Story Notes

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, locations, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Certain elements may be inspired by real places, historical contexts, or personal experiences; however, all characters, dialogue, and narrative events have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes.

First edition.

Summary

At six years old, I survived a night I shouldn’t have. My mother and I were running for our lives when Detective Adrian Hale stepped between us and the men who wanted me dead. He didn’t survive—but we did. I grew up remembering flashes of that night: gunfire, rain, my mother’s hand dragging me through the dark… and a presence I could never explain. Now the same threat is rising again. The same secret is bleeding into the open. And the same presence is back—closer, stronger, impossible to ignore. Someone died for us. Someone is hunting us. And someone is still watching over me.

Genre: Thriller

Author: R.R. RISCH

Status: Complete

Chapters: 30

Rating: 5.0 (2 reviews)

Age Rating: 16+

PREFACE

Guardian entities do not announce themselves.

Survival is their only signature.

— Classified appendix, Project OZ

I was six years old the night Detective Adrian Hale died for me.

I didn’t understand it then—the gunfire, the rain, the way my mother’s hand trembled as she dragged me through an abandoned industrial park. I only knew the terror in her breath and the small, fierce comfort of my stuffed bunny pressed to my chest.

What I didn’t know—what I couldn’t have known—was that a man I had met only minutes earlier had already made a choice that would shape the rest of my life. A choice to stand between the people hunting my mother. A choice to take the bullets meant for me.

For years, I remembered that night in fragments: the echo of a shout, the flash of a muzzle, the metallic taste of fear. But there was something else, too—something I never told anyone. A feeling. A presence. A sense that someone was guiding us through the dark, nudging us toward safety when every shred of logic said we shouldn’t have survived.

I didn’t know his name then. I didn’t know the truth about the men chasing us, or the secret they were willing to kill to protect. I didn’t know why the signs glowed, or why I felt warmth at my back when the world around us was so cold.

But I know now.

This is the story of the man who died for me… and the guardian who stayed.

He was the one who called me Bunny. I didn’t truly know him—not then—only the name he left behind to keep us safe. And the man who died for me left a signature I wouldn’t understand until much later:

OZ.

And long before I understood any of it—before the truth unraveled and the past came for us again—it all began with a thin file in the hands of a detective who refused to look away.

The Case He Died For

Story Notes

Summary

PREFACE

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