Unbelievable, he thinks.
It feels deeply symbolic, this theft.
Not enough to leave me. You have to take the bloody tools of my trade, too.
He shoves the chair aside and trudges toward the doorway. He can hear crying now—loud, gulping, childlike sobs—as he struggles to cram his feet back into his shoes. Millie. If this is another prank, he’ll find the culprit and throttle them. Both for upsetting the poor girl and for dragging him out of a perfectly good sleep. (He’d bet money that Jaxon was to blame the first time around. After all, nothing like a good old-fashioned scare to make a young lady seek comfort in your arms. But enough is enough.)
“What in god’s name...” he rasps, mouth dry as he storms down the hall.
Millie’s standing, shoulders hunched, at the bottom of the stairs, Priscilla just behind her, rubbing her back. The poor girl sobs so hard that she lets out a little hiccup before turning and burying her face in the woman’s pink sweater.
But Priscilla’s head snaps up at the sound of his arrival, a stricken expression on her face. Her palm shoots up into the air. “Malcolm, stay right there. Don’t look!”
He bristles at the order. Whatever it is, he’s sure he can handle it just as well as aromancewriter.
So as he rounds the top of the stairs, he looks down.
Yellow sheets of paper trail like breadcrumbs down the carpeted steps, leading his eyes piece by piece to the landing where the staircase pivots before continuing to the foyer. A typewriter sits, overturned, in the center of the landing, bent oddly, as if someone’s flung the contraption down the stairs, but there’s something else. Malcolm blinks, struggling to make the image coalesce into something he can understand. It’s not that he doesn’t see it, the pale limbs at odd angles, the sweep of mahogany hair. It’s simply that there are things the eye sees and the mind rejects. Brain and body refusing to work together, and then, which one do you trust?
He doesn’t remember starting down the stairs, but now he can’t stop. He is on the landing, staring down at Sienna, her cheek turned away.
Malcolm sinks to his knees. “God, no... please God, no,” he whispers.
He goes to brush stray strands of his wife’s hair from her face but then stops, his hand hovering over the terrible wound just above her ear, the place where her skull caves in instead of out. At last the Scotch turns on him, and he scrambles back just in time to heave his guts into a potted plant.
Priscilla was right: He shouldn’t have looked.
If he’d onlylistened. Sienna’s always complaining that he neverlistens.
Malcolm will regret not listening for the rest of his life.
Chapter Two
Fourteen Years Earlier
MALCOLMBUCHANAN IS WELL AND TRULY FUCKED.
It’s almost midnight, and he is sitting at the hotel bar, nursing his third Scotch and tapping his pen against the paper as if the steady rhythm might coax the words out.
So far, no luck.
He parted ways with his agent, Harry, three months ago. It was mutual, except for the part where Harry said, “It isn’t working out,” and then explained that what publishers were really looking for was something that hadn’t been done before.
“No shit, Harry,” he said, before trying to explain that crime was as much about the formula as breaking it.
The agent, no longerhisagent, pressed on, as if to drive the point home.
“The work’s not bad, Mal,” he said. “It’s just... not good enough to stand out. Not in this market.” This market, which cares more about novelty than novels, and has publishers pushing out good old-fashioned crime for books that, half the time, don’t even open with a body.
“Crime still sells,” insisted Harry. “It just has to do somethingunexpected. Take Arthur Fletch. He always finds a way to make it new.”
Great, thought Malcolm, then, and now. All he has to do is take a page from one of the most successful names in publishing. All he has to do is be Arthur Fletch.
He looks down at the scribbles in his notebook, his conference pass shoved between the pages as a makeshift bookmark. It has been three years since his last book, which feels like a lifetime, especially since sales are dipping dangerously low, and he is spending more time on the road, filling out panels and giving guest lectures to bored college students who care less about the craft than seeing their name on a book.
If he isn’t careful, he’ll become one of those writers who teach more than they write, and then one of those writers who teach, andneverwrite, and eventually the writing part will be forgotten, a footnote in his history. (There is a reason, after all, for the saying that those who can’t do, teach.)
And Malcolm Buchanan will be damned if he lets that happen.
