Chapter 4

• Dean’s POV
• The file had been closed for months. Stamped with
• accidental death
• in bold, neat letters that looked too clean for what it really was: a mess of lies.
• Collette Quinn. Twenty-seven. Socialite, philanthropist, Hudson Cross’s very public lover. Found dead in a single-vehicle accident.
• At least, that’s what the report said.
• I didn’t buy it then, and I sure as hell didn’t buy it now.
• The crash had too many gaps. No security footage from the streets she supposedly drove. No witnesses, except for a drunk who suddenly remembered the details a week later. And Hudson Cross’s airtight alibi? It read like it had been written by a PR firm.
• The deeper I dug, the stranger it looked. There’d been evidence in the apartment—glass shattered, bruises inconsistent with a crash—that never made it into the official file. Rumors whispered she’d been found in a slip, not a seatbelt. The kind of detail someone buried fast.
• “Agent Holt,” my supervisor had warned when I pulled the folder again. “You can’t keep chasing ghosts.”
• He was wrong. I wasn’t chasing ghosts. I was chasing Hudson Cross.
• I leaned over the photographs spread across my desk. The wreckage was staged too cleanly, like theater props. Her autopsy was missing pages. And Collette’s face stared up from every gala photo, laughing, alive, sharp-eyed in a way that made me certain she hadn’t gone quietly into the night.
• But my gut said otherwise. My gut told me Hudson’s fingerprints were all over her death, whether the evidence showed it or not.
• And my gut was rarely wrong.
• I leaned back in my chair, rubbing a hand over my jaw. Her photo lay in the center of the mess. Collette. Laughing at some gala, eyes sharp even mid-smile. Not the kind of woman who went quietly into the night.
• Something about her face—it got under my skin. The kind of beauty that lingered, sharp enough to cut, soft enough to keep you bleeding.
• I told myself it was professional interest.
• But the twitch in my cock said otherwise.
• “Fuck,” I muttered, snapping the file shut. She was dead. I didn’t lust after the dead.
• Still, I couldn’t shake her eyes. That smirk. The tilt of her chin that said she’d always have the last word.
• And lately… I swore I’d heard her name whispered more than once in Hudson’s penthouse surveillance feeds. Moans that weren’t coming from the women he brought home. Laughter that chilled the hair on my arms.
• I’d set up discreet monitoring—don’t ask how, the Bureau didn’t need to know. Hudson’s ego painted a target on his back, and I wanted to catch him slipping.
• What I saw was better.
• Footage of him tossing women out mid-fuck, pale and shaking. Talking to himself. Shouting her name.
• Collette.
• Dead Collette.
• I clenched my fists, my pulse quickening. Either Hudson was losing his mind, or something else was at play.
• And damned if I didn’t want to be the one to unravel it.
• I slid the photo closer, tracing my finger along her jawline. “What did he do to you, Coco?” I murmured. The nickname slipped out, unbidden, like it belonged on my tongue.
• Heat stirred low in my gut. Wrong, filthy, but there all the same. I pictured her alive, whispering in my ear, laughing against my chest. My cock twitched, traitorous.
• I slammed the file shut again, shoving back from the desk. This wasn’t about lust. This was about justice.
• But even as I said it, even as I swore it—her face lingered. Her voice echoed in my skull.
• And for the first time in my career, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to solve the case… or fuck the ghost haunting it.