Chapter 1
Clare
The snow started after midnight.
I stood at my kitchen window watching fat flakes drift past streetlights, collecting on the sills of empty warehouses across the street. The industrial district looked desolate in winter, skeletal buildings, cracked pavement, everything gone quiet except the river’s distant rush.
Sleep wasn’t happening. Cold tea in my hands. Snow blanketing a neighborhood most people avoided after dark.
The radiator clanked behind me. My breath fogged when I exhaled despite two calls to the landlord. Two promises to fix it.
I turned from the window. Dumped the tea.
Metal crashed against concrete outside.
Sharp. Loud enough to cut through snow-muffled silence and spike my pulse.
I froze.
Nothing. Wind whistling through gaps in warehouse walls. Snow tapping glass.
Then again, not a crash. Something dragging. Metal scraping stone.
My hand went to my phone. Automatic. But police took thirty minutes to respond to calls from this neighborhood. Forty if it snowed. I’d learned that during my second week here, reporting someone breaking into the warehouse next door. They’d shown up the next morning, bored and annoyed I’d bothered calling.
Coat first. Flashlight from under the sink. Then, hesitation, fingers hovering, the knife from the drawer by the door.
Stupid. This was stupid.
But I’d grown up in neighborhoods like this. Learned early that ignoring trouble didn’t make it disappear. Sometimes you looked it in the eye, made it clear you weren’t easy prey.
The alley hit me with cold that stole my breath. Snow fell heavily now, covering the ground in white that looked clean in the dark.
Deceptive.
“Hey!” My voice carried across the empty space, authoritative and firm. The tone that usually sent squatters shuffling off to find somewhere else to collapse. “You can’t be here!”
Silence.
I swept the flashlight beam across the alley. Caught something dark against brick.
Not trash.
A person.
And blood, Jesus Christ, so much blood, black against white snow, trailing from the drainage tunnel at the far end like something had dragged itself out of the river.
I moved forward. Nurse training overriding everything screaming run.
Assess. Stabilize. Get help.
The flashlight found his face.
Male. Early thirties. Blood matted dark hair to his skull, running into his left eye. He squinted against the light, face pale beneath smears of dirt and worse. His shoulder sat wrong, anterior dislocation, the angle unmistakable. Tactical gear hung in shreds around his torso, soaked through and dripping river water.
He’d been in the water. In this weather.
My stomach dropped.
