Free Hunted by Kaylea Cross Page A

I’m coming after you.” A warning and a promise, and even if it was domineering of him, she knew he was only insisting on this for her own safety.
    “Okay.” She got out and hurried up the sidewalk, around the back of the house. Away from the soft illumination of the streetlights out front, the shadows seemed to close in on her. A dog barked from a yard a couple houses over. Rounding the corner of the sidewalk that led to the wooden privacy fence encircling the property, she looked around.
    “Over here.”
    She glanced toward the rear fence where the female voice had come from. Leticia stepped out of the shadows, hair and the upper part of her face hidden by a gray hoodie. “Thanks for coming.” She turned and spoke behind her. “It’s okay, Xander, you can come out.” The boy appeared behind her, a living shadow.
    “You guys still okay?”
    They both nodded. “Thanks for coming,” Leticia said, dropping her gaze to the ground as though she was too ashamed to meet Zoe’s eyes.
    “No problem.” Zoe crossed her arms and looked around. “Do you have friends or relatives here?”
    “No, but I used to work here when I cleaned houses and I knew it was a safe place to come.” Leticia blew out a breath and stuck her hands into the kangaroo pocket on the front of her hoodie.
    Zoe stepped closer, lowered her voice so it wouldn’t carry. “What scared you so much tonight?”
    She lifted a shoulder. “I was watching from the windows in the guesthouse out back. Thought I saw a car circle by a few times and I got nervous.”
    More than nervous, if she’d decided to take off with Xander at that hour with no plan and no place to go. “I want to help,” Zoe said softly. “But I feel like we’re both in way over our heads with this already.”
    A humorless laugh. “Yeah, I know.” She wrapped an arm around her son’s shoulders, brought him close and pressed a kiss to the top of his head. “I’m so sorry, buddy. This is all my fault.”
    “It’s okay, mom,” Xander said. “Don’t worry.”
    Zoe wanted nothing more than to swoop in and rescue them both, but she couldn’t do that. “You didn’t get the restraining order, did you?”
    Not meeting her eyes, Leticia shook her head.
    Zoe pushed out a breath, disappointed but not all that surprised. “Why not?”
    The woman lifted her head, stared back at Zoe with haunted eyes. “I already told you. He’s too dangerous. If I go to the cops, he’ll know. They’ll even help him find me. So I lied and told you I got it.”
    It made Zoe’s skin crawl to think of cops so corrupt that they’d help a criminal hunt down a woman he’d battered. But this had to go way beyond the local police, and that in itself was a huge red flag. The way Leticia acted, this guy had connections to all the powerful and important people along the entire Gulf Coast, maybe farther. What the hell had Leticia gotten involved in?
    “We need help,” she said simply, appealing to Leticia’s common sense. “There are people who can help you. Not the cops.” She had to be careful about her wording here. “I know a few people personally who can give you and Xander the help and protection you need.” Leticia started to shake her head, but Zoe kept on. “These are people I know well, Leticia. People I trust my life with.”
    The woman hesitated, still staring at her. “Who? Are they law enforcement?”
    “Federal agents.”
    She gave a bitter laugh, looked away again and tightened her hold on her son. “He’ll know them.”
    “Even if he does, these people aren’t corruptible.” Normally she wouldn’t reveal any of this to an outsider, let alone someone she didn’t know all that well, but this was important and Zoe was getting desperate. There was no way Leticia’s ex had ties to Tuck, Celida or Clay, yet she seemed so terrified that he might. Zoe wished she had a name, so she could find out exactly who they were dealing with here. “One of them’s my cousin, one is my best