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CHAPTER ONE
SUMMER
Atlanta, Georgia
Ishoved 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.
