artist the funeral home employed had done an excellent job. Her skin wasn’t death-white, but instead had been given a warm golden glow. The bullet that had exited the front of her neck and torn off half her face was nowhere in sight. There was not so much as a glimpse of the damage that had been done to her.
The damage he had done.
He stared at her. His cheating, lying wife. The woman who had sold out her friends, her family, her husband, and her son, for drugs. For the thrill, the high, God only knew what other reasons she had had.
How could he have not known?
He stared at her now, realizing that all the clues had been there, and he had overlooked them.
He had known someone was betraying the agents sent to Alpine, Texas, to track down a homeland terrorist group. He had suspected it originated from his office, and he had been investigating it for years, but he had never known the extent of it.
His wife and his deputy had betrayed him.
How had he lived with such evil and not known it? he wondered. How had something so vile mothered the child that now lay sleeping in a chair in the corner of the room? Their son, Kent.
Rick glanced over at him, seeing the peace on the boy’s face, and realized, not for the first time, that his mother’s death had barely affected him.
He turned back to his wife. Sienna. Lovely, lying, murderous Sienna. The county mourned her now as they would have a fallen hero. The truth about her death, and the kidnapping of another woman, had been hidden so deeply that even he wondered exactly what had happened at times.
Only a handful of people knew the truth. Knew that his wife and his deputy Hershel Jenkins had been involved with a militia group so bloodthirsty and powerful that even America’s law enforcement agencies hadn’t been able to get to them. It had taken a team of dead men to catch them.
He continued to stand there, to stare at her. Tried to figure out why she would turn into nothing more than a camp whore for a small group of powerful men who thought they could determine who was and who was not American.
A group of men that kidnapped, hunted, raped, and murdered those they targeted, and his wife had helped them.
He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t suspected her. That he couldn’t have known. That somehow it had slipped by him.
A cocaine whore. That was what had been written in the report by one of the federal agents who had wrapped up the paperwork in the case.
His wife had been a cocaine whore.
He wanted to shake his head. He wanted to deny it. He didn’t want to accept that he hadn’t seen it. He couldn’t believe that the years of training, that his years as a sheriff, had taught him so little that he hadn’t even suspected her.
Or had he?
Had he even been surprised the day a bleeding, nearly hysterical Rory Malone had given him and that team of “dead” men the information that tied it all together? He hadn’t wanted to believe it, but he realized now that despite his horror, his shock, he hadn’t disbelieved it.
Some part of his mind had already accepted that something was wrong with Sienna. Something was lacking. She hadn’t been a wife in years but she had refused to divorce him. She had threatened more than once to take their son, and to make certain Kent’s life was hell, if Rick ever divorced her.
He’d convinced himself at one time that it was an empty threat. That she wouldn’t hurt Kent. Now he knew what a monster she truly was, and he thanked God that his sister had done more to raise the child than Sienna.
But it didn’t ease his guilt. Six federal agents had died over the years because of information she had given the militia. One had been a young woman. She had been hunted like an animal, brutalized, tortured. Raped.
His soul felt as though it were being ripped from his body at the thought of what had happened to her. Her and other young women. Wives. Mothers. Sisters. Women whose only crime had been the color of their skin. They had been Mexican or of Mexican descent. And they had been punished for it in the worst ways. By his wife.
He could still feel the hollow, brutal shame that seared his guts like a brand. He may as well have killed those women himself. He should be as liable for their deaths as she was, yet he had been cleared.