Page 3 of Over Her Dead Body

I need somewhere else to go.

So I think about six days ago.

Six days ago, I was, by any reasonable measure, doing exceptionally well.

He pulls the bamboo free and adjusts his grip on my wrist.

“Last chance,” the man across the desk says.

Six days, it turns out, is all it takes to end up here: blood on the floor, a dead man’s name in my mouth, and the slow understanding that no one is coming to save me, because no one knows where I am.

I look at the window again. Third floor. I already know how that ends.

I look at the door. The man with the gun is still between me and it.

Then my eyes land on the thing he missed.

There you are.

Okay, I think.

Let’s see how this goes.

CHAPTER 1

EMMA

Six days earlier

Ioverslept.

By the time I opened my eyes, my flight had been in the air for forty-three minutes. Margot was on it. I was not.

I don’t oversleep. I have a system. Two alarms, a car booked the night before, and a very firm personal policy about not opening a second bottle of wine on a weeknight. Two of those three things happened last night. I’ll let you guess which one didn’t.

The alarms went off. The car arrived. The driver called four times. I slept through all of it.

In my defense—and there is no defense—the warning came somewhere around glass two. Nothing dramatic. Just the part of me that knows better clearing its throat.

I ignored it.

I was on the phone with Todd, from both the app and Boerne, who had just discovered I am taller than him in heels. I was distracted. Also annoyed. So I poured the third glass anyway.

Which is now even more of a problem than my height in heels. The Bauer estate sale starts Friday in Vienna. I spent six months valuing and cataloguing the collection; the condition reports are final, the lots are already there, and Margot is somewhere over the Atlantic without me, headed toward the hundred things that can still go wrong. I am supposed to be beside her when they do.

I also have forty-three emails I haven’t answered, a client who communicates exclusively in voice notes, and a boss who is going to hold this morning over me for the rest of my natural life.

At the end of the month, the partners meet to decide whether to make me one of them.

Which makes this a particularly bad morning to miss a flight.

There are two deals left between me and partnership. Bauer is the first. The second is a collector a current client is bringing to Austin after I return—no name yet, only a private referral and a number large enough to make secrecy seem tasteful.

Celeste has never said both deals determine my future. What she said was, “Close Bauer. Land the referral. Give us nothing else to discuss.”

Celeste prefers instructions that can survive litigation.

Partner means equity. A vote. A piece of the house I have spent ten years building.