stood flattened against the wall, his hand to his chest, inside a jacket, his head turned to face the door. In the shadows, she could hardly make out his profile, taking in his black shirt, the way his dark hair blended into the wall behind him. Not a server. No one she’d ever seen before.
He stood perfectly still as the door opened wider, and Sam tore her gaze from the stranger to the new arrival. The overhead bulb caught a glimmer of silver hair, instantly recognizable. What the hell was Josh—
The move was so fast, Sam barely saw the man’s hand flip from the jacket. She might have gasped at the sight of a freakishly long pistol, but the whoomf of sound covered her breath, the blast muffled like a fist into a pillow.
Joshua’s face contorted, then froze in shock. He folded to the floor, disappearing from her sight.
The instinct for self-preservation pushed Sam down behind the rack, her head suddenly light, her thoughts so electrified that she couldn’t pull a coherent one to the forefront. Only that image of Joshua Sterling getting a bullet in his head.
She closed her eyes but the mental snapshot didn’t disappear. It seared her lids, branded her brain.
Something scraped the floor and her whole being tensed. She squeezed the bottle in her right hand, finding balance on the balls of her feet, ready to pounce on whoever came around the corner.
She could blind him with the bottle. Crash it on his head. Buy time and help.
But no one came around the rack. Instead, she heard the sound of metal on metal, a click, and a low grunt from the front of the vault. What the hell?
Still primed to fight for her life, she stood again, just high enough to see the man up on a crate, deftly removing the video camera.
The security camera that was aimed directly at the back stacks.
She ducked again, but it was too late. She heard him working the screws in the wall, trying to memorize his profile. A bump in a patrician nose. A high forehead. Pockmarks in a grouping low on his cheek.
Dust danced under and up her nose, tickling, tormenting, teasing a sneeze. Oh, please, no.
She held her breath as the camera cracked off the wall, and the man’s feet hit the floor. In one more second, the door squeaked, slammed shut, and he was gone.
Could Joshua still be alive? She had to help him. She waited exactly five strangling heartbeats before sliding around the stacks and running up the middle aisle.
Lifeless blue eyes stared back at her, his face colorless as a stream of deep red blood oozed from a single hole in his temple. The bottle slipped out of her hands, the explosion of glass barely registering as she stared at the dead man.
God, no. God, no. Not again.
She dropped to her hands and knees with a whimper of disbelief, fighting the urge to reach out and touch the man who just minutes ago laughed with friends, explained a joke to his wife, ordered rare, expensive Bordeaux.
This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t be.
The blood pooled by his cheek, mixing with the wine. The smell roiled her stomach, gagging her as bile rose in her throat and broken glass sliced her knees and palms.
For the second time in her life, she’d seen one man take another’s life. Only this time, her face was caught on tape.
CHAPTER 2
Sam hatched her entire escape plan from the floor of her bedroom closet. There, with her laptop and phone, she figured out how to fashion a disguise, sneak out of her apartment in the middle of the night, and maybe not get caught and killed in the act. Maybe.
Until that very moment, though, she didn’t know where she would go once she got out. She needed a friend, obviously, but more than that, she needed someone who could help her find out just how close the police were to catching Joshua Sterling’s killer. ’Cause they sure as hell weren’t telling her anything.
And then, surfing through news stories on her computer, hidden in her closet with her apartment door barricaded, she saw the name and instantly had her answer.
Vivi Angelino. Normally, she would not be high on Sam’s list of friends—former friends, in this case, since they’d grown so far apart in the last three years—who could help in this particular jam. But seeing her byline as the author of the lead story on the Boston Bullet crime investigative website catapulted