Page 42 of Duty Unbound

The intruder glanced back, his eyes widening when he saw how close I’d gotten. He veered left, making for a cluster of trees near the property line. Bad move. The uneven ground slowed him down further.

Fifty yards to the fence. Forty. Thirty.

I pushed harder, my legs burning with effort. The gap narrowed to fifteen feet, then ten. I could hear his panicked breathing now, see the sweat glistening on the back of his neck in the moonlight.

He reached the fence and frantically began to climb. I closed the final distance with a burst of speed, grabbed a fistful of his jacket collar, and yanked hard. He tumbled backward with a startled yelp, hitting the ground flat on his back.

I was on him before he could scramble up, one knee pressed into his sternum, my weapon trained on his face.

“Move, and you’ll regret it.” The words came out in a dangerous whisper.

His eyes were wild with fear, darting from my face to the gun and back again. “Don’t shoot! Please!”

Logan sprinted up beside us, his own weapon drawn. “Need help, boss?”

“Get the son of a bitch’s hands,” I instructed, keeping my weight on the man’s chest.

Logan holstered his weapon and efficiently pulled the intruder’s arms behind his back, securing them with flexicuffs. Once he was restrained, I got to my feet but kept my gun trained on him.

“Pat him down.”

Logan’s hands moved expertly over the man’s clothing, emptying his pockets. “Wallet. Phone. Small bottle of—” Logan squinted at the label “—Jergens?” His expression twisted with disgust. “And…what the hell?” He held up a pair of bright-pink socks with unicorns on them.

I raised an eyebrow. “Those look familiar.”

“They’re Nova’s,” Logan confirmed. “I’ve seen her wearing them in those behind-the-scenes videos she posts.”

“Jesus Christ.” I holstered my weapon, already knowing what kind of creep we were dealing with. I grabbed the wallet Logan had set aside and flipped it open. The driver’s license photo matched our gasping intruder. “Roger Harrison.”

“Did you say Roger Harrison?” Jace asked through comms.

“Yeah. What about him?”

“We’ve got a file on him. A big one. Dude is creepy-mccrawly.”

I’d seen the file. I crouched down to Roger’s eye level. “You’ve been hanging around Nova’s events. Sending her letters. Waiting outside venues. And now breaking in to private property in the middle of the night.”

“I wasn’t breaking in,” he protested weakly. “I just wanted to see her.”

“Were you invited?”

“Well, no. But?—”

“Then you were breaking in.”

Roger wet his lips nervously. “It wasn’t a problem before. They always let me hang around.”

I exchanged a loaded glance with Logan. That explained how comfortable he seemed on the property. This wasn’t his first uninvited visit.

“You’ve been here before?”

He nodded eagerly. “Lots of times. I leave samples.”

“Samples of what exactly?”

“Just left…little pieces of me.”

Logan and I exchanged another look, and he pointed to the bottle of Jergens.

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