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assessed the situation, and smoothly exited the room, shutting the door behind herself.
    “Have a seat,” he invited the two detectives.
    Cat kept a lid on her nervousness. “If it’s all the same to you, Captain, I’ll stand.”
    “Me, too,” Tess said.
    “Chandler, it’s your father, former Special Agent Reynolds.” Ward paused.
    “My father.” That lid was threatening to blow. “Who’s at Rikers.”
    Captain Ward said, “He’s missing.”
    The room tilted like a ship at sea. A panic reaction, pure and simple, she told herself, but there was nothing simple about her father. Reynolds was a man she despised and mistrusted, and she had risked Vincent’s life to save his. And just when she thought she was done with him, another tornado of his making tore through her life.
    “As in, out of his cell,” Tess said.
    “As in, no longer at Rikers,” Captain Ward said.
    “Whoa.” Tess slid a glance in Cat’s direction. “He escaped?”
    And then Cat was back, swallowing a flood of stomach acid so she could ask questions. But the most important question could not be voiced:
Is he coming after Vincent?
    Ward said, “As to if it was voluntary or not, we don’t know yet. They had a blackout same as us. Generators didn’t come on right away and the disappearance took place in that window of opportunity. Witnesses say the guards were overpowered by armed assailants in ski masks. But no shots were fired and there were no injuries.”
    “Rikers guards? Overpowered?” Tess echoed. “That place is like the Fort Knox of prisons.”
    “So it’s said,” Captain Ward replied.
    “Any leads on the assailants?” Cat asked.
    “We don’t know yet. FBI’s at the scene. Early reports say it looks like an inside job.” He waited a beat as he studied Cat’s face, and then the tornado landed on top of her:
    “A job orchestrated by you.”

CHAPTER THREE
    W e carved out a little time
, Vincent reminded himself as he put on his scorched ball cap and kept his head down, quietly departing Cat’s building.
We got to be together.
    But it was never enough time. And he hated how he put Cat at risk whenever he visited her apartment. When they had first met, Cat had come to the abandoned chemical factory he and J.T. had turned into a sanctuary. Her trespassing had sent J.T. into a spiral of dismay, and as J.T. feared, Cat’s initial investigation into Vincent’s supposed death had put Vincent back on the radar of the clandestine organization that had changed him into a beast—Muirfield. In Afghanistan, his superiors had received orders to wipe out his unit of experimental super soldiers, and he had used every bit of Special Forces training to elude the shock troops, survive, and get back to the States.
    J.T. had been terrified that Cat’s repeated visits to the factory would lead Muirfield right to their door. Unfortunately, he had been right, and the chemical factory was now gone, blown up to convincingly stage the death of “the Vigilante”—Vincent’s nickname in the press. Now J.T. lived in a vacated gentlemen’s club and Vincent stayed on a houseboat in the 79th Street Boat Basin.
    It would have been easy for someone as loyal as J.T. to resent Cat for all the danger and tumult she had brought into their lives. But thanks to her interference, they actually had lives. Before Cat, they had essentially existed in stasis, and she had been right when she had insisted that he and J.T. couldn’t spend another decade in lockdown.
    And anyway, I was the one who exposed us in the first place, when I went out at night to help victims.
    Like I’m doing tonight, actually.
    It had been inevitable that he would leave trace DNA and the occasional fingerprint when administering CPR or wheeling a wounded victim into the receiving bay of the local hospital’s ER. He had always risked discovery because of his insistence on helping humanity… even though back then he had ceased thinking of himself as human. Muirfield had turned