Novels by Ivy White

Miles's POV"Get off me!"The tall man's knee sat square between my shoulder blades. Gravel bit into my cheek. A few feet away, the radio lay in pieces where his boot had finished it, and the crate phone was already in his fist."You said eight," he said."I said one word!""That's one more than you should have." He eased his weight back and hauled me up by the collar. "Do that again and I'll tie you to the bumper."My lip had split open again. I wiped it with my wrist and stared at him. "They've got three of your people on their knees. You want me to just stand here?""I want you alive.""Who told you that?"He didn't answer. His eyes slid down the road toward the dark, the way they'd done all night, like he was waiting for a voice to confirm something.On the hood of the abandoned car, the intercept team's phone lit up and started ringing out loud. The screen still read R. It wasn't the crate phone. That one sat in the tall man's pocket.Everyone froze. It rang three times, bright a

Julian's POV"Drive," I told the man at the wheel. "Lights off. Stay three hundred yards behind the truck.""Yes, sir."The sedan was the last vehicle on that road that still ran: dented, one headlight smashed, the man who had rammed my convoy zip-tied in the back seat beside me. My own driver's blood was drying stiff on my sleeve. The convoy had left the crash site three minutes ago with Miles in the lead car. I had let it go ahead on purpose. I'd knelt in the ditch with my collar up until the taillights were gone, and now I was following a quarter mile behind, out of any light.The earpiece I'd pulled off my wounded driver's collar crackled against my jaw. It was tuned to the convoy's channel and it only received. Nothing I said would ever go out through it."Intercept team, report," the tall man said, far ahead. Then, again: "Intercept team, this is the lead car."Static.I watched the taillights slow. They swung around a long curve beside a concrete culvert and stopped, and a car

Miles's POVThe beam found a pair of boots and stayed there."Say something," I said into the phone. "Now."Nobody had shot at me since I left the truck. Every round before had hunted me. Now the trees had gone quiet, as if somebody had told them to wait.Nothing came back. Not a word, not a breath on the line. Only wind, and a faint wet rasp, somebody trying hard not to breathe."That's far enough, Smith."A man stepped into the light between me and the boots, tall, rifle held across his chest, face carved out of shadow. He wasn't the one whose flashlight I'd taken. This one stood like a door."Where's Hayes?" I asked."Not here.""Then who's on the phone?""Somebody who's lying to you.""That's what I'm trying to find out." I kept the beam steady on the ground behind him. "How many of you are there?""Enough.""He said Hayes has been standing behind the second car since we stopped.""He says a lot of things."In my ear, the pale voice laughed, soft and delighted. "He's right there,

Julian's POV"A man called me three days ago," the ram driver said. His chin stayed tipped up where the muzzle held it. "He gave me a sheet. Two names, a truck number, tonight's date. He said the rider would be Miles Smith, and that you'd be somewhere else.""Somewhere else where?""The east gate. Watching the count."I kept the rifle where it was. The road smelled of hot metal and spilled fuel. The horn on the crushed rear car had finally choked itself silent. My own driver sat against the lead car's wheel with a strip of shirt knotted around his thigh, watching me over his knee."Show me the sheet.""Left breast pocket."I took it out with two fingers. Typed, two names, a truck number, tonight's date. I had read the other one less than half an hour ago in a gatehouse, down to the last line. This one had no third line at all, and no groove pressed through from under it."Same two names," I said."I don't know them.""Neither do I." I folded it into my coat beside the other one. "What

Miles's POV"Hands where I can see them," the voice called again. "I won't ask a third time."I kept both hands in the glare. The second car sat thirty yards ahead of my truck, nose toward me, headlights blazing. Through the cracked windshield, the gunman at its open door was a black cutout with one arm out straight, the pistol steady. Behind him, far down the road, a car horn howled like an animal in a trap. I couldn't see what made it."What was that noise?" the driver whispered."A crash.""Whose?""Not ours."The gunman had turned his head toward it. Only for a second. His pistol wandered an inch off the cab.The rear window already had a hole in it. Whoever was back there in the trees knew where the cab was. A truck cab with the engine dead is a coffin with a windshield, and the gunman's pistol was off me for the first time. I wasn't going to wait for it to swing back."Get on the floor," I told the driver. "Stay there.""Smith, don't."I opened the door. Nobody fired. I stepped

Julian's POV"Drive," I said.My driver didn't ask where. He turned the wheel and put his foot down, and the gravel lot of the checkpoint swung out of the headlights and was gone.The phone I'd used lay face down on my knee. I pushed it into my coat without looking at it. My thumb still ached where it had pressed the red key, and I flexed it once against my palm.The other phone buzzed. I put Vincent on speaker."I lost the trace," he said. "Whoever that was routed through three relays. Julian, where are you?""In the car.""Going where?""East.""Don't." Vincent's voice sharpened. "Let the cars handle it. If you're seen on that road, everything you built in Blackgate is gone.""I know what it costs. That's why I'll stay behind the cars." I watched the dark road slide under the headlights. "Where's the lead car?""Four minutes ahead of you. They're reporting shots.""What kind?""Rifles. A lot."A faint crack reached me through the window, flat and small with distance. Then a ragged b

Russo had a shotgun leveled at Kade's chest before the car doors finished closing."That's far enough." The man on the porch was broad through the shoulders and gone thin everywhere else, gray stubble, a flannel shirt hanging off him like it belonged to somebody bigger. "Nobody drives up this road unless somebody wants me quiet. Turn around."Kade stopped with his hands open at his sides. Ivy stood a step behind him, Leo beside her, Marcus's car waiting a quarter mile back where the gravel road bent out of sight."My name is Kade Cross," Kade said."I know who you are. You've got your father's walk." The barrel didn't drop. "Last chance, kid.""Mr. Russo." Leo stepped out from behind Ivy before she could catch his sleeve. "Halden Street. Back room, Tuesday night. You slid forty thousand dollars across a table and told me it was easy money. By the time your men came to collect, it was fifty-five."The shotgun dipped. Russo's eyes went to Leo's face and stayed there."The kid with the s

"My way means you tell me everything," Leo said. "Not the parts you think I can handle."Kade studied him, jaw set the same way Ivy's had been the night she'd refused to leave his study. Stubbornness ran in that family."Sit down," Kade said. "All three of us. We're doing this properly or not at all."They sat around the kitchen island, Leo's bandaged arm resting carefully on the counter, Ivy between them like a buffer neither man particularly wanted but both needed."A press conference gets me shot before I finish a sentence," Kade said. "Reporters, cameras, no control over the room. That's not confession, that's suicide with an audience. Silas asked for public. He didn't define it as press.""Then what does satisfy him," Leo asked."A sit-down. The kind my father's world actually recognizes as binding." Kade laid it out slowly, working through it as he spoke, the shape of it clarifying in real time. "Every allied family sends a representative to witness major disputes resolved betwe

"You told me thirty days," Ivy said from the study doorway. "Not thirty hours." Kade didn't look up from the legal pad, pen still moving, three pages already covered in his own handwriting. "I can't sleep until I know what I'm actually going to say to a room full of people who'll want me dead for saying it." "You've barely slept since yesterday morning." Ivy crossed the room and closed the pad under his hand, gently, the way you'd take a knife from someone who didn't realize they were still holding it. "You held a gun on your own father's men twelve hours ago. Your brain isn't going to hand you a plan for a public confession at four a.m. on no sleep." "If I stop, I start thinking about what happens if I get it wrong." "Then think about it with me instead of alone." She sat on the edge of the desk, facing him. "You keep doing this. Carrying the worst parts by yourself because you've decided that's what protecting people looks like. It's not protecting me, Kade. It's just leaving me

Vincent stepped out of the car before it had fully stopped, coat still open, two of his men flanking him with hands already near their jackets."Stand down," Kade said, loud enough to carry across the gravel. "All of you. Now."Nobody moved. They were looking at Vincent, not at him, and that told Kade exactly how much authority he actually held over men who'd worked for his father for twenty years."I said stand down." Kade walked toward them, putting himself squarely between Silas and the approaching group, his own back exposed to a man with a drawn weapon because there was no version of this that worked with him staying safely out of the middle. "This is my meeting. Not his.""Your meeting is with a man who kidnapped your wife's brother." Vincent's voice cut across the cemetery, controlled even now, even furious. "I'm not standing on a road while my son negotiates with a criminal alone.""You promised me you'd stay out of this.""I lied." Vincent said it without shame, like the ad

Silas was already at the grave when Kade arrived, hands in his coat pockets, no visible weapon, though Kade knew better than to read that as safety. "You came." Silas didn't turn around. "I half expected an empty gate and a very good excuse." "I said I'd come." Kade stopped six feet back, close enough to talk, far enough to move if he had to. "I don't waste words I don't intend to keep." "That's supposed to separate you from your father." "It does." Silas finally turned, and in the gray half light before sunrise he looked older than he had in the warehouse, tired in a way anger alone didn't explain. He glanced down at the headstone between them. TIMOTHY BOONE. Two dates too close together for the years they should have held. "Say it, then," Silas said. "You came all this way. Say his name." Kade looked at the stone instead of at Silas, because some part of this deserved to be said to Timothy and not just performed for his brother. "Timothy Boone took the fall for a shipment m

Kade read the name twice before it made sense. The man who'd filed Cormac Ellis's death certificate was the same man Kade trusted with every secret he had left. Marcus. Not a stranger. Not a hidden operative. Marcus had filed Cormac's death certificate six years ago, his own signature sitting right there in the county records, clean and unremarkable. Nobody questions paperwork stamped with the right name attached. Kade called him before he'd finished reading it a third time. "It was a standing order," Marcus said, no hesitation, no defense in his voice at all. "Your father had a policy. Anyone who left the organization on bad terms eventually got scrubbed from the records, sometimes years after they were actually gone, whenever it came up on a review. Cormac's file got closed out six years ago. I filed the certificate, closed his employment record, scrubbed the address history. I didn't think about it again until tonight." "You didn't think to mention this when I told you h