Chapter 1
Saoirse
The man drops to his knees before I hear the gunshot.
That’s the order of it—the thud of weight hitting wet concrete, the choked-animal sound a person makes when they understand what’s coming, and then the shot. One shot. The sound isn’t what movies taught me to expect. It’s smaller. Flatter. Like a door slamming in a building two streets over.
I press both hands over my mouth and crouch lower behind the dumpster. I was just cutting through the alley. That’s all.
The laundromat on Keefe banned me from sleeping in their chairs three nights ago—new management, new policy, nothing personal—and I need to get to the one on Paulina. Which is why I’m crouched in this dark alley in three inches of rainwater with my duffel strap cutting into my shoulder and my knee throbbing where I caught it on the chain-link coming over the fence.
I wish I weren’t here. I wish I hadn’t seen anything.
Through the four-inch gap between the dumpster and the brick wall, I watch a man straighten. He doesn’t look at what he’s done. His head doesn’t bow. His hands don’t shake. Hedoesn’t do anything that suggests the last ten seconds were any different from the ten seconds before them.
He turns away from the body with the same neutral economy he’d use to push back from a desk, and the absence of reaction scares me more than the gunshot did. A man who flinches is a man who feels. This one does neither.
He hands something to one of the two men flanking him. His voice carries a low, flat, single instruction I can’t parse, and one of the men moves toward the body.
The security light above the loading dock catches his face.
It’s blood-spattered. Hollow-eyed. Not angry, not satisfied. No expression at all. I grew up in houses where I learned early what dangerous men look like, and none of them wore this kind of blank. This is worse. This is a man whose face has forgotten it's supposed to perform. Or doesn’t care.
I teeter slightly, and my elbow hits an empty beer bottle. It rolls maybe six inches and clinks against the base of the dumpster. Crap.
His head turns.
Not toward the noise. Toward me. As if he'd already triangulated the bottle to the dumpster and back to my body before the glass stopped moving.
Most people would freeze, wait to see what might happen. I don't freeze. Freezing is how you die. I run.
In a split second, I’m on my feet and over the chain-link in one ugly scramble. My jacket tears on the top, but I don’t stop. I hit the pavement on the other side, stumble, scrape my palms raw on the asphalt, catch myself, and sprint like my life depends on it. Because it does.
The duffel swings against my hip. Rain stings my face.
Behind me, boots pound on concrete. A long, driving stride that doesn't sound like it takes any effort to cover ground.
I run with everything I've got, and at some point, the footsteps stop. Just stop. They're there, and then they're not. Like a switch thrown.
I run eight more blocks before I press myself into a doorway and try to quiet my breathing. My pulse is hammering so hard I can feel it in my back teeth.
He stopped.
He could have caught me. Even at a dead sprint, I'm five-foot-nothing with a fifteen-pound bag—I am not hard to run down, and he wasn't slow. No. He stopped because he chose to, and the only reason a man like that lets a witness go is because running doesn't change the outcome.
I know what that means. It means he saw my face.
I pull the duffel strap higher and start walking. But the back of my neck prickles with a cold certainty that somewhere behind me, a man with hollow eyes and a dead man's blood splattered on his face is confident he’s going to find me.
Chapter 2
Declan
Three days. I've learned a lot about my little fleeing witness in the past three days.
What started with a grainy still from a bodega camera of a young woman with dark blonde braided hair, a duffel bag, and terror written in every line of her body turned into info from informants on the street. Then, finally, data from my IT specialist who scoured the internet and confirmed what I already suspected. She's local, transient, and alone.
I know all about her history. She's no one. One of the hundreds of people in this city with nobody to care about them, who nobody will miss when they're gone.
