4th of July, Northeastern Colorado

THREE HOURS OUT OF GRAND Island, Nebraska, racing across northeastern Colorado at 100 mph, Liam Dylan Magnuson knew he wasn’t going to make it. He was going to die out here in the godawful middle of nowhere.

Tightening his hands on the steering wheel, he pressed down on the Porsche’s accelerator and took the 718 Cayman up to 110 mph. He was flying through the night, the full moon rising behind him, the road stretched out flat and straight ahead of him, black asphalt and yellow stripes running under his wheels.

Every breath hurt.

His body ached.

Blood ran down the side of his face and half a dozen other places.

Nate Martell had beaten the hell out of him in Grand Island, hit him again and again, and his own damn stepbrother, Tommy Dunstan, had cut him across the arm with a damn Bowie knife, but Liam hadn’t given up the name or the place they wanted so goddamn badly.

“Where you going, boy?” Tommy had demanded, shoving Liam up against the side panel of Nate’s Escalade. “Who you running to? You better tell me, boy, or there’ll be hell to pay.”

“Ain’t telling you nothing, Tommy.” He’d kicked out, trying to break free, and Bobby Lee Raynor had shot him – a hot gash across the top of his thigh meant to wound, not kill, but he still hadn’t given them anything, not the name of the man he was chasing down, and not the place where he hoped to hell he could find him.

F**k you, Big Jack Dunstan.

He should have ditched the car in Iowa, when he’d figured out Big Jack’s jokers had been tracking him since Chicago, but the Porsche was fast, really fast, and it had felt like his only chance. He’d been wrong, and he was paying for the mistake with every breath he took.

But the name, the name was still his to hold, the way he’d been holding onto it for his whole goddamn life.

He’d never spoken it to another living person, no friend, no pillow-talk girl, and most of all, never to his mother, Momma Margot, or the corrupt southern bastard she’d married, Big Daddy Jack Dunstan.

He’d told his bandmates everything during their long nights on the tour bus driving from one gig to the next, the good and the bad of his poor-little-rich-boy life – but not the name.

The name was his to hold, close to his heart, a balm to his soul – and now, out here on the Great Plains, the death of him, if he couldn’t outrun his stepbrother, Tommy, and the rest of Daddy Jack’s men all the way to Denver.

He put his chances at less than even, at best.

Ahead of him, a sudden curve snaked out of the dark night. He hit it, and the Porsche skidded hard to the outside edge of the pavement, the wheels spitting up gravel, the chassis shaking. He held the car with every ounce of strength he had, foot off the gas, his hands locked onto the steering wheel, and thank God, the Cayman stuck to the road. A second later, he fed the beast more gas and accelerated out of the turn, not daring to slow down, no matter how fast his heart was pounding.

He was so damned lost.

Liam had thought he’d seen it all, London, Sydney, Hong Kong, New York, Chicago, L.A., but he’d never seen this much empty – 360 degrees of empty with a few lights scattered through the darkness.

The only clue he had to his location was the Colorado state highway sign he’d passed five miles back.

“California,” he’d said, spitting out a mouthful of blood, when Tommy had asked him for the third time where he was going.

But he knew Tommy hadn’t bought the lie.

The bastard had been chasing him down since the first time he’d bailed out of boarding school. He’d been fourteen years old, and it had taken Tommy two months to catch him down in the Florida Keys.

He didn’t know why his mother and Big Daddy Jack had bothered dragging him home every time just to send him away someplace else, someplace they thought could hold him. Hell, he hadn’t lasted a week in military school, and so it had gone, one school after another, until graduation, when they’d finally thrown up their hands, cut him loose, and let him go his own way.

But the game had changed when Tommy had shown up in Chicago, waving a letter from a New York City attorney about an inheritance. From that moment on, the game had gotten mean, and in Grand Island, out in the dark beyond the edges of an interstate truck stop, Tommy had taken it into the gutter.

Five million dollars could do that to a person.

A cool five million sitting on ice with Liam’s name on it.

Except it wasn’t his money, and the name on it, though exactly the same as his, wasn’t his. It never had been. Long before he’d come along, the name had belonged to someone else, a fifteen-year-old boy who’d done a helluva lot better job escaping Momma Margot and Big Daddy Jack than Liam had managed. That boy had disappeared and taken a new name, and Liam was racing toward Denver, holding it close, determined to find him.