Chapter One
To Harper Milburn, East Tennessee in late October always seemed like somebody in the process of cleaning the whole world up for company. The air held that crisp edge that made breathing a little addictive, woodsmoke drifted over the county fairgrounds of Claiborne, Tennessee from beyond the midway, and the mountains rose dark on the horizon, already losing detail to the falling evening.
Beneath strings of lights and hand-painted signs and the spinning blur of rides, the annual fall festival glowed gold and orange and red.
Country music drifted from one direction. Somebody laughed too loud from another. Close by, grease popped in a fryer.
Harper hugged a giant stuffed elephant tighter against her chest as a little kid ran past while staring at the plushie with naked envy.
She elbowed Isaac. “Stop smirking.”
His smirk smirked bigger. “I’m not.”
“You are.” She’d had this face memorized for five years, and she knew every version of it. “I know every expression you’ve ever made.”
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his blue flannel and kept walking beside her through the crush of people. “You named him Gerald in under three seconds.”
Harper hugged the elephant closer. “You won him for me. The least I could do was give him dignity.”
“Gerald.” He yanked at the elephant’s floppy trunk hanging over her forearm. “He looks more like a Dingledore.”
She gasped like he’d insulted a family member. “You take that back.”
His laugh did that thing it had always done to her—got under her skin and stayed there. Except tonight it stayed differently. Warmer. She wasn’t entirely sure what to do with that yet.
Harper had known Isaac Resnick since she was eleven. Sixth grade. Mrs. Bell’s afterschool science club. The baking soda volcano disaster and the field trip permission slip he’d forged so she could go and his whispered running commentary while the docent droned on about sedimentary rock like she was unveiling the secrets of the universe. Five years of walking home together, shared lunches, shared jokes, group projects where they did ninety percent of the work while everybody else coasted.
Five years of all that, and she’d still needed Cora to explain it to her.
Obviously, Harper. Obviously. He’s in love with you! What took you so long to see it?
Harper hated how she hadn’t seen what her best friend saw right away.
The hard part wasn’t that Isaac looked different tonight. He didn’t. Same lanky build. Same olive skin. Same dark curls falling over his forehead when the wind caught them. Same thoughtful, slightly serious face that made teachers assume he was older. The same blue flannel she’d seen him in a hundred times that somehow, tonight, looked completely different.
She’d clocked that and hadn’t mentioned how sexy he looked. She wasn’t going to mention it. She was sixteen, and she had some dignity.
Harper shifted Gerald under her arm, and his floppy trunk did a wild whirly-whirl before settling.
Okay, maybe not that much dignity.
They passed the ring toss booth where Gerald had entered their lives on Isaac’s third try. He’d missed the first two catastrophically enough that the carny started looking bored on purpose, and Harper laughed so hard she nearly cried. When the third ring landed clean, Isaac’s relieved expression forced her to glance away so she wouldn’t launch herself into his arms.
That had happened a lot tonight.
At the top of the Ferris wheel, with the whole valley spread below them and the fair noise floating up in soft, distant bursts, he’d reached over and laced his fingers through hers like it was just the next natural thing. Like they’d taken the long road to what had always been there.
She hadn’t trusted herself to speak after that. With Gerald crammed awkwardly between them, Isaac’s shoulder warm against hers, her pulse was doing something genuinely embarrassing.
She was never telling Cora how long that had lasted.
Isaac’s arm brushed hers now as they walked. He reached out—she caught it from the corner of her eye, that small movement toward her—and then he stopped himself and looked straight ahead. The back of his neck went red.
I’m going to have to be the one to do it.
Harper leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder.
Isaac went very still for exactly one second before his fingers tightened around hers.
“Hey.” His voice came out a little rough. “We’re, uh.” He cleared his throat. “We’re still good, right? With this?” He gestured vaguely with his free hand, which seemed to mean all of it. The hand-holding. The tonight-being-a-date thing. The whole five-years-of-friendship-becoming-more thing.
She loved how gentle he was with her. How he didn’t treat her like all the other boys who acted like she was lucky if they even looked her way.
“Yeah, we’re good.”
“I know it’s…we’ve been friends for a long time, and I don’t want it to be weird. I just…” He stopped. Tried again. “I should’ve asked you out a long time ago.”
You think?
Harper stroked his palm with her thumb. “We’re good.” Her voice came out steadier than she expected. “We’re really good.”
He exhaled. It might’ve been the most relieved sound she’d ever heard a person make.
“Good.” He examined her face, his gaze falling to her lips before jerking away. “Okay.”
Am I going to have to be the one to kiss him too?
She grinned. “You spent six weeks working up to asking me, didn’t you?”
The tips of his ears went red. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Harper rolled her eyes. “Isaac.”
He shoulder-checked her. “Four weeks.”
She laughed, and he laughed too, and Gerald’s trunk did another whirly-whirl, and life was fine. Everything was fine and maybe more than fine, and she had to fix the tightness in her chest right now before it became a whole thing.
Isaac pointed toward a concession trailer with a bright-red nacho sign bearing a cartoon cowboy hung over the window. “You hungry?”
She wasn’t, but he seemed excited. “For fake cheese pumped out of a machine? Obviously.”
“Good.” He nodded at the bright-red stand. “That one’s my favorite. Been getting nachos there since I was little.”
When had he gotten so handsome? “Nachos sound good.”
“I’ll get drinks too.” He bounded over to the line, and Harper wondered what he’d choose. The autumn air had gone cold enough to justify hot cider, but she absolutely wanted lemonade. He probably already knew that. He knew everything like that. It was annoying in the best way.
She rubbed her hands along her sleeves and watched the fair. An older couple walked away with nachos. Kids dragged their parents toward the next game. Teens in hoodies cut between food stands. A couple shared a funnel cake while sitting on a hay bale. Harper recognized a few people from school.
She hugged Gerald tighter. This was the perfect night.
Isaac came back balancing a tray in one hand and two large drinks in the other.
When she spotted the bright-yellow liquid inside, she grinned. “How’d you know?”
“Because you always get lemonade.” He offered the nachos. “No matter how cold.”
I’ve loved this boy since freshman year.
Harper took a chip and inspected the container closely. “The cheese looks like it was manufactured in 1987.”
“Probably was.”
“You bought them anyway.”
“Yep.”
She ate a few of the chips. The cheese tasted aggressively fake and better than it looked. Isaac ate most of the rest, working through them while she managed Gerald and the lemonade and the general logistical challenge of walking through a crowded midway with an enormous stuffed animal under one arm.
They talked about the fair for a while, and then about school, and then Isaac mentioned the environmental science program at UTK, the way he’d been quietly excited about it since sophomore year. The coursework, the research track he wanted…she listened to every word.
He had a plan. A real, considered, this is where I’m going kind of plan, and she was simultaneously proud of him and aware of a small, cold current underneath that she didn’t examine too closely.
He was a year ahead of her. He’d be gone next fall.
Don’t do that tonight.
Harper reached for another chip, but this time, Isaac didn’t offer the tray
She glanced up at him.
He’d gone still in a way that didn’t fit the moment. One hand pressed against his stomach. His face flushed bright across his cheekbones.
“You okay?”
He blinked like he’d surfaced from somewhere else. “Yeah.”
He didn’t look yeah.
“You sure?”
A tiny shake of his head, almost embarrassed. “Just ate too fast.”
“Fake-cheese karma.”
“Probably.”
Isaac didn’t sound convinced. She wasn’t either.
They kept moving, slower now. The midway had thickened with people—families clustering around game booths and food stands, teenagers drifting in packs, couples shoulder to shoulder. To their right, a toddler was crashing out over a balloon. Laughter burst from the haunted corn maze entrance. Isaac shoved the nacho tray into a trash can.
He’d gone a weird combination of red and deathly pale.
Harper touched his arm. “That bad?”
He dragged a hand over the back of his neck. “I’m fine.”
He wasn’t.
The sweat gave him away first. Not enough to gleam, but enough to change his appearance. A dampness at his temples. A strain around his mouth. He kept swallowing in the way that meant his body was fighting bile climbing higher.
She shifted Gerald to her other arm. “You want to sit down?”
“No.” Too fast. He softened it. “No. I just need a bathroom.”
A thread of worry pulled tight.
“There were some by the livestock barn, I think.”
“Good. I can make it.”
They turned away from the busiest part of the fairgrounds and cut between two vendor rows. The lights thinned. The ground under Harper’s boots changed from packed gravel to patchier dirt and straw. The music behind them shifted songs.
Just as she started to hum, her stomach cramped.
She stopped walking for half a beat as another sharp twist hit her, low and mean.
No.
She pressed her free hand flat against her side. The pain eased. She kept walking.
Isaac noticed even in the middle of whatever was happening to him. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t want to say it out loud. Didn’t want to make it real. “Probably the jalapeños.”
He nodded once, but he’d gone gray around the mouth.
Worry wormed through her. “Isaac.”
He made it three more steps.
His knees hit the ground hard enough that Harper felt the impact in her chest. The cup he’d been carrying flew out of his hand, and Gerald nearly slipped from her arm as she lunged toward him.
“Isaac!”
He braced one hand on the ground and vomited hard enough that his whole body convulsed.
A woman twenty feet away gasped and yanked her little boy back. Somebody cursed loudly. Another voice called out asking if he was drunk.
Harper dropped to her knees beside him. “Hey. Hey, look at me.”
He couldn’t. He gagged again, emptying whatever was left. His shoulders shook. His breath came in ragged pulls between retches.
This is wrong. This is really wrong.
She shoved her hair back from her face and dug for her phone one-handed while keeping Gerald trapped under her elbow because she’d apparently forgotten how to let go of the stupid thing.
Isaac grabbed her wrist before she could unlock the screen. His palm was hot and slick. “Don’t.” The word came out rough, barely shaped.
“I’m calling 911.”
He swallowed hard, eyes glassy. “I’m sorry.”
The apology cut straight through Harper. “For what?”
He looked at her like he hated this. All of it. The timing, the weakness, tonight collapsing into terror—frightening and ugly and public.
“I wanted tonight to be perfect.”
Don’t you dare.
“Isaac, shut up.”
He almost smiled. His mouth broke halfway there. “I should’ve asked you out sooner.”
Harper’s eyes stung so fast it made her furious. “Now is not the time for your delayed emotional growth.”
A sound escaped Isaac. It might’ve been a laugh if his body hadn’t been fighting him. “I love you.”
The fairgrounds tilted.
Not literally. But her equilibrium did. A balance she’d carefully held in place for a long time. Months. Maybe longer. She stared at him kneeling in the dirt with vomit on his shirt and misery carved across his face, and nothing about the scene was how this should’ve happened.
That made it worse. That made it truer.
“You idiot.” Her voice cracked. “I know. I love you too.”
His expression changed. Relief, shock, some complicated mixture of both.
“Since freshman year.” His voice shredded at the edges. “That’s pathetic.”
“It would be pathetic if I didn’t feel the same way.”
His eyes closed.
She pulled free just enough to dial for help.
This time he didn’t stop her.
Harper gave the dispatcher the location, her name, Isaac’s name, the symptoms. Her words shook, and she hated that but kept going. In the middle of the conversation, her stomach cramped again—harder this time—and she pressed her fist into her belly and breathed through it and didn’t stop talking.
By the time she ended the call, the scene had already started to come apart.
A teenage boy staggered against the side of a nearby trailer and doubled over. A woman farther down the path sat down hard in the dirt like her legs had quit without warning. Somebody shouted for a medic. Another voice was yelling about the food.
The first paramedics reached them in what might have been five minutes or fifteen. Time had turned stupid. Isaac was shivering despite the sweat soaking through his flannel. His breathing had gone fast and shallow.
One of the paramedics crouched beside him. “What did he eat tonight?”
“Nachos.” Harper swallowed. “From the red trailer by the Ferris wheel. I had some too. Not as many.”
The woman’s attention sharpened on her. “Any vomiting? Dizziness?”
Another cramp doubled Harper forward. She pressed both arms around her midsection and somersaulted between hot and cold. Swallowed against the metal taste at the back of her throat she’d been trying to ignore for the last ten minutes.
“My stomach hurts.”
“You’re coming with us.”
Harper almost argued. Almost. Isaac was right there—pale and shaking and going somewhere she couldn’t follow, but the paramedic was already taking her arm, and her legs had gone unreliable, and the lemonade was sour and wrong in the back of her throat.
Gerald stayed locked against her chest.
The paramedic gave him one baffled look and let it go.
The ambulance ride blurred into pieces. Questions. A blood pressure cuff. Somebody starting an IV while she tried to hold still and failed.
Over the radio, she heard the word Lifestar.
She knew what that meant. Lifestar was the helicopter. Lifestar meant something had gone too far for ground transport to handle.
Not Isaac. That’s not for Isaac.
She threw up twice on the way and cried once, and she couldn’t decide which was more humiliating.
At the hospital, everything moved fast and not fast enough.
They split them up almost immediately.
A nurse walked her into an exam room, strapped a bracelet on her wrist, took blood, asked questions. Someone got an IV running in her arm. Cramps came in waves, and the room tilted every time she tried to sit up straight.
Harper sent her mom an incoherent text. She dropped the phone and nearly lost it behind the bed rail. They gave her medication through the IV line, and the cramps dimmed a little. Enough to breathe through, but not enough to stop.
She kept asking about Isaac. The careful answers she got back meant nothing.
Eventually, they moved her to a different room. A proper one, with a bed and a monitor. The IV was still running. The monitor beeped. Outside in the hallway, there were voices and the rubber squeak of shoes on linoleum and somebody saying multiple patients from the festival in the clipped tone people used when they were trying to stay professional.
She heard Lifestar again.
And then she heard it a third time, and a nagging cry in her chest went very quiet.
Gerald sat in her lap.
She’d stopped noticing him at some point. He was just there, gray and soft and enormous, slightly damp now, and she held on to his floppy ear like a lifeline.
A doctor came through the door.
He was young and walked slowly, carefully, as if carrying a huge weight on his back. Nobody moved like that toward a sixteen-year-old girl in a hospital bed at nearly midnight unless the world had gone permanently wrong in some new way.
He pulled a chair close. “Harper.”
She held Gerald tighter.
The doctor’s expression shifted—not pity, something worse, something gentler—and she understood then, before he said another word, that whatever came next, she would never be able to unknow.
“I’m so sorry.”
No.
They were supposed to fix him. Fluids and medicine and whatever people got when the problem had a name. He was seventeen. He was healthy. He was Isaac. He was supposed to walk back in and tell her he’d ruined their first date in unforgettable fashion, and she was supposed to tell him that nearly dying was a little dramatic, even for him.
The doctor’s mouth kept moving.
She only caught the end.
Isaac Resnick is dead.
Wheels squeaked down the hallway. Somebody laughed at the nurses’ station and cut it off fast. A television in the corner murmured. Harper caught the word fatalities. The use of the plural slipped through her brain. Only one fatality mattered.
Inside Harper, everything went dead still.
Isaac loves me.
Isaac loves me.
Isaac loves me.
The thought turned over and over, useless and unbearable, like her brain couldn’t stop picking up the words and putting them back down.
She looked at the doctor and waited for the part where he corrected himself.
It didn’t come.
The monitor beeped. The IV dripped. Gerald’s ear was soft between her fingers.
She didn’t let go.
Chapter Two
Light came off the water like it had one sole purpose…to wake Winter up.
It slipped past the edge of the curtains and stretched across the floor in a long, shifting line. Winter Black lay still for a moment, watching sunshine climb the wall, reach the dresser, and fracture across a picture frame she hadn’t bothered to hang yet.
Different light.
Texas had been blunt about it—bright, direct, unapologetic. This was layered. Softer at the surface and sharper underneath, moving constantly, refusing to settle into anything she could map with confidence.
She’d been tracking its patterns every morning for days now, which probably said something unflattering about her.
She rolled onto her side.
Noah was already awake. He lay on his back with one arm tucked behind his head, staring at the ceiling like he’d been there awhile. Not tense. Not drifting either.
Thinking. He got quiet this way when he was running through calculations, and she’d learned years ago to let him get to the end before interrupting.
“Mornin’, darlin’” His accent was always thicker in the morning.
“You planning your day,” her voice came out rough with sleep, “or mentally judging the entire state of Maryland?”
His fingers linked with hers. “Little of both.”
She pushed up onto her elbow. The sheet slid down, cool air moving across her skin. “You’re still upset about the brisket.”
He turned to face her. “That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact.”
“You’ve been here four days.”
“And I’ve already been disappointed twice.”
“Very brave of you to carry that.”
“Very right of me, you mean.”
His green eyes caught the morning light, revealing the version of him that was easy and unguarded, the one that belonged to mornings and nowhere else. She’d had nearly a year with this version, and it still caught her off guard sometimes, how much of Noah she got to keep.
Winter leaned over and kissed him. He caught her wrist before she could pull back, his thumb settling against the inside where her pulse ran steady. Her thumb found the line of puckered flesh where his left ring finger once lived.
“You ready for your first official day saving the world in a very secret unit?”
He frowned. “We’re not allowed to say it like that.”
“Right.” She smoothed his hair, which needed a cut. “Our totally normal, completely boring federal jobs.”
“That’s better.”
She slipped out of bed and padded to the window, the floor still unfamiliar under her feet. Same layout as Texas in function. Not in feel. She pulled the curtain back the rest of the way.
The marina stretched out below, yachts and sailboats lined up in rows, their reflections breaking and reforming every time the water shifted. A couple walked the path near the docks with coffee cups. Off to the left, a line clinked rhythmically against a mast.
No fences.
No yard.
She tracked the walkways instead—the entry points, the blind corners between buildings, the path someone would take to move from one side of the complex to the other without ever stepping into an open sight line, if they knew the layout and had a reason to care.
“You’re doing it again.”
She didn’t turn. “Doing what?”
“Mapping exits like we’re about to get raided.”
She exhaled. “We did get raided.”
“Even so.” The mattress shifted behind her. “We’re allowed a break sometimes.” Noah came to stand beside her, close enough that she felt his warmth. He looked out at the water without comment, which was his version of giving her a minute.
A knock sounded on the door.
He pulled on a t-shirt and opened the door without checking the peephole.
“Morning, Jack.”
“Boy, if you don’t stop answering doors like that, you’re trying to get yourself—”
Jack McAuliff stepped inside mid-lecture, already shaking his head. Beth followed behind him, holding a container with both hands.
“Don’t start with him.” Gramma Beth brushed past her husband the way she’d been doing for fifty years. “He gets it from you.”
“I do not.”
“You absolutely do.”
Winter smiled before she could stop herself.
Beth crossed to the kitchen counter and set the container down like she owned the place. At this point, she basically did, since she’d been in their new unit almost as often as they had.
“I made muffins.”
Winter could already smell them. Blueberry. She didn’t need to check.
Beth turned and came straight for her, hands going to Winter’s face, cupping her cheeks, studying her with the thoroughness of a doctor doing a wellness assessment. “You look thin.”
“I ate dinner last night.”
“That doesn’t count.”
Jack wandered to the sliding doors and stood looking out at the water with his hands in his pockets. “Still can’t believe we traded perfectly good houses for this.”
“You love it.”
He grunted. “I tolerate it.”
Beth shot him a look. “You sat on that balcony for an hour yesterday and didn’t say a single negative thing.”
“I was observing.”
“You were relaxed.”
He pointed at her. “Don’t spread that rumor around.”
Noah had already gotten the container open. “Blueberry?”
“Mm-hmm. Don’t you dare take the biggest one.”
“I’m offended you’d think—”
“You would.”
He took the second biggest. Beth watched him with narrow eyes and seemed to decide that was acceptable.
Winter leaned back against the counter and watched them. Something quiet moved through her. Contentment. She wondered if it would last.
Texas hadn’t been wrong. It’d just been…off in a way she couldn’t name while there. She saw it now—how Beth had filled every room with activity, how Jack had complained loudly about things that didn’t actually bother him, how they’d both insisted they were fine while something in them held back.
Here, they breathed.
That showed in the way Beth moved through the space without hesitating, the way Jack leaned against the window instead of hovering like he needed an exit, the way they looked at each other when they thought nobody was watching.
“You like it here.”
Beth’s eyes softened. “I do.”
Jack shrugged like it was nothing. “It’s not terrible.”
Noah poured coffee and handed Winter a mug before she asked. “I saw a guy walking a golden retriever this morning.”
Jack’s posture changed almost imperceptibly. “Yeah?”
Beth’s head swung toward him. “We are not getting a dog without having an actual conversation about it.”
“We’re having a conversation right now.”
“Floating ideas is not a conversation.”
Winter kept her mouth shut. She had opinions about this, and they weren’t going to help.
Jack looked at her anyway. His expression said, back me up.
Her eyebrow responded with, You’re on your own. She sipped her coffee.
He winked at her and looked back at Beth. “I’d be very responsible.”
“You would spoil it rotten and then act mystified about why it has terrible manners.”
“I have excellent manners.”
“That dog would have terrible manners.”
“That dog would be beloved.”
Gramma Beth rolled her eyes. “Jack.”
“Bethie.” He sighed. “Autumn trusts me with taking care of Toad and Peach when she’s away.”
“Autumn trusts us, you mean.”
Noah ate a muffin and stayed out of it with practiced ease. He’d once told Winter a long time ago that when Jack and Beth found a groove, the best policy was to let it run.
Winter watched them with so much affection, her heart hurt.
For a moment, it was almost like nothing else existed. No case coming. No weight sitting just below the surface of her life.
Just this room and these people and a Monday morning in Maryland with good muffins.
She let herself stay there.
A beat. Two.
Then something in her chest tilted, like it did when stillness lasted long enough for her to notice. The awareness she’d never managed to fully quiet that the calm was temporary, that danger was always coming, that she’d chosen this life specifically because she was built for what came after the calm.
Winter pushed off the counter. “We should get ready.”
Beth made a soft sound. “First day.”
“First official one.” Noah handed her the rest of his coffee, which she accepted without comment. “We already had our trial by fire.”
Jack snorted. “You call that a trial by fire. Looked more like a damn ambush that got buried on page seventeen.”
Winter met Noah’s beautiful green gaze over her mug.
A moment passed between them. The flooding. The team finding its shape under pressure. Jacinda saying I’ll be in touch like the outcome was already decided. The realization that CROSS didn’t ease you in so much as drop you directly into whatever was waiting.
We survived it. “We’re hoping for a calmer start.”
Noah grabbed another muffin, this time ignoring everyone and taking the biggest one. “I’m not holding my breath.”
Beth pulled Winter into a hug. Tight. Grounding. She smelled of Worth perfume and blueberry and early morning, the way she had for as long as Winter could remember. “Be careful.”
Winter rested her cheek against her grandmother’s wavy white hair. “I always am.”
Beth pulled back just enough to give her a look.
Winter didn’t argue.
Jack clapped Noah on the shoulder. “Keep her out of trouble.”
Noah snorted. “That’s not really how this works.”
“Worth a shot.”
An hour later, Winter and Noah headed out together. The hallway carried the layered smell of salt water and a faint fishiness. Just the Chesapeake doing what the Chesapeake did.
Morning had fully asserted itself. The drive took them past the marina and out through neighborhoods that shifted slowly from residential quiet into more purposeful activity the closer they got.
Security tightened in layers—subtle at first, then not. Fewer civilian cars. More unmarked vehicles. Fencing that didn’t read as fencing until you really looked.
Noah slowed as they approached the final checkpoint. “Cover story straight?”
“Task force.”
“Task force for what?”
“Whatever they need us to task force for.”
“Very official.”
“Very vague.”
He peered through the windshield. “You ever think about how strange it is that we can’t write down what we actually do?”
“All the time.”
Stroking his arm, she leaned back in her seat as they rolled through the perimeter.
She’d chosen this. All of it.
And a certain hunger in her had already started angling toward whatever came next, the way it always did, the way she’d long ago stopped fighting.
The deadliest weapon in America isn’t a gun. It’s on the menu.
Special Agent Winter Black thought the battle to launch CROSS was behind her. She was wrong.
Now based in Annapolis and working her first official assignment for the elite new unit, Winter is finally part of a team build to chase threats that cross borders, agencies, and jurisdictions—and prove the controversial program can succeed where everyone else failed.
Then people start dying.
A suspicious death at a county fair becomes something far worse: victims across multiple states, connected not by a killer’s hand but by what they ate. As CROSS digs deeper, they uncover a… Read More