Chapter 1
Kat
“Damn it.”
I peered at my hand in the dim light behind the bar. I’d reached for a wine glass without realizing it had a jagged chip in the rim. I’d sliced my fingertip on the broken glass, and blood welled out, dark and red.
I grabbed a cocktail napkin, wrapped it around my finger, and gestured to Chris, my fellow bartender. “Cover for a second. I have to clean this up.”
He frowned at me through the messy lock of dark blond hair falling over his forehead. Chris was the perfect embodiment of the Nashville would-be musician who had ended up as a bartender instead, complete with longish hair and unkempt beard. “We’re about to get busy. The band is warming up.”
“I know.” I brushed past him, squeezing my finger. No one wanted to be served a drink with bloody fingerprints on it. “I’ll be right back.”
I felt his glare on my back as I opened the bar entry one-handed and walked down the back hall to the bathrooms. Tonight, like every night, Knoxy’s had a live band booked, though it wouldn’t be one of the better bands that worked the Nashville circuit. We were on the outer edge of the main tourist strip, and a lot of our customers were low-rent business travelers from the nearby motels. Guys in cheap suits don’t spend a lot of money, so we always booked the cheaper bands, the ones who were always available, even last minute.
Tonight’s band looked hung over, but the guitarist still managed to give me a wink as I turned down the corridor toward the bathrooms. He was well over forty, with the dyed-black hair of a sometime Elvis impersonator and a face as hard as granite. The first thing I’d learned when I got to Nashville two years ago was still true: Musicians were literally the worst. They’d try to screw anything that moved, even when they were untalented, hung over, and ugly as sin.
I ignored the guitarist and made my way down the dark hallway, elbowing the door to the ladies’ room open. I washed my hand in the sink, dabbing the cut with hand soap as my best shot at disinfecting it. The cut bled nastily for a minute or two, then started to slow as pain throbbed through my finger.
Outside, I could hear the band tuning up and the shouts of the wait staff as they moved back and forth from the kitchen. It was noisy, but it was so familiar to me that I could probably fall asleep to the sound. How many bars had I worked in, almost exactly like this one? How many late nights had I slogged through, wiping grimy bar tops and mopping sticky floors? How many passes had I fended off? How many times had I heard comments about my hair, my tits, my ass?
I threw the bloody napkin in the garbage and grabbed a Kleenex from the dispenser, wrapping my finger tightly again. There was no one else in the bathroom, and I glimpsed myself in the mirror. I was too thin. My golden-brown skin was pale with exhaustion and my long, black hair lay listless over my shoulders. I had shadows under my eyes. The harsh light in here did me no favors, and I looked every minute of my thirty-five years. In another year or two, I’d have no right to criticize the washed-up guitarist on the stage outside. I’d look almost as bad as he did.
What the hell am I doing here?
I didn’t work at Knoxy’s because I loved bartending so goddamned much. I worked here because bartending was what I knew, because I’d worked in almost a dozen places just like it. I wasn’t even in Nashville because I loved it. It was just another place to go, a city to stay in for a while until I decided to leave.
My parents would be horrified if they could see me right now. Their precious princess, wearing snug jeans and a top that was very nearly a black bustier, tending yet another bar for a bunch of creeps.
Well, fuck my parents. They had nothing to say about my life anymore.
Absently, I dropped my hand and ran a finger over the front of my jeans pocket, feeling the slight indent there. A circle. A ring. I’d never wear it, and yet I’d never been able to get rid of it either. Over the years, it had become a good luck charm. I put it in my pocket every night when I went to work. I never took the ring out and looked at it, never put it on. I just kept it in my pocket and touched it there sometimes. It was a memory that I’d been someone else once. That this tired-looking bartender wasn’t the only thing I was.
Once upon a time, I’d been…
I wasn’t going to think about that now. My finger had stopped bleeding, so I tossed out the Kleenex and started for the bathroom door as a couple of girls in their twenties came in. They were laughing, already half drunk, probably in the middle of a bar crawl. One was wearing a halter top and the other was wearing a complicated wrap thing in fabric of glittery silver. They had fake eyelashes and glossy lips, and they didn’t even see me as they passed me. Their gazes slid over me as if I was wallpaper.
I’d been that young once. I’d been giddy and horny and on top of the world. I’d also been in love.
Now it was thirteen years later, and everything had changed.
I walked back out into the hall, letting the door bang shut behind me.
The band was justshort of awful. They could carry a tune, but just barely; they could cover a few big hits, but they couldn’t manage anything too difficult. The bar-hopping girls stayed only forty-five minutes or so, long enough to down two rounds of shots. I could see the guys in the band visibly wilt when they left, taking their sparkle and gloss with them.
I finished out my shift on autopilot, serving drinks and trying not to think. The band finished—mercifully—at twelve thirty, and at one we started hustling everyone out, getting the last drunks out the door. There wasn’t enough business on a weeknight to stay open any later. It was my turn to close, so Chris went home, leaving me alone in the empty bar.
I was used to this, too—being alone in a dark bar in the middle of the night, cleaning up. Getting home at three in the morning wasn’t the safest way to live, but the work had made me tough, and I was used to it. I was good at paying attention to my gut, picking out guys who looked at me too long or made one too many off-key jokes. I paid attention to my surroundings, especially at night. And I had taken some self-defense classes, so I at least knew to put my heel into a man’s kneecap or knee him in the balls if he got too close.
But tonight seemed calm. Even the last drunks had been docile, hardly arguing when we sent them home. I put up the chairs, mopped the floor, cleaned up behind the bar. Like with every establishment I’d worked at, I had told the management that no, I would not park my car in their dingy, pitch-dark back parking lot, filled with empty beer bottles and rapists. Instead, my car was parked in a well-lit lot across the street, which was empty now but was lit with street lamps. It was so close I could actually see my car from the front window of the bar.
When everything was done, I put my purse over my shoulder, killed the lights, put my coat on, and stepped outside, keying in the security code behind me. The night was cold and damp, with barely a breath of breeze. It was February, which was unpredictable here. Cool, though sometimes you lucked out with warm, sunny days. Sometimes, when you weren’t so lucky, you got snow. You just had to roll with it. There was no snow tonight, just a midnight chill that came with the sun being long gone.
My boots clicked on the pavement as I crossed the sidewalk and checked the street before I headed across. Despite the chill through my thin coat and the smell of old beer, it was nice to be outside for the first time all night. I inhaled deeply and fished for my keys in my bag, keeping my gaze on my car.
When I stepped onto the opposite sidewalk, a voice came from beside me. “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?”
I turned my head.
Whoever was behind me was fast. I was hit between the shoulder blades, my feet kicked out from beneath me as I fell to the ground. I hit the sidewalk on my left elbow and made an oof sound as pain jarred up the bone. Someone kicked me in the back, getting me in the kidneys, and in front of my face I saw a second pair of feet, clad in boots, coming toward me. One of the feet lifted to kick me in the face.
I swerved away and the man’s toe clipped my ear. I tried to roll, but the man behind me kicked me again. I heard a car roll up and a car door open. Warm blood from my ear coursed down the side of my face. I started to scream.
“Shut the fuck up,” one of the men said, and I got a fist to the cheekbone. My head hit the concrete. Powerful arms dragged me toward the car at the curb and my coat and shirt rode up, my bare skin scraping painfully against the ground. Another pair of arms lifted my kicking legs. I realized with distant shock that they were trying to put me in their car. On the side of the street. Right now. And they were about to succeed.
I screamed again and grasped the edge of the open car doorway, locking my arms and pushing back. Why was no one coming to help me? These men were stronger than me, but I was more powerful than I looked. I wasn’t a petite, wilting flower. I was five-six and lean with muscle. I twisted and screamed, and when a big hand tried to land over my mouth, I bit it. I tasted blood. I got another punch for that, but I still didn’t let go. I gripped the edges of the car door, refusing to be pushed inside, and screamed for all I was worth.
Then one of the men slammed the door.
The pain was unbearable. My fingers, my wrist, my forearm—they all felt like they’d been crushed. I lost my grip on the car as my arm fell limp, and this time the scream coming from my throat was agony. The side of my face was wet with blood.
“Get her in,” someone said as the world faded out and in. Big hands grabbed me again.
And then I heard it at last. Another voice, far off. “Hey! What are you doing to that woman?”
Another voice, and footsteps. “I’m calling the cops! Let her go!”
The big hands tried to get me into the car one last time, but even through the haze of pain, I still fought him. Even though I was bloody and my jaw was swollen and sore, I still screamed.
The men dropped me. The doors slammed. The car pulled away, and the world went black.