In New York Times bestselling author Karen Robards’s latest heart-pounding thriller, a woman must uncover a murderer—or risk being the next victim of a vicious killer. When Riley Cowan finds her estranged husband Jeff dead in his palatial home, she’s sure it’s no coincidence. The police rule it a suicide, but Riley thinks someone’s out for blood—specifically someone Jeff’s father ripped off in one of the biggest financial fraud cases of all time. She suspects that someone is trying to send a message to Jeff’s father: Tell me where the money is, or everyone you care about will die. Enter Finn Bradley, an FBI agent with a dangerous secret. He's after the money too, and Riley quickly becomes his chief suspect. But when someone tries to kill her, he has no choice but to protect her until he can uncover the truth. The question becomes, can they discover the killer’s identity in time, before he resurfaces—and strikes again? Dubbed an “exceptional storyteller” by the Chicago Tribune and “one of the most popular voices in women’s fiction” by Newsweek , Karen Robards’s latest action-packed novel will keep you glued to the pages until the final, shocking conclusion. Karen Robards is the New York Times , USA TODAY , and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of more than fifty books and one novella. Karen published her first novel at age twenty-four and has won multiple awards throughout her career, including six Silver Pens for favorite author. Karen was described by The Daily Mail as “one of the most reliable thriller...writers in the world.” She is the mother of three boys and lives in Louisville, Kentucky. Hush — CHAPTER — ONE The Houston mansion was huge. Dark. Deserted. Except for the corpse hanging in the living room. Or whatever the hell rich people called the big, fancy room where nobody ever actually lived. Approximately the size of a football field with the white marble floors and the giant crystal chandeliers dangling overhead. This one, just like the rest of the house, was empty, its furnishings and other accoutrements in storage somewhere waiting for the government to auction them off. “You should’ve talked when you had the chance, Jeffy-boy,” Finn Bradley said to the corpse as he grimly surveyed it. His voice was soft, but the words seemed to echo off the pale marble walls—hell, for all he knew the ceiling was marble. It soared thirty feet above his head, which made it kind of hard to tell. The electricity had been cut off, so pale moonlight pouring in through the windows was all he had to go by, but he was confident that the death looked like a suicide. Except that Finn knew it wasn’t. Jeff Cowan, the twenty-nine-year-old son of disgraced financier George Cowan, who had made off with billions of investor dollars in one of the biggest financial frauds in history, had just become one more piece of collateral damage in the war to recover the missing money. Jeff was slight—okay, so maybe nearly everybody seemed slight when compared to Finn’s own six-three, 220-pound self—blond, and classically handsome. He’d had the most expensive of educations. The most expensive of everythings. His parents had doted on him. He had a host of rich-scion–type friends. Yet here he was, his bare feet dangling at approximately Finn’s eye level, wearing a pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt, his face contorted in death, the smell of ammonia from where he had pissed himself stinking up the air around him. To all outward appearances, he had wrapped an electrical cord around his neck, attached one end to the wrought iron railing of the second-floor gallery looking down on the room, and leaped over, thus breaking his own damned neck. Finding a motive was easy: the shame of his father’s crime, the unaccustomed poverty into which Jeff had been plunged, the relentless investigations as every law enforcement agency under the sun tried to ferret out who else had been involved in the fraud and what had happened to the money, had proved to be too much for the pampered darling of one of Houston’s wealthiest families. The ME could bring in a suicide verdict and nobody would question it. Only a select few would know the verdict was bullshit. Finn wrapped a hand around Cowan’s wrist. He’d seen enough death to know what it looked like, so he didn’t bother to check for a pulse. What he was checking for was body temperature. Cowan was still warm. No sign of rigor mortis. No sign of blood pooling in the extremities. The smell of urine was still strong. He’d been dead under an hour. Maybe way under an hour. As in he could have been killed in the last fifteen minutes or so. Shit. It was possible that whoever had killed him was still around. Finn tightened his grip on his gun as he scanned the room, paying particular attention to the nearly impenetrable darkness shrouding the overhead gallery. He didn’t get the feeling that anyone was up there, but— “You find Cowan?” inquired the voice in his head. At least,