Chapter 1
Chapter One
CHARLOTTE
Sunlight shone through the open blinds of my window, illuminating my figure in a warm, golden glow as I stood in front of the full-length mirror and stared at my reflection.
Happiness and sunshine were a contradiction to the emotions swirling inside of me as I took stock of the litany of scars that peppered my face and body.
Wounds that had healed but left reminders behind in the form of physical imperfections.
Most specifically, the pink puckered scar on my abdomen a couple inches above and to the right of my belly button.
There was another that cut right through the arch of my left eyebrow that I could fortunately cover up whenever I filled my brows in, and another that slashed across my right cheekbone.
Then there was the thin silvery line that angled across the bridge of my nose—a bridge that was no longer straight as an arrow thanks to having been broken.
The scars might have been months old, but if I paid them close enough attention like I was doing right then, I could still feel the burn of the skin opening up when each of the wounds had been created.
As it usually did whenever I started to really study myself, my vision began to grow fuzzy, and I found myself getting lost inside my own head.
There were some people in the world who led charmed lives. Most others were happy to live ordinary lives, filled with ups and downs, happy times and sad.
Then there are those like me.
I wasn’t one of the fortunate few who led a charmed life. Hell, I wasn’t even lucky enough to be one of the majority. More times than not, I’d have given anything to be blissfully ordinary.
The downs I lived through were nearly constant.
Each day felt like a tumble even lower than the one before.
Ugliness followed me around like a putrid black cloud everywhere I went.
For every good day I experienced, there were countless bad ones that followed.
For every happy moment, guaranteed sadness would follow in its wake.
It was a crushing weight I couldn’t get out from under no matter how hard I tried, but I must have been a glutton for punishment because no matter how many times I got knocked down, I always forced myself back up.
No matter how many bad days I experienced, I couldn’t let go of that microscopic glimmer of hope that things might get better. Even though they never did.
Most people would have learned their lesson and given up hope for a turnaround, accepting the bad and learning to live with it, letting it taint them and turn them into something or someone else altogether. But despite my hard exterior, at my center I was still a soft, gooey optimist.
And it was that optimism that had gotten me into so much damn trouble.
In my attempt to pull myself out of the gutter, I’d blinded myself to the wolf in sheep’s clothing. I’d hitched my wagon to a man I thought was a knight in shining armor. Turned out, just like every single man who’d come in and out of my life, he was a monster.
Malachi Black had the looks and the smooth charm that made me believe he was something he wasn’t: namely, a good and moral person.
I was far from the first woman he’d fooled, but I should have known better.
I’d had more than my fair share of scumbags and users and criminals filter in and out of my life; I should have been able to spot the threat he was from miles away.
But I’d been seduced by a set of dimples, an easy smile, and firm, hot muscles.
If only all criminals were as ugly on the outside as they were on the inside. However, that wasn’t the case with Malachi. He had the sexy looks that belonged on the cover of a magazine.
By the time I realized the man didn’t have a single decent bone in his body, it was too late. I wasn’t just stuck, I was trapped, held prisoner in a life I’d willingly walked into with rose-colored glasses affixed to my face.
He might have been arrested a while back and locked up for a very long time, but the black mark he’d left on my soul remained, and by letting him into my life, I’d let in another monster as well. One that was arguably worse because he hid his evil behind a shiny badge and a uniform.
If Malachi Black was a blight on humanity, Officer Greg Cormack had been the devil incarnate.
In a long line of mistakes, getting tied up with those two men was the one I regretted the most. The penance I tried to pay in an attempt and make things right had nearly cost me my life—literally.
Yet it still didn’t feel like enough. The mess I’d tangled myself in had cost one good man his life and put countless others in danger, and I wasn’t sure if there was enough atonement in the world to fix the damage I’d been a party to.
I was ripped from my depressing thoughts by the ding of my cellphone. I dropped my T-shirt, covering the scar left behind from that unforgiving bullet that tore through my abdomen and moved to grab my phone off the bedside table and check the text that had just come through.
Hayden: Just a warning, Micah said if you try to cancel on dinner tonight, he’ll come over there and drag you here by your hair. Don’t forget to bring wine. Love you!
If you had told me a year ago, or hell, even six months ago, that I would be best friends with a woman like Hayden Young, I’d have laughed in your face.
Given what we’d both lived through, I was certain she’d want nothing to do with me, that I would have been a reminder of a nightmare she wanted to forget.
But the strange bond that resulted from a shared trauma was something Hayden had insisted on cultivating, not running from.
Before we met, I’d been working as an informant for a detective by the name of Micah Langford.
I’d wanted to help him and his partner, Leo Drake, take down Cormack and the other dirty cops and criminals he had working for him after he’d stepped in to take over Malachi Black’s drug operation when Malachi had gone to prison.
Hayden and Micah had been dating at the time, and to say our first meeting had been an unfortunate one would have been putting it mildly.
Hayden was one of the good people who’d gotten hurt in my tangled mess. Cormack had abducted her as a way to get back at Micah for coming after him, and I’d been shot trying to save her.
She’d been forced to kill him while I’d lain bleeding on that dirty floor in a desolate cabin in the middle of nowhere, and I worried constantly that having to do that was going to scar her in a very profound way.
I’d tried pushing both her and Micah away after everything was said and done, thinking they were better off without me around, but no matter how much I fought it, they refused to let me slip away quietly, all but forcing me into the fold of their lives.
I’d gone from having no one to being an extension of their family.
I had dinner at their house once a week, saw Hayden and my ever-widening circle of friends for lunch or coffee at least twice a month, and she’d even asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding when Micah popped the question a couple months ago.
I shot off a quick reply, letting her know I was just about to head her way and started across my studio apartment toward the front door.
The place was the size of a matchbox but the whitewashed brick walls and view of the foothills and mountains that surrounded the valley from pretty much every window made the lack of space totally worth it.
I grabbed my purse from the kitchen counter and headed out. Just as I shoved my key into the lock, the door across the hall from mine opened, and my neighbor’s curler-bedecked head popped out.
Deloris Weatherby was at least eighty years old—and that was being generous—cantankerous as hell, nosey, and a bit—a lot—dramatic.
Most of the other tenants in the building found her salty and suspicious nature annoying, but I saw a lonely old lady who was just trying to connect with people the only way she really knew how.
“Hey, Ms. Weatherby,” I said with a wave of my hand.
Her eyes were cartoonishly small behind her Coke-bottle glasses as she looked right then left down the hallway. “Oh good. It’s just you. I heard a door and worried it might be a burglar.”
“No burglar. Just me,” I assured her.
“I thought they’d finally come for my Precious Moments figurines. I have one of the biggest collections in the state, you know. It tends to make people jealous.”
Oh, I did know. She’d told me about her extensive collection countless times. She’d even invited me over for lemonade once and spent two hours showing them off, giving me a very detailed history of when and where she’d gotten every tiny statue.
“Don’t worry, Ms. Weatherby, your collection is safe. No burglars in sight.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” With her knickknacks no longer under threat, she let out a relieved sigh and pulled the door open farther, revealing her brightly colored muumuu and fuzzy house slippers. “I just made a fresh pitcher of lemonade if you want to come in for a glass.”
A sense of panic washed over me. Even with those crazy thick glasses, the woman was still blind as a bat, so she couldn’t tell the difference between salt and sugar. It was something I’d discovered the hard way.
“I’d love to Ms. W, but I’m actually heading out. Maybe another time?”
She gave me a suspicious look. “You aren’t going out carousing, are you?
Young people these days. Always carousing.
” She pointed a gnarled, arthritic finger in my face.
“That’ll get you in trouble. You could pick up some good-for-nothing lowlife, and next thing you know, he’s breaking into your building, stealing all the neighbors’ most valuable possessions so he can pawn ’em to pay for his crank!
It could happen. I just saw it on Dateline.
All her neighbors were robbed blind! And the police never found her body,” she added, almost as an afterthought.