CHAPTER 1
DAKOTA
ZERO HOUR MINUS TWENTY MINUTES…
Dakota Sloane was no stranger to hardship. A born survivor, she’d spent her life waiting for the next calamity, the next disappointment, the next strike from a world intent on breaking her. But Dakota didn’t break. She felt close now, though. Her chest tightened as she scanned the street outside the window of the Beer Shack Bar. A damp rag in one hand, she froze, bent over a yellow table strewn with crumpled napkins and a greasy, half-eaten lunch of twist fries, burgers, and globs of ketchup. Her gaze locked on a familiar figure striding through the lunchtime crowd strolling along Front Street in Overtown along the outskirts of downtown Miami.
She knew that confident, purposeful walk, the lean, lanky shape of him, sharp as a knife blade. She’d recognize that thin, angular face anywhere, those grim, fevered eyes—the eyes that haunted her nightmares. He wasn’t supposed to be there. Dakota didn’t believe in coincidences. If Maddox Cage was in Miami—in this part of Miami—it was for one reason. He was here for her. For her and Eden.
She’d made it two years and thirteen days. She wasn’t ready yet, hadn’t saved enough. Six more months and her plan would be in place, ready for execution. Five grand and her little sister. That was all she needed to start a brand-new life a thousand miles away.
Miami was loud and colorful and always moving, made up of a jumble of Cubans, Haitians, Asians, South Americans, and Anglos, an exuberant smorgasbord of cultures, music, food, and art.Miami was an easy city to get lost in. But she hadn’t gotten lost enough.
Sweat prickled along her hairline. She took a step back from the window, hoping the sunlight’s glare on the glass would shield her presence. Maybe he only had a general idea of their location. If he was still searching, if he didn’t already know exactly where she was…
But maybe he wasn’t coming for her first. The thought sent a cold fission of dread through her gut. He was going after Eden. She held her breath until he passed—never turning his head to the left or right, eyes fixed straight ahead as he weaved between the pedestrians thronging the sidewalk.
He always had been single-minded, like a dog with a bone. She should’ve known he wouldn’t let go. Would never let go. She leaned over the table to get a better view of the street. Maddox Cage paused at the corner and waved down a taxi. Dakota didn’t move until he slipped inside, shut the door, and the car pulled away from the curb.
“Excuse me, Miss,” said a heavy, middle-aged Indian guy at the next booth.
She didn’t know him. The usual regulars haunted their favorite bar stools, but this close to downtown and Miami International, the bar always served a steady stream of tourists and traveling business types. People liked the Beer Shack’s funky vibe. The bar was lined with kitschy shiny yellow tables and elephant palms in huge ceramic planters adorned with fairy lights. Famous locations throughout Miami—South Beach, Freedom Tower, the Coral Castle Museum—were immortalized in bottle cap art hung on the faux brick walls.
The radio was always playing a vibrant mix of rumba, salsa, timba. The mix of authentic Cuban fare and classic American selections was damn good, too. With his sweating mug of Sam Adams, the man gestured toward the flat-screen against the far wall. He was in his fifties and nearly bald, a neatly combed circle of white hair ringing his shiny brown scalp. “Can you turn that up?”
“Sure thing.” She forced herself to move, to go through the motions, even as her mind spun with jostling, frantic thoughts.
She put the Coke glass down on the dirty table she’d been cleaning, leaving the plastic tub and rag behind. She pulled the remote from her moss-green apron and punched up the volume. The Marlins’ loss recap had been interrupted. The screen showed an aerial shot of Michigan Avenue in Chicago, completely cleared but for a minivan parked on the street. Several police cars and SWAT vehicles were stationed a safe distance away, three helicopters hovering overhead. A breathless, wide-eyed news reporter gesticulated wildly about something. She couldn’t make sense of the woman’s jumble of words.
“I live near the west side of Chi-Town. Heading back tomor‐ row. Crazy, huh?” the guy said.
“What’s all the excitement about?” Dakota asked distractedly, forcing herself to be polite.
A low, frantic buzz filled her head. Fear was already forming like ice around her heart. She couldn’t just leave in the middle of her shift. She couldn’t afford to lose another job, but she had to contact Eden, had to figure out what to do.
“Some kind of bomb. Terrorist wackos, looks like. Probably ISIS. But Chicago PD caught it in time. Disarming it now, thank God.”
“Good thing,” she said.
He held his mug toward her. “Fill ’er up, would you?”
She grabbed the mug, refilled it at the bar, and returned it to the customer. He didn’t acknowledge her. His eyes were glued to the screen.Her nerves were stretched taut. Anxiety squeezed her lungs. She needed a break. She needed to reach Eden. She strode across the room and paused, keeping her back to the empty bar-height table behind her, the glass front door on her left, the bar counter several feet to her right. The bar wasn’t busy yet. A handful of regulars hunched over their drinks, staring glassily at the second screen hung over the bar, showing the same view of the van in Chicago.
The steady buzz of their conversations was a constant hum in the background: Walter Monroe whining about his ex-wife; Jesse Peretti’s grass kept dying from the increased water restrictions due to the drought; Tamara Santos complaining about more forced overtime. Mendo Del Rio always brought up politics, especially when he was itching for a fight. The Beer Shack owner and current bartender, Julio de la Peña, had been forced to kick him out several times. Most of the time, the regulars discussed sports and deep-sea fishing plans, crappy boss problems, and the latest indomitable heat wave.They were all regular people with regular problems. No one was hunting them.None of them paid any attention to her.
She jerked her cell out of her cargo pocket—an old model Samsung that barely qualified as a smartphone. It was all she could afford, since she put every extra penny toward her bug out fund. As she tapped the contacts icon, she kept one anxious eye on the street outside, in case Maddox decided to double back. He was cunning like that.Wanda Simpson, her sister’s social worker, picked up on the fourth ring.Dakota didn’t waste time on greetings. “I need to see my sister.
Now. Today.”
“Well,” the woman huffed. “I don’t have time for this nonsense today, Ms. Sloane. You know as well as I do that you have court-appointed, supervised visits once a month and no more. Your next visit isn’t for a week—”
“I can’t wait that long.”
“Ms. Sloane, your sister is medically fragile. She needs consistency. The judge, the psychologists, and I all agree that disrupting her carefully maintained routine would be detrimental to her well-being.”
“Which is just shrink-speak for trying to keep me from my sister so you can adopt her out—”
Mrs. Simpson sighed heavily into the phone. Dakota could hear voices in the background. At the bar, someone turned the TV up even louder. She gritted her teeth, repressing everything she longed to say, pressed the cell to her ear, and turned away from the bar. “Look. It’s an emergency.”
The woman gave another imperious sigh, like she was already patting herself on the back for her boundless, saintly patience. “What kind of emergency, Ms. Sloane?”
Dakota couldn’t tell the social worker who she’d seen or what she feared it meant. She’d never explained what she and her sister had escaped from. To bring Maddox up now would expose them both to questions they wouldn’t—couldn’t—answer.
“I just need to see her, okay?” “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Frustration bubbled up inside her. She was already doing her best to do everything absolutely right. First: gain steady employment and stable housing. Second: petition the courts for custody before Eden’s rich, shiny foster parents sank their claws into her permanently and whisked her away with promises of a real family, vacations to the Keys, art and tennis lessons. Until then, she kept to herself and stayed wary and watchful. She saved every penny, spending nothing extra on herself other than her sessions three times a week at the gun range off Miami Avenue.
She carefully maintained a low profile—never attracting attention, avoiding conflict, even when she wanted to punch someone in the kidneys. It was essential to remain under the radar at all times. In two years, she’d begun to think that they’d escaped the horrors they’d fled, that the past wouldn’t follow them. But she was dead wrong. The fragile sense of security she’d built around herself had shattered the moment her gaze snagged on Maddox Cage among the sweating crowds outside the bar windows.
“I’m practically her guardian!” she forced out. “I’ll be ready to petition the court in a few months—”
“It would be foolish to make such an assumption, Ms. Sloane.” Mrs. Simpson sniffed derisively. “It’s not an appropriate—or healthy—frame of mind, especially considering your inability to maintain steady employment, your lack of a G.E.D. or high school diploma, and your…flexible…housing arrangements.”
Dakota could imagine her smug face, her cheap polyester suits, that awful chemical perfume that smelled like burnt rubber. The woman despised Dakota and her “negative influence” over her fifteen-year-old sister. A helpless fury roiled in her gut. “I’ve done everything you’ve asked. Gotten a job—”
“Bussing tables hardly qualifies as a job—” “I have an apartment!”
“In a highly dangerous and questionable neighborhood.”
She and Eden had been separated for almost two years, after they’d been caught sleeping on the sidewalks on Southeast First Street in downtown Miami. With no parents and no family, the Florida Department of Children and Families—a terrible misnomer of a name if she’d ever heard one—had swallowed them up into its bloated, utterly broken foster care system. After a slew of disastrous foster placements, Dakota was stuck in a group home for unwanted teens until she’d come of age eigh‐ teen months ago. Her younger sister—beautiful, sweet, traumatized Eden—was placed in a specialized foster home for the medically fragile. She swallowed back a curse. She couldn’t afford to piss off a woman who still held so much power over her life.
“Please,” she said instead, hating herself for begging, but giving it one last shot. If the woman still refused to help, she’d have to take matters into her own hands.
“You know I can’t do that even if I wanted to, dear,” Mrs. Simpson simpered. “And you know I only have your sister’s best interests at heart…”
Behind Dakota, someone at the bar gasped. Dakota glanced back at the flat-screen. Her arm fell limply to her side. Her fingers barely held onto the phone. The social worker babbled something, but Dakota wasn’t listening anymore. She could do nothing but watch the screen in stunned disbelief.
CHAPTER 2
DAKOTA
ZERO HOUR MINUS FOUR MINUTES…
Cold went through Dakota all the way to her bones. The screen was split now—one side displaying the bomb squad descending on the minivan in Chicago; the other side, a shaky cellphone video of a massive cloud rising into the sky over a city so hazy with smoke, she couldn’t tell which it was.
“...We repeat, we’ve just received reports from outside Washington, D.C. that there has been a massive explosion,” the male reporter said, his voice rising in agitation.
The female reporter tapped her earpiece. “Communication is down in the area, but we’ve received information that a fireball at least a half mile wide has been sighted over Capitol Hill. It appears this is—this is an attack, Gerard. An attack on American soil…” The first reporter’s face drained of color. “It appears to be a bomb. A nuclear bomb.”
The shot cut to the reporter on the street in Chicago. “We also have an unconfirmed report that the Michigan Avenue bomb is likely an improvised nuclear device, Gerard.”
The news desk reporters didn’t speak for a moment, the shock and horror on their faces genuine. So often, the media seemed to feed on manufactured outrage or barely disguised gleeful delight in the “next big thing.”
This, though, was beyond imaginable. Dakota’s own pulse thudded in her throat. Her chest tightened like some invisible hand was squeezing her heart.
“Ah,” Gerard stammered, “so I’m hearing that we have multiple bombs. Multiple nuclear bombs—at least two. One has detonated in D.C. already. We’ve heard nothing definitive yet from official sources.
“Social media is blowing up with reports of a terrible explosion, though all locations are at least a few miles from the blast. We’ve had zero communication from anyone at the White House or Capitol Hill…Massive casualties must be expected…”
The patrons in the bar—five at the bar itself, three more in the booths—sat staring at the screens, frozen, their mouths agape. Dread coiled in Dakota’s gut. Slowly, she raised the phone to her ear. “Mrs. Simpson, are you watching the news? Check your phone.”
“Really, Ms. Sloane,” Mrs. Simpson huffed, “I don’t have time for your games today. Some of us have actual work to do—”
“Another bomb!” the female reporter gasped. “We’ve just lost contact with large portions of New York. Hundreds—thousands of reports coming in on Twitter and social media. People reporting a massive mushroom cloud seen from miles away, buildings collaps‐ ing, massive fires…” Her voice trailed off in disbelief.
The second reporter gestured at someone offscreen before turning back to the cameras, visibly shaken. “We have a video feed. Please brace yourselves. This is live—”
The aerial shot revealed an enormous pillar of smoke larger than Dakota had ever seen, dwarfing the skyscrapers. She could barely see the skyline through all the smoke and fire. Dakota took a step back, and then another, until her butt pressed against the lip of the bar table. Three bombs. Not just bombs. Nukes. Three targeted cities. New York. Washington D.C. Chicago. Were there only three? Or were there more?
She thought of Ezra. He’d warned her of something like this. What was it he always said? That smart terrorists would engage in a coordinated and multi-pronged attack. They would simultaneously attack the infrastructure—the electric grid, import hubs, or several cities—all intended to eviscerate American morale. Just like this.
Dakota was a pessimist by nature. Experience had taught her that. Life always kicked you when you were already down.Worst case scenario, more bombs were just waiting to be detonated. Miami wasn’t the largest city in the U.S., but the metropolitan area was home to more than five million people. Seventh largest, her boss had said just last week. Miami International Airport and the Port of Miami were also major hubs of commerce.
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