He leaned forward and grabbed her phone, then reached for her hand, now limp. The phone was an old-style iPhone with the button at the bottom. Hoping she used fingerprint ID, he pressed her index finger to the button and breathed a sigh of relief when the phone unlocked.

He quickly found Novak, Dani in her contacts. But what to say? He’d need to text, of course. Something that would make Dani hurry to the clinic.

Preferably alone, without her bodyguards. Which there was no way she’d do. She wasn’t stupid.

Unless . . . He looked at the next name in the woman’s contact list.

Novak, Greg. Dani Novak’s little brother, the dog walker who was deaf.

I can do something with that number. Brother and sister would most likely use texting as their primary communication, so neither would think twice about receiving one.

It might work. Then again, it might bring the FBI and the entire Cincinnati PD down on his head. Prison would be a sure thing.

His vision abruptly blurred. He didn’t want to know what his body temperature was at the moment. All he knew was that he had to try to get Dani Novak here, or he wasn’t going to live long enough to make it to a holding cell, let alone drive to Canada.

Cincinnati, Ohio
Tuesday, March 19, 6:15 p.m.

“And we’ll go back, right?” Joshua asked for the tenth time. “We’ll go back for Storm, right?”

Dani looked over her shoulder to where Joshua sat in the very back of the windowless FBI van in his booster seat and patiently answered as she had the previous nine times. “Yes, we’ll go back. Storm isn’t ready to leave her mom yet anyway. Delores said she needs to drink her mama’s milk for another week.”

Dani hoped like hell that all this would be over by then, and they’d be back home in a week. The outing had been necessary for the boys’ mental health, but it had been a bitch to plan and execute. They’d taken two different vans from the Mount Adams condo to Delores’s shelter in the northeastern part of the city. Troy drove their van, with Diesel riding shotgun. Literally, she suspected.

He wore a loose-fitting sweatshirt today instead of the tight T-shirts he seemed to prefer. She had a feeling he was wearing a weapon under the sweatshirt, but she wasn’t asking. She didn’t want to know and she didn’t think Troy wanted to know, either.

Besides, Diesel had a concealed-carry permit, so on this he was actually legal. She wasn’t going to complain either way, because Michael was sitting beside her, looking more peaceful than he had when they’d left the condo. The firepower in this van and the one that trailed them had enabled that to happen.