Prologue

      There was a time when he loved coming up to this ranch. Loved riding through its fields, getting lost in its acreage.

      Right now, that time seemed as if it were a million years ago. Back then he’d been a boy and this had been his ranch.

      Well, his and his family’s, Ryan Colton amended silently.

      Back then, the only crimes, large or small, harmless or serious, had all been made-up, part of the make-believe games he, his brothers Jack, Eric and Brett, as well as his half brother, Daniel, and his baby sister, Greta, would play.

      Playing had been serious business back then.

      He wished for a moment that he could go back to that point in time. Back to when innocence had been a major player in all their lives.

      But a lot of things had happened since then. Jack had gotten married, become a father and then gotten divorced before he finally got it right and found Tracy. Eric had left the ranch to become a trauma surgeon at Tulsa General Hospital, where he had met Kara, the love of his life. Daniel, along with his wife Megan, and Brett and his wife, Hannah, were still here on the ranch, along with Jack, but Daniel and Brett had ideas about managing the ranch that differed from the direction that Jack had initially wanted to take. All three were currently trying to iron things out rather than clashing over methods the way they had once done.

      And Greta, well, Greta was Greta. Her gift for training horses took her away from the ranch a great deal more than it once had. These days found her in Oklahoma City more than here because of her engagement to Mark Stanton. But even when she was gone, her presence seemed to just ooze out of the very shadows, as if unconsciously reminding the others that she, too, was a Colton and every bit as much a part of this ranch as they were.

      As for him, well, he had gone into the Marines in search of himself. He came back still looking, except now he did it as a homicide detective with the Tulsa police department.

      And it was in that capacity, as a police detective rather than a Colton sibling, that he was here now, standing in one of the Lucky C’s smaller stables, staring at a broken windowpane with blood smeared on the jagged edges.

      Whose blood was