God, how could she have been so reckless, so stupid?
The doorknob turned. She grabbed it—as if she could prevent whoever was there from getting inside. The knob was wrenched away. Light from the conference room pierced her hiding place. She blinked against the brightness and squinted. The barrel of an ancient-looking revolver emerged through the glare. Her gaze tracked from its muzzle up a man’s arm and then his torso, both covered in an expensive-looking, dark suit coat. Until she was staring into the face of a monster.
Her mind seized.
Reality seemed to contract, then expand. One second, she thought the carpet was rising up to smack her. The next, she realized she’d crumpled to the floor in a boneless heap at the man’s feet. Her thoughts blanked to nothingness except for the conviction that it wasn’t possible.
He wasn’t possible.
“You…,” said the raspy, eerily familiar voice. His menacing hand grabbed her hair. Its grip kept her from crawling away. He jerked her head up. The muzzle of the gun bit into her temple.
“No!” She stared at her captor and saw nothing but death. Her mind refused to process the rest.
The ruthless, emotionless logic she’d mastered since she was a teenager deserted her. She fought the all-consuming confusion that replaced it. She strained to focus. To really see him. But his features wouldn’t register. There was only the gun and the terror, the ominous sound of a vicious storm. And the absolute certainty that he was going to kill her.
“I don’t understand,” she said. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening.
“Kill the bitch,” said the man with the foreign inflection. “She’s heard everything we said.”
“No, please…” Shaw struggled against her captor’s hold, hating that she was begging, that she once more felt like a desperate teenager—petrified, fighting for her life, and crumbling under her fear. “I won’t tell anyone you were here. I swear.”
Pain burned across her scalp, her hair pulling out from its roots. She tried desperately to crawl away. Her legs tangled in something from the closet.
“Sorry, Shaw,” said the man restraining her. His tone was annoyed, hassled, maybe even a little amused, as if killing her were a special treat just for him. “It’s time for you to learn your true place in my world.”
She heard a click. The sound of a revolver’s hammer being cocked. She stared up at him in defiance, wanting to spit in his face so he’d know he hadn’t won.
Instead, she screamed when the gun fired and her world dissolved into darkness.
…
Cole Marinos jogged through biting-cold rain toward Atlanta Memorial Hospital’s ER entrance. The entire eastern seaboard had been socked in by slushy winter storms. It had been a bitch of a night to catch a flight in from New York, and then catch a cab to midtown from the airport.
Stepping inside, he shucked his leather jacket, which was soaked even though there’d only been a few feet between the cab and the sliding doors that now whooshed shut behind him. Rubbing a hand over his face and through his longer-than-regulation hair, he dripped water onto the admissions counter.
“Sorry.” He flashed his badge, then asked for the directions he required.
An older woman in a starched white shirt and pink jumper consulted her computer, then jerked a tissue from the box at her elbow.
“Sixth floor,” she grumbled, sopping up his mess. “Ask at the desk.” The button pinned to her shoulder said she was a hospitality volunteer. Evidently, three o’clock in the damn morning was no place for hospitality to make an appearance.
Just as Atlanta was no place for Cole himself tonight.
He draped his jacket over his shoulder, dampness soaking through his T-shirt. The foreboding that had hounded him since boarding the plane grew stronger as he strode to the central elevators, rode to the sixth floor, then followed a second set of directions—given by an equally irritable nurse—down the hallway to the right. After flashing his badge twice more at plain-clothed officers who were either Atlanta police detectives or federal marshals or, like Cole, FBI, he stopped at the room’s observation window and stared inside.
The patient was a fragile-looking blonde, even though he’d read she hit the private gym at her corporate headquarters seven days a week and was a devotee of several eastern meditative disciplines. The single light over the bed shrouded her in shadow. If it weren’t for the bandage covering the right side of her head where a bullet had grazed her skull, the breathtaking beauty would have appeared to be resting peacefully. Like a princess awaiting the hero who would kiss her back to awareness. Cole rubbed a hand across his still-damp neck, echoes from their childhood whispering through his mind. He brushed them away.