Morally Malice: Malice, #12

By K'Anne Meinel

Alice is tired of the killing; she wants a nice, normal life.  Circumstances won’t let her though, and although she has tried to do the “right” thing, the “moral” thing, life won’t allow her to do anything but what she needs to do to protect her family from those who would hurt them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shadoe Publishing
• Release date: Jan 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781497353237

K'Anne Meinel

K’Anne Meinel è una narratrice prolifica, autrice di best seller e vincitrice di premi. Al suo attivo ha più di un centinaio di libri pubblicati che spaziano dai racconti ai romanzi brevi e di lungo respiro. La scrittrice statunitense K’Anne è nata a Milwaukee in Wisonsin ed è cresciuta nei pressi di Oconomowoc. Diplomatasi in anticipo, ha frequentato un'università privata di Milwaukee e poi si è trasferita in California. Molti dei racconti di K’Anne sono stati elogiati per la loro autenticità, le ambientazioni dettagliate in modo esemplare e per le trame avvincenti. È stata paragonata a Danielle Steel e continua a scrivere storie affascinanti in svariati generi letterari. Per saperne di più visita il sito: www.kannemeinel.com. Continua a seguirla… non si sa mai cosa K’Anne potrebbe inventarsi!

Book preview

Table of Contents

MORALLY MALICE

~MORALLY MALICE~ | BOOK 12

BLOWN AWAY

CHAPTER ONE | REMEMBRANCES

CHAPTER TWO | THE ESCAPE

TO BE CONTINUED...

MORALLY MALICE

A Novella by K’Anne Meinel

E-Book Edition

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K’Anne Meinel on E-Book

2nd Edition Copyright © K’Anne Meinel January 2018

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MORALLY MALICE

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K’Anne Meinel is available for comments at [e-mail] as well as on Facebook, her blog @ http://kannemeinel.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @ kannemeinelaim.com, or on her website @ www.kannemeinel.com if you would like to follow her to find out about stories and book’s releases or check with

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~MORALLY MALICE~

BOOK 12

Something woke her.  She didn’t know what, but some sense was screaming in her head to wake up and wake up NOW.  She obeyed it, knowing that her senses were fined tuned a little differently than most.  She slipped out of bed, glancing at Kathy’s side to hear her snoring slightly.  Walking on bare feet, she slipped out of the bedroom and down the hall.  Listening carefully, she tried to identify what, if anything, had awoken her.  She heard the dog from the girl’s room growling softly.  She headed for the balcony to downstairs and stopped short of coming out of the shadows. 

Looking down into the living room, she glanced out of the corners of her eyes, knowing that looking straight on she wouldn’t see the shadows.  She saw movement, and her eye glanced at it and then past it to make out the shape of a man.  She was certain it was a man by his size moving about the room.  She wondered if he had on night vision goggles, something that would give him a distinct advantage over her own vision.

The wide-open aspect of the stairwell meant she couldn’t creep down them unobserved, but she could watch them from her vantage point.  She watched as he made his way through the living room, heading for the stairs down to her offices and the weight room.  Once he was out of sight, she quickly followed down the stairs from the upper floors, avoiding the one step that always gave the children away because it creaked.  She’d been meaning to fix that forever, but life seemed to get in the way.  She quickly went through the central level to follow him down the stairs, keeping her eyes darting about, looking out of the corners to see any other movements, hoping he had come alone.

She found him in the office rifling through her desk, using a pen light to see.  Since nothing of note was in there, she knew he would find a dead end, in more ways than one.  She ducked into the workout area and picked up some light weights, balancing them carefully in her hands so they could be used quickly and effectively.  When she returned to the office she saw him trying to access her many computers, an impossible task at best to the unknowing.  Even a computer expert would have had difficulty accessing her encrypted portals to the many things that she used her computers for.  As an analyst and investment broker she was well covered with the many needs of someone who would have so many computers.  She watched as he swore under his breath at the fingerprint he thought was necessary to enter the one computer.  She nearly laughed aloud since it was a retina scan that was necessary.  It was just disguised to thwart the unknowing.  It was nice to know that her safety precautions that were in place to protect her family, to protect her extra-curricular activities, her life...worked.

She watched as he gave up on the desk and the bank of computers and looked around the room.  She stayed well within the shadows near the door, so he didn’t see her.  She didn’t move at all, so as not to draw attention to herself or give her presence away.  She saw when his eyes lighted on the pictures on the wall.  It was the third picture frame, the one between the shelves that garnered the most attention since it contained a dummy safe behind it.  Sure, Alice and Kathy kept unimportant documents in this one since it was a real actual wall safe, but the real treasure was beneath his feet in the floorboards under the area rug.  Of course, she wasn’t about to tell him that as she watched him play with the safe.  Even this safe, an illusion of what someone like they might keep in their home, was difficult to access.  It took him at least fifteen minutes, and Alice had to admire his tenacity before he got through all the security codes she had in place.  It was as he was reaching into the actual safe that Alice hit him up both sides of the head with the weights in her hands.

She chose the placement carefully since he hadn’t heard her catlike walk behind him, and she had plenty of time to place herself and plan out her line of attack.  He was a big man, a very big man, and while she couldn’t quite make out his features, she was certain he had to have something to do with one of their past indiscretions.  As the weights made contact with his ears and skull, she watched dispassionately as his body slumped to the floor.  She had hoped to knock his equilibrium off and had been prepared to physically fight him if necessary, but her surprise had been absolute.  Her surprise over actually killing him was not apparent.  She used his penlight to search him and found nothing but a set of car-rental keys in his pockets.  She glanced around the room, considering her options, turned and closed the safe, and then headed for the front door, which she found slightly ajar from where he had entered.  She admired his handy-work at not setting off their top of the line security system.  She herself knew how hard this particular system was to bypass, and she realized he had to of had an in at the service she used.  Pulling a set of car gloves from the table in the hall, she headed outside.

She strolled down their driveway in her pajamas, looking around to see if she saw any movement.  Coco had joined her, and she glanced at the golden retriever occasionally to see her reactions to anything she might sense.  She realized it had been the dog’s growls that had awoken her in this early morning break in.  Not just the growls though, something else had told Alice that her family might be in danger.  She quickly climbed the gate as she didn’t have the key to their gate door on her and then cursed as the spikes on the gate caught her pajamas and tore them.  She would have slid open the gate from the key code panel, but she didn’t want a recording of it opening on the computers.  Coco watched unhappily that she wasn’t included in this part of their walk, her normally aloft tail sinking in her disappointment as she watched Alice walk rapidly to the parked car.

Using his keys, she entered the rented car and began to search it.  She could smell the smoke of a cigarette, and while she knew that a lot of car rental places discouraged smoking in their cars, they couldn’t actually prevent it.  She found his wallet and quickly memorized the information contained inside it before returning it to the exact spot she found it.  She read through the contract and nothing seemed out of the ordinary for that either.  It was the cigarettes that gave him away.  The matchbox told her volumes, and she pocketed it.  There was nothing else of value in the car other than his hotel key, and this was simply white