Holman Correctional Facility, Atmore, Alabama

Sometime after noon, Boyd Graham stepped out of the gate and into the parking lot a free man. He figured he could spare a moment for the excitement surging through him. Grinning, he spread his arms wide and lifted his face to the weak December sun.

Freedom.

Lowering his hands to his hips, Boyd took a good look around the outside of the place where he'd spent the last ten years of his life. The prison was an hour north of the Gulf of Mexico, and there was no sign of the sea here. The place was surrounded on all sides by tall pines, and the rotten-egg smell of a paper plant drifted faintly on the wind. He couldn’t wait to get home and back on the water.

A car turned down the row in front of him and screeched to a stop, the driver throwing it into park and jumping out. Walker, his younger brother jumped out and caught Boyd up in a bear hug. Boyd pounded his baby brother's back and laughed. The sound was rusty from disuse. He hadn't had reason to laugh in years.

They stepped back and sized each other up. Walker was the only person in the world who gave a rat's ass about him. The once scrawny kid had filled out over the years; his chest and back were now broad, his biceps bulging and covered in tattoos. He looked as tough as Boyd and had the same build. Somehow he’d managed to stay out of jail over the years, but he’d had a string of close calls.

Boyd grinned. "Been hittin' the iron, kid?"

Walker snorted. "Get in the damned car. I haven't been a kid since I was ten."

Boyd stopped and took his first good look at the vehicle. His car. The wreck he'd in won in a poker game twelve years ago had been completely restored.

"Looks good, doesn't she?" Walker asked with pride.

Afraid it might be a mirage and disappear on contact, Boyd reached out cautiously and skimmed his hand over the surface of the roof. His fingertips met midnight black metal and he swallowed the lump in his throat. It was just a damned car. Well, as much as a 1968 Camaro could be just a car.

He lifted the gleaming door handle to swing the heavy door open. Removing the pack from his back, he tossed it over the seat and slid in, pulling the door closed behind him. The reupholstered leather seats were soft and plush, and as they exited the parking lot he started to relax for the first time in ten long years.

It was a three hour drive home to Duluth. The small town on the Chattahoochee River in Alabama was only a stone's throw from both Georgia and Florida. It’d never seemed much like home until he couldn’t go to it.

He took the time to study his little brother. The owner of the only garage in Duluth looked prosperous. When Walker had sent him word he was taking over a garage, Boyd hadn't asked too many questions. Where a petty criminal had come up with the kind of cash necessary to buy a business, he could only imagine. Walker had always been a talented mechanic, so the move made sense. Made him look legit. And the place would give Boyd gainful employment, too. A return to prison was not part of his plans.

Since he'd served every minute of his ten year sentence, he was a totally free man, not encumbered by any asinine rules of parole. He tried not to think too much about that. He should have been out of prison years ago, finishing his sentence on parole. Unfortunately, the warden at Holman was an old school buddy of Judge Jameson's, the man who'd presided over his trial and sentenced him to ten years. Even after the man's death, the warden made sure Boyd stayed in prison. Every time he came up for a parole board review some minor infraction against him was manufactured and presented. Every time he was turned down. Taking a deep breath, he suppressed his rising anger and concentrated on life as a free man.

He hadn't been in an all-fired rush to return to Duluth until he'd heard she was back. Closing his eyes, he called up her memory. Serenity Lynn Jameson. The woman responsible for his ten years of hell. The last time he'd seen her in the flesh she was sitting across a small table from him in the county jail's visitation room, close to tears and wringing her hands. If not for the guards, he might have reached to comfort her, and that had pissed him off. It still did.

Serenity had always been innocent and demure. He'd watched her grow from a skinny gangly teenager to a knockout twenty-two year-old. He knew better, but she was a woman he just had to sample. And sample he had. Once. Only, once wasn’t nearly enough.

Serenity had been meeting him for the second go when the trouble had started. Billy Thompson had started hitting on her the minute she walked in the door. When she shrugged him off, the man had grown dangerous, aggressive. Boyd had defended her, why, he couldn’t fathom, and Billy was killed, the simple bar fight ended by Billy's knife in Boyd's hand. The one righteous thing Boyd had ever done landed him in prison.

The last time he saw Serenity she'd asked him to forgive her and promised he'd be out soon. After all, her daddy was the judge. Why would he send away a man for defending his daughter's virtue?

Boyd snorted. Yeah, right. He’d seen the writing on the wall. He'd screwed Judge Jameson's daughter. One man was dead, and the other from the wrong side of the tracks was in handcuffs. He didn't have a chance in hell.

Serenity had gone back north to college before the trial started. For some reason he'd expected to see her there anyway. Her not showing up for it felt like rejection, something he wasn't accustomed to, a chink in his armor. He beat the emotion down, but not before vowing to make her pay. When he'd heard his sentence, ten years without parole, in his mind he'd doubled her sentence, too. She'd spent the ten years in her own kind of exile, on the other side of the state.

And now she was back as Duluth's new police chief.

"You're awfully quiet over there," Walker cut into his thoughts.

He smiled, the movement tightening muscles long unused to such action.

"Just contemplating revenge, brother."