All Rights Reserved
No AI was used (since when did this have to become a thing!)
Copyright © 2009 (updated and edited 2026) by Katherine Rochholz
Waterloo, IA
Publisher’s Note
All rights reserved as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to persons living or dead (unless explicitly noted) is merely coincidental.
She escaped the darkness once. Now it’s calling her home.
FBI Profiler Katrina “Kate” Russo has spent her life outrunning the past. At twenty‑seven, she’s already a prodigy—degrees in linguistics, cryptography, and computer engineering, ten years in Military Intelligence, that makes her one of the Bureau’s most formidable hunters. She’s built her life on discipline, distance, and data.
But nothing prepares her for Unit Chief Michal Harris—a steady, sharp‑minded leader with a gentle baritone, a haunted past, and a six‑year‑old son he’s raising alone. Michal swore he was done with love after his wife walked out, but Kate Russo walks into his unit and shakes the ground beneath him. She’s sweet, shy, devastatingly intelligent… and she makes him believe in the impossible again.
When three bodies are discovered on a rural Iowa farm, Kate and Michal are sent to investigate a string of missing foster children. For Kate, Iowa isn’t just a crime scene—it’s the place she barely survived. Foster care meant forced labor, brutal winters, and the night she stayed alive only by cutting open a cow and crawling inside during a deadly ice storm. She escaped at sixteen, joined the Marines, and never looked back.
Now she must return to the very farms where she watched other children disappear.
And the killer remembers her.
A note arrives at the local police station addressed to her: You escaped eleven years ago. I see you now. And I will have my prize.
As Kate’s past resurfaces and her walls begin to crack, Michal becomes the one person capable of holding her together. But protecting her means confronting his own fears—and risking the fragile new hope he’s found with her and his son, Alexander.
In the cornfields of Iowa, a monster waits. In the halls of the BAU, a bond grows stronger. And in the shadows of her past, Kate must decide whether she’ll run again— or finally stand and fight with someone at her side.
Love can perform miracles. But only if they survive long enough to claim it.
Kris Charles - Author 