When the police call the slaughter of his mother and brother a home invasion gone bad, Mika doesn't believe it. Because he has no way to prove otherwise, he closes down, refusing to talk about what happened.<br><br>That is until Buck, a bouncer at a local bar Mika visits, convinces Mika to open up to him. When he does, Buck not only learns about the murder, but also that Mika grew up living off the grid until his father died, two years previously, at which point his family moved to the city.<br><br>They begin to bond as they try to figure out the reason behind the murders, which may revolve around the family property in the mountains. All they have to do is prove it, without being killed in the process. Only if they can will they take a chance and move their growing friendship on to something more.

Hunting a Killer

He awoke Sunday morning with a feeling of anticipation. He was going to meet Buck for lunch. Before he did, though, he had to clean house. Not that it needed it, he’d only been there for a few days, but it had been drilled into him from childhood that he had to at least dust and straighten up. At the moment he was glad to have something to do that didn’t take much thought.


When he finished, he still had over an hour until he had to leave, so on impulse, wondering if it was a good idea, he got out the pictures he’d taken from his old home to hang them on the wall behind the sofa. At that point he realized he didn’t have anything to hang them with, so he made a run to the local convenience store to get some stick-on picture hangers. Nails would have been his first choice, but he didn’t have a hammer. “I have to start making a shopping list of necessities I didn’t know I needed,” he grumbled.


Chapter 11