The murder game, p.25
STOP BREATHING, page 25
S T O P
B R E A T H I N G
(A Beth Drake FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 8)
K a t e B o l d
Kate Bold
Bestselling author Kate Bold is the author of numerous series in the mystery and thriller genres, including Meg Thorne, Heather King, Brynn Justice, Beth Drake, Maggie Flight, Addison Shine, Barren Pines, Nina Veil, Nora Price, Kelsey Hawk, Alexa Chase, Ashley Hope, Camille Grace, Harley Cole, Kaylie Brooks, Eve Hope, Dylan First, Lauren Lamb series.
An avid reader and lifelong fan of the mystery and thriller genres, Kate loves to hear from you, so please feel free to visit www.kateboldauthor.com to learn more and stay in touch.
Copyright © 2025 by Kate Bold. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
EPILOGUE
SERIES BY KATE BOLD
MEG THORNE
HEATHER KING
BRYNN JUSTICE
BETH DRAKE
MAGGIE FLIGHT
ADDISON SHINE
BARREN PINES
NINA VEIL
NORA PRICE
KELSEY HAWK
ALEXA CHASE
ASHLEY HOPE
CAMILLE GRACE
HARLEY COLE
KAYLIE BROOKS
EVE HOPE
DYLAN FIRST
LAUREN LAMB
PROLOGUE
Justin Fox checked the temperature gauge on the reaction vessel for the third time in five minutes, his breath misting in the frigid air of the converted barn. Outside, the Montana wind howled across the empty plains, rattling the sheet metal walls with a sound like distant thunder. The propane heater in the corner struggled against the December cold, creating pockets of warmth that dissipated before they could reach the far corners of their makeshift laboratory.
"Temperature's still dropping," he called to his brother, who was hunched over a camp stove, stirring something that definitely wasn't dinner. "We might need to fire up the second heater."
Brandon Fox looked up, his face gaunt in the harsh LED work lights they'd strung from the rafters. "Can't. The tank is almost empty, and we can't get more until Thursday. Johnson won't deliver out here more than once a week."
Justin nodded, pulling his jacket tighter. The irony wasn't lost on him—they were literally cooking, producing heat through chemical reactions that could burn skin on contact, yet they were freezing their asses off in this glorified shed. But that was the nature of the business. Nothing about cooking meth in rural Montana matched the glamorous drug dealer lifestyle from movies and TV shows.
He moved to check the pH levels of their current batch, careful not to disturb the delicate process. One wrong move, one moment of inattention, and they could lose three days of work—or worse. Justin had seen plenty of "worse" in his five years doing this. Burns that looked like something from a horror movie. Lungs scarred from inhaling the wrong fumes. And more than a few cooks who'd blown themselves up trying to cut corners.
"Remember when we were kids?" Brandon said suddenly, his voice cutting through the mechanical hum of their ventilation system—another irony, since the thing barely worked. "You said you were going to be a veterinarian."
Justin snorted. "And you were going to play professional baseball."
"Could've made it too, if I hadn't blown out my shoulder senior year."
It was an old conversation, one they'd had a hundred times in the long hours of watching chemicals react, waiting for crystallization, measuring and remeasuring to ensure purity. But tonight, something in Brandon's voice made Justin really study his younger brother. At thirty-one, Brandon looked forty-five. The chemicals aged you—the stress, the irregular hours, the constant paranoia about getting caught or robbed or killed by a deal gone wrong.
Justin was thirty-four, and he knew he didn't look much better.
"Why bring up the veterinarian thing?" Justin asked, adjusting the flow rate on one of their tubes.
Brandon shrugged. "Saw the Hendersons' place when I was getting supplies. They've got a new foal. Made me think of how you used to spend every summer at their ranch, back when old man Henderson was still alive."
Justin remembered. Fifteen years old, mucking stalls for five dollars an hour and loving every minute of it. Learning to gently handle young horses, to read their body language, to treat colic, and wrap injured legs. Mr. Henderson had even offered to help pay for college, saying Justin had a gift with animals.
But then Dad had gotten sick. Lung cancer, despite never smoking a day in his life, was one of those cosmic jokes that made you question everything. The medical bills had piled up faster than Mom's waitressing job could cover them. Justin had taken a job at the slaughterhouse instead of going to college—brutal work, but it paid three times what the ranch had offered.
Still, it wasn't enough. By the time Dad died two years later, the family was so deep in debt that bankruptcy seemed like the only option. Mom had aged twenty years in two, and Brandon's baseball scholarship had evaporated along with his shoulder's range of motion. The American Dream had become the American Nightmare.
And somewhere along the way, Justin had stopped dreaming about anything at all.
"You ever wonder what Mom would think?" Brandon asked, still stirring his pot.
"Every damn day."
Their mother had passed three years ago. Heart attack at fifty-eight, stressed and worn down to nothing. She'd never known what her boys did to pay off the last of the medical debt, to keep the family land from being foreclosed on. Justin had made sure of that, crafting elaborate lies about construction work in North Dakota, oil field money that explained their sudden ability to make payments.
The truth was simpler—and uglier. Justin had learned the basics from a guy at the slaughterhouse who'd done time in California. Just a little cooking on the side at first, small batches to sell to the long-haul truckers who needed something to keep them awake on thirty-hour runs. But small batches became bigger ones, and soon Justin had pulled Brandon in—two people could work faster, more safely, and Brandon had always been good with his hands, precise in a way that meth cooking demanded.
"We're almost clear," Justin said, the same thing he'd been saying for two years now. "Another six months, maybe eight, and we're out."
Brandon laughed, but there was no humor in it. "You've been saying that since we started."
"This time, I mean it. We've got enough saved to pay off the land, plus a cushion. We can sell the equipment to those boys from Billings, let them take over the territory."
"And then what? Go back to the slaughterhouse? Pretend we never did this?"
Justin didn't have an answer for that. The truth was, once you'd cooked meth, once you'd crossed that line, you couldn't uncross it. It wasn't just the money, though the money was better than anything else available to high school graduates in rural Montana. It was the knowledge that you'd contributed to the very plague destroying your community. Every tweaker in the county, every kid who tried it at a party and ended up hooked, every family torn apart—Justin and Brandon had played a part in that.
"At least we cook clean," Justin said, falling back on the one justification that helped him sleep at night. "No battery acid, no drain cleaner. Just pure chemicals, proper ratios."
It was true. Justin ran their operation like a real laboratory, insisting on quality ingredients and careful processes. Their meth was known for being consistent, less likely to cause the immediate health problems that came from the bathtub crank other cooks produced. It was a strange point of pride, but in this business, you took what moral victories you could.
"Still poison," Brandon said quietly.
"Yeah. Still poison."
They worked in silence for a while, the familiar routine taking over. Check temperatures, adjust flows, and monitor reactions. It was oddly meditative, requiring just enough attention to keep your mind from wandering too far into dangerous territory—li
Justin had just bent down to read the thermometer on the lower reaction vessel when he heard it—a sound that didn't belong. Not the wind, which had been constant all night. Not the creaking of the barn's old bones or the skittering of mice in the walls. This was different. Deliberate.
A footstep on gravel.
He straightened slowly, catching Brandon's eye. His brother had heard it too, was already reaching for the shotgun they kept propped in the corner. Raiders were always a possibility—other cooks or dealers who thought they could take what the Fox brothers had built. Or worse, law enforcement, though they usually came in loud with sirens and demands for surrender.
"Could be a coyote," Brandon whispered. "Or Henderson's dog. That mutt gets out all the time."
Justin nodded, but his instincts were screaming. Five years of cooking had developed a sixth sense for danger, and right now every alarm in his head was going off. He moved toward the door, careful to stay out of the line of sight from the windows, even though they were already covered with black plastic.
"I'll check," he said. "You watch the cook. We're at a critical point—can't let it overheat."
Brandon looked like he wanted to argue, but Justin was already moving. He grabbed the flashlight from the shelf by the door, though he wouldn't turn it on yet. Better to let his eyes adjust to the darkness, to not announce his position to whoever—or whatever—was out there.
The door opened on well-oiled hinges (they kept everything well-maintained, another safety precaution), and Justin slipped out into the bitter night. The wind hit him hard, cutting through his jacket as if it were made of paper. He pulled the door shut behind him, not wanting the light from inside to spill out.
The moon was three-quarters full, providing just enough illumination for him to see the rough shapes of the landscape—the hill rising behind the barn, the rutted dirt road that led to the highway two miles away, the cluster of cottonwoods along the dry creek bed. Justin stood still, listening, letting his vision adjust.
There—movement by the propane tank they used for the heater. Not an animal; the shape was wrong. Too upright, too purposeful.
Justin's hand went to the pistol in his jacket pocket, a .38 revolver that had belonged to their father. He'd never shot anyone, had only fired it at the range to make sure he could if necessary.
"Who's there?" he called out, trying to project an authority he didn't feel. "This is private property."
No response. The figure—definitely human now that Justin was focused on it—seemed to be doing something to the propane tank. Or near it. Justin couldn't quite make out the details.
He took a step forward, then another. "I said—"
The world exploded.
Not the propane tank—that was Justin's first confused thought as the blast wave hit him. The explosion came from behind, from the barn itself. The force of it threw him forward, slamming him into the frozen ground hard enough to drive all the air from his lungs. Heat washed over him, followed immediately by a rain of debris—wood splinters, metal fragments, things he didn't want to identify.
Justin tried to push himself up, but his arms wouldn't cooperate. His ears were ringing, a high-pitched whine that drowned out everything else. He managed to turn his head, looking back at where the barn had been.
Fire. Everything was fire. The structure had been reduced to a skeleton of flaming timbers, the roof completely gone. The heat was intense even from fifty feet away, and Justin could see the snow around the building beginning to melt, creating strange patterns of steam and smoke.
"Brandon," he tried to say, but it came out as a whisper. His brother had been inside, right next to the reaction vessels, surrounded by volatile chemicals.
Justin tried again to get up, to run toward the inferno, but his body wouldn't obey. Shock, some distant part of his mind recognized. He was going into shock.
As his vision began to gray at the edges, Justin saw the figure again—or thought he did. Standing at the edge of the firelight, watching. Then darkness claimed him, and his last coherent thought was that this had been no accident. Someone had murdered his brother, destroyed their lab, and left him alive.
But why?
The question followed him down into unconsciousness, where the cold couldn't reach and the fire couldn't burn, and Brandon was still alive, still stirring his pot, still dreaming of playing professional baseball someday.
CHAPTER ONE
The bed and breakfast overlooked Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, its wraparound porch offering views of vineyards that stretched toward the horizon in neat, geometric rows. Beth Drake sat in one of the white rocking chairs, a wool blanket across her lap and a cup of coffee growing cold in her hands, watching the December morning mist burn off the valley below.
Six weeks since she'd jumped between boats in hurricane conditions. Six weeks since she'd been placed on administrative leave. Five weeks since she'd been quietly reinstated with what Harrison had called "a notation in your file that could be read as either a commendation or a reprimand, depending on who's reading it."
Politics. Everything in the FBI eventually came down to politics.
"You're brooding again," Gabe said from the doorway, carrying his own coffee and a plate of the inn's famous apple cider donuts. "I can tell by the way you're strangling that mug."
Beth looked down at her white-knuckled grip and consciously relaxed her fingers. "I'm not brooding. I'm thinking."
"About the case." Dr. Gabriel Romano knew her too well after nearly two years together, the last two months of which had been spent navigating the delicate dance of shared living space in his Dupont Circle condo. He settled into the chair beside her, close enough that she could smell his shampoo—the expensive stuff he insisted was worth the money, unlike her drug store brand that he claimed "smelled like institutional soap."
"About Phantom," she admitted. "It's been three weeks since the Banneker lab raid came up empty. Three weeks, and we're no closer to finding the Doctor."
The raid had been a disaster. By the time the joint task force had descended on the abandoned pharmaceutical building in Rockville, nothing remained but empty rooms that smelled of bleach and a few pieces of equipment too large to move quickly. The Doctor—whatever he was—had been warned. Someone in law enforcement, someone with access to operational planning, had tipped him off.
"You weren't even supposed to be part of that raid," Gabe reminded her gently. "Technically, you're not supposed to be working Phantom at all anymore. Harrison made that clear."
"Harrison says a lot of things." Beth took a sip of cold coffee and grimaced. "But people are still dying. Eighty-three confirmed Phantom deaths now across D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Richmond. And last week, a suspicious overdose in Pittsburgh that has all the hallmarks."
"Pittsburgh." Gabe offered her a donut, which she declined with a shake of her head. "It's spreading west."
"Like a disease. And we had him, Gabe. We had the location, the lab, everything. If someone hadn't leaked—"
"You don't know it was a leak. It could have been surveillance on their end. Counter-intelligence. These aren't street dealers; this is a sophisticated operation."
Beth wanted to argue, but he had a point. Everything about the Phantom operation suggested a level of organization usually associated with cartels or terrorist cells, not domestic drug manufacturing. The Doctor—a nickname that might be literal, given the pharmaceutical-grade quality of the product—had managed to stay completely off law enforcement's radar. No photos, no real name, no concrete leads except what Susan Tanner had provided before she died.
Susan Tanner. Former chemistry teacher turned poisoner, who'd used a modified version of Phantom to kill her students in some twisted attempt at "salvation." She'd spent her last weeks drifting in and out of consciousness at Penn Presbyterian, occasionally lucid enough to provide fragments of information. The Banneker lab had been her final gift to the investigation, delivered just hours before her heart finally gave out.
Beth pulled out her phone and opened the case file she wasn't supposed to have. Photos from the empty Banneker lab filled the screen—pristine rooms, spaces where equipment had obviously been removed, marks on the floor showing where heavy machinery had been positioned.
