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Prologue
Harbor City
One Year Ago…
A shot cracked through the air.
“I don’t want to shoot you, Ivy, but I will,” Carlos Castillo called out from the room’s main entrance, swallowing back the bile brought up by seeing the woman he loved in the midst of a real-life murder spree. Or more truthfully, the real-life version of the woman he loved. Ivy was nothing like Scarlett, Ivy’s alter-identity and Carlos’s partner for the past three years in the online game Magic Battledome.
Ivy turned toward him, her eyes wide. “Zephyr?” Her use of his code name was a shiv between the ribs. “What are— You aren’t supposed to be here.”
He adjusted his aim. A red laser dot instantly appeared on her wrist above the gun. He didn’t want to shoot her, but she’d poisoned him and had her gun aimed at two innocent people. Killing Ivy might be his only option.
“Yeah, as I recently learned, some surprises suck.” That was one word for her nearly murdering him. He moved his weapon, shifting the ominous red dot down to her hand, then back up her arm and chest until it slid to rest between her eyes. “I’m even better at this in the real world than in Magic Battledome. Put the gun down, Ivy. Game over.”
Her left eye spasmed and her gun jiggled in her loose grip. “So do it, then.”
Abruptly, she dropped to one knee, escaping Carlos’s aim, and fired off three rapid shots at Tony Falcon and Sylvie Bissette.
Two of the bullets went wild.
One pinged off the chair above Sylvie’s head and ricocheted back toward Ivy, only just missing her.
Carlos didn’t think. He didn’t have time. His pulled the trigger, and the shot exploded through the room.
An oomph sounded.
Ivy crumbled to the ground.
Carlos hustled over, kicked the pistol out of her reach, and kneeled down, feeling for a pulse beneath the red hair tangled around her neck.
“Is she dead?” Tony asked, lowering Sylvie gently to the floor.
“Yeah.” Carlos stood.
“The ricochet?”
“No.” Carlos wiped his bloody hands on his pants, but it just smeared the redness across his palm. He rubbed harder, but it wouldn’t come off. “I shot her.”
“I’m sorry you had to do that, ’Los.”
He looked up at the Maltese Security owner who held Sylvie in his arms. The woman Tony loved was alive only because Carlos had killed Ivy.
“I’m not sorry.” And he almost meant it. He’d only known her as Ivy for a matter of days, but he’d loved her alter ego, Scarlett, in Magic Battledome for years. “Scarlett deserved more than to be Ivy in the real world.”
There hadn’t been a choice about pulling that trigger, but that didn’t make the cold void in his chest shrink. He’d killed part of himself with that bullet. Now it was time to bury it forever.
Chapter One
“To be irreplaceable, one must always be different.”
—Coco Chanel
Harbor City
Today…
Carlos Castillo surveyed the Thursday-night crowd at Feeny’s hole-in-the-wall bar. It was a step above a dive bar and several stories below what most people in Harbor City would call a respectable establishment, which made it perfect for Carlos and the other guys from Maltese Security when they needed to blow off a little steam after closing a case. It also happened to be the site of his impending public humiliation at the hands of his fellow investigators who’d come to Feeny’s with him.
“Don’t even think about pussying out, ’Los.” Cam Hardy tapped his shot glass against Carlos’s. “You lost the bet, you pay the price.”
Fuck. What human being could eat fifteen pickled eggs that had been sitting in a jar on the bar for God knew how long? Apparently Cam, who’d knocked up his success to the fact that neither he nor his live-in girlfriend, Drea, could cook for shit and his taste buds had gone into hiding.
“What about one of them?” Will Roscoe asked, nodding toward the trio of women in a corner booth.
“The redhead’s hot,” said Alex Lee before taking a long draw from his beer.
Carlos shot back the last of his shot before he said anything he’d regret about redheads. The last redhead he’d dated had nearly killed him—literally—and he’d had to return the favor.
“Not his type,” Cam said.
Unlike Roscoe and Alex, who were relative newbies to the team, Cam knew the real reason behind Carlos’s aversion to redheads. While Cam would shame Carlos into embarrassing himself in a bar full of people, he wouldn’t say anything about the shooting that had changed Carlos’s life forever.
Cam nodded toward the women in the booth. “The girl on the end is more his speed.”
Right at that moment, the woman in question slid out of the booth and stood up. She couldn’t be more than five-five even in the thigh-high leather boo
ts with their wicked high heels. She wore skin-tight jeans that clung to her legs like they were made for her tight body and a top made out of some sort of shimmery material that caught the dim lights when she walked, drawing his attention to the way her tits moved as she strutted across the bar like she owned the joint.
The full-body profile view was enough to make him reach for another shot, but then she pivoted at the bar, turning so she faced their table, and he couldn’t do a damn thing but stare. Almond-shaped brown eyes, full pink lips, and more than a hint of trouble in the way she tossed her long light brown hair and laughed at some undoubtedly lame joke from the bartender.
“Roll your tongue back in your mouth, ’Los.” Cam shook his head and finished his shot. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you still spent all of your free time pretending to be a warlock or some shit on the computer.”
The verbal nudge was more than enough to bring him back to reality. After the shooting, he’d replaced Magic Battledome role-play online gaming with the gym and had spent the past year working to make the team at Maltese realize there was more to him than just amazing computer geek skills. And as tonight’s celebration of a job well done proved, it had worked. He worked cases in real life now, not just at the keyboard.
