Chapter One
Summer
Atlanta, Georgia
I shoved open the restaurant’s back door to a wave of heat-sucking oxygen. My feet ached from waitressing, and all I wanted to do was fall in bed and sleep for a week. I’d spent too many hours slaving away for yet another double shift. Wispy hairs that’d escaped my ponytail stirred in a breeze sent straight from hell. The spidery strands stuck to my clammy skin.
The heavy door slammed behind me, and I stepped into the alleyway, turning left to head home on foot. I hoped the apartment was empty. I couldn’t deal with anything but silence and a date with my pillow.
My roommate, Lauralee, was back with her craptastic on-again, off-again mob boyfriend since he was in town on business. We’d had one too many glasses of cheap wine last night, and she’d run one scheme after another by me before I’d left for work at the ass crack of dawn. She wanted to extort money from her boyfriend, Ben Amato, over some conversation she’d overheard that she shouldn’t have.
The risks were significant, and we knew she could pay with her life. I didn’t want her to do it—and didn’t think she would follow through—but she saw the prize at the end and couldn’t let it go. We’d both grown up on the wrong side of town. To her, blackmailing him was her way out of that stigma and a fast track to a better life.
He was a Mafia thug—it was a bad idea all around. I’d met the man once, and that was enough to last a lifetime. Lauralee and I had worked too hard—too many extra shifts—to leave our trailer park origins behind and make it on our own to get whacked for easy money. If she was going forward with this plan, she needed to leave me out of it. And I told her so repeatedly.
Tiredness shadowed my steps along the cracked sidewalk. I blamed my roommate for my exhausted, overworked state, since she’d bought the boxed wine. The alcohol only encouraged her to yammer on late into the night with her crazy plan. Not only that, but she’d scared the heck out of me about what would happen if her hairbrained idea went wrong when she confronted Ben.
The backpack was key—for whatever reason. She didn’t say. I didn’t ask.
Regardless, I’d committed to memory and sworn an oath that if I had to make a break for it—her words—I’d take it with me. We’d even packed emergency bags with some clothes. So weird. The only reason I’d remembered my drunken promise was because I’d tripped over the loose floorboard in my bedroom getting ready for work.
I turned down an alley, trudged through it, and then made it to the backyard before I got to the stairs. I could practically feel the softness of my pillow beneath my head. So close.
Some sixth sense had me looking up, and I stopped midway in my climb up the stairs to the rear entrance of the apartment.
The back door was ajar.
Someone’s in my house.
I clutched the decrepit railing, jagged splinters biting into my palm, and fixed my gaze past the landing.
I froze, straining my ears. “Hello!” Adrenaline and fear chased my exhaustion away as I waited, but there was no response.
No out-of-place sounds alerted me to danger. I let another minute pass to be sure. When there was nothing, the tension from the possible break-in melted from between my shoulder blades, and I slumped against the rickety wood. I’d overreacted. It was probably Lauralee, who’d forgotten again to pull hard enough on the door to latch it shut.
A bead of sweat trickled down my back. The humid Georgia air was thick and would be even heavier in our dingy apartment. I trudged up the remaining stairs, my eyelids falling back to half mast, and shoved the door fully open, focusing only on reaching my bedroom and falling into a coma-like sleep.
My toe caught on something, and I lurched forward, stumbling over the kitchen’s time-worn linoleum floor, banging my leg into our garage-sale-special table. That was when I noticed the mess—and not Lauralee’s usual sloppiness but complete disarray. Cabinet doors were opened, the drawers’ contents emptied onto the floors. The stove was virtually clean but for that damn pan of hardened pasta from Lauralee’s dinner the night before. She’d sworn she would clean it up but hadn’t.
There was no way she made that mess. I mean, she was a certified slob, but our apartment had been tossed.
Fear crawled up my spine. I had been correct. Someone was inside.
I pulled at my hair and vowed to get myself together. I had to get out of there.
A floorboard creaked, and I tensed to run just as Ben Amato rounded the corner from the living room into the kitchen.
“What are you doing here?” I shrieked. Surprise held me immobile. “Where’s Lauralee?”
Had they fought?
A slow, malicious smile curved Ben’s thin lips as he closed the distance between us. His hand shot out, his palm spanning the width of my neck. I squeaked in shock as his fingers tightened, limiting my air supply.
My hands flew to where he held me. I tried to pry his meaty fingers free, digging my nails in for purchase. He observed me as if I was an insignificant bug, one he wanted to crush under his shoe.
“Summer.” He pulled me closer. “This is going to be fun. I could have brought others to help me kill you, but I thought it would be more… intimate with just the two of us.”
I wanted to hurl and would have, but I couldn’t fully inflate my lungs. I wheezed air as if through a pinched straw. Panic coursed through my body, and spots danced around the edges of my vision.
“Why don’t you make this easy and tell me where she hid the video?”
What? I frantically wracked my brain, trying to figure out what he was talking about. Then it came to me—she’d left late last night right before I’d passed out. Blackmail. Lauralee had gone through with her cockamamie idea to get money out of Ben. I’d barely paid attention to her. Now I wish I would have.
He loosened his fingers just enough for me to suck in a lungful of air. His focus dropped to my heaving chest, and I didn’t waste his distraction. I kicked him in the shin then kneed him in the balls.
His hand spasmed on my bruised throat then relaxed. I jerked back, free from his grasp, and took one step to the side, the exit in sight. Then he retaliated. The sound of the back of his hand connecting to my cheek echoed in the small kitchen. Blinding pain shot across my cheekbone, and I stumbled until my back slammed into the stove, and I automatically braced myself against the rusty appliance. The grates rattled from impact, and my wrist connected with the pan. The pan!
Ben lunged forward, but I’d already grabbed the handle. I slammed the pan into the side of his head with a metallic clang. He staggered, slightly dazed. I didn’t wait. I pushed off the stove, throwing my weight behind the next swing. When it connected, his eyes rolled back. His body crashed to the floor. I dropped my makeshift weapon and bolted for the door.
With my hand on the knob, I paused as if an invisible string tethered me inside. I couldn’t leave. Not yet. He might not have found the thing Lauralee had planned to use against him, and she’d made me promise to take it with me.
I raced out of the kitchen and toward my shoebox-sized bedroom down the hall where she’d stashed the evidence.
In my room, my heart racing a million miles a minute, I fell to my knees. I yanked the loose floorboards free and threw them aside. My fingers curled around the leather. Once free of its hiding place, I secured the backpack and tightened the straps. Next, I threw my purse into the prepacked duffel hidden partially behind my laundry hamper then slung it over my shoulder before pivoting and running to the front of our apartment. No way was I going out the back where Ben was sprawled over the linoleum floor, blocking the path to the rear exit.
Hope bloomed in my chest when I saw the front door. I was going to make it. I twisted the doorknob then pulled. No one stood there. I could practically taste freedom as I raced along the covered outdoor corridor then flew down the rickety stairs, jumping over the last few. I landed with a jarring thud on the cement sidewalk.
I had to put distance between us. My feet slapped against the gravel that lined the alleyway behind our run-down apartment. Air sawed in and out of my lungs, my neck burning the entire time. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes as the horror set in. Adrenaline propelled me, holding the shock at bay.
By the time I got to the gas station a mile away, I was close to collapsing. I slowed when I was within range of the cameras, keeping to the vegetation that surrounded one side of the old building with neon beer signs that flashed against the fading light. Not wanting to risk getting caught, I slipped past the tree line then dropped to the ground in the shelter of a wide oak. I couldn’t stay, but it was a good enough place to rest for a few minutes. Then I would figure out where to go next.
Mind racing, I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes, pondering my next move. I couldn’t think about Lauralee and whether she was okay—not now.
I was going to have to go far away. I knew it. Ben was there for whatever business his New York mob family had, but I had no doubt he would stay to search for me and for whatever incriminating evidence Lauralee had on him. This was bad. If I didn’t put enough distance between us, I was dead.
I could kiss college goodbye. Dammit. The scholarship my high school math teacher had helped me get for a full ride wouldn’t wait for me. And I’d just paid for textbooks with what was left of my savings. I was almost broke. The degree was supposed to help me with a career, a future, an escape from poverty. A few more tears rolled down my cheeks, and I hugged my arms tighter around my body.
Who will help me?
Then it came to me. Alison, the old lady who lived in the trailer park I’d grown up in already had. If I could find the name and number that she’d given me for her sister, then I had a way to get a job out of state, far from where Ben would continue to look.
I yanked my purse out of the duffel I’d stashed it in then dug through the meager contents. Somehow, Alison had known I might need help. My fingers brushed against a soft slip of paper she’d given me. On it, Alison had written the name of her sister, Tracy, who owned a temp business in California. I couldn’t stay in Georgia—Ben would find me and finish what he’d started.
I had to leave, and that piece of paper was my ticket out.
