Chapter 1 Blood on the Rug

Corinne

Glass exploded before I heard the gunshot.

For one stupid, suspended second, my mind tried to turn the sound into something ordinary. A dish dropped in the kitchen. A bottle slipping from Tiny’s hand. One of the old windows giving up because the building was ancient and the landlord was cheap.

Then Tiny dropped.

His knees buckled first. His big frame folded like something inside him had been cut loose, and the mug in his hand hit the floor, shattering across the faded rug.

Not a little.

It poured out of him, dark and fast, blooming through the cotton beneath his leather vest while his eyes stared at me in stunned disbelief.

“T-Tiny?”

My voice sounded wrong. Thin. Useless.

He tried to move his mouth, but another shot punched through the window.

The couch cushion burst open, stuffing spraying into the air like dirty snow.

That was when my body finally understood what my mind refused to accept.

Someone was shooting into the apartment.

I hit the floor so hard pain cracked through my knees and palms. Broken glass bit into my skin as I crawled behind the couch, my breath coming in sharp, ugly bursts. I could hear myself making some broken sound, not quite a sob, not quite a prayer, while my brain screamed the same command over and over.

Move.

Move.

Move.

Tiny lay only a few feet away.

Too far.

Too close.

The man who had spent months pretending to book me for dinner and conversation, the man who had slid envelopes of information across tables beneath folded napkins, the man who had looked at me like he saw Corinne beneath every inch of Stormie Fox, was bleeding out on an ugly brown rug in an apartment that smelled like coffee, gunpowder, and old leather.

I pressed a hand over my mouth to keep from screaming.

If I screamed, I died.

If I stayed, I died.

The window cracked again as another shot came through, and that was enough to break whatever part of me was still clinging to him. I scrambled backward, keeping low, slipping on coffee and blood and glass. My shoulder slammed into the hallway wall. Pain flashed white behind my eyes, but I kept going because pain meant alive.

Alive mattered.

Alive could still finish what Tiny started.

I made it to the bedroom with my pulse pounding so loudly I could barely hear anything else. Behind me, the apartment had gone strangely still between shots, that awful quiet stretching like a held breath. I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. If I saw him again, I might stop moving, and I couldn’t afford softness now.

Stormie Fox did not panic.

Stormie Fox smiled through danger, lied with a steady voice, and left rooms before men realized she had taken anything from them.

Corinne Martinez wanted to crawl into the corner and sob until someone else came to save her.

No one was coming.

That truth had raised me for the last four years.

I found the exit because Tiny had shown it to me weeks ago, joking about old buildings having secrets if you knew where to look. At the time, I’d laughed and told him secrets were usually just bad plumbing with better marketing. Now I thanked every ghost in that building for his paranoia.

Cold night air slapped my face. The metal of the fire escape ladder beneath my feet rattled as I moved, and I forced myself not to think about how visible I might be, how easily the shooter could turn the barrel and find me again. I moved because stopping meant becoming another body in Tiny’s apartment.

By the time I reached the ground, my lungs felt scraped raw. I didn’t remember crossing the alley. I only remembered the smell of onions, grease, and warm tortillas hitting me all at once as I stumbled through a side entrance into the kitchen next door.

Every person inside stopped.

A cook holding a spatula stared at me. A woman near the prep station lowered a knife. Someone said something in Spanish too fast for my brain to translate through the roaring in my ears.

I knew how I must have looked.

Hair tangled.

Hands bleeding.

Dress torn.

Tiny’s blood drying on my skin.

A woman who looked like trouble wearing heels she had no business running in.

I lifted one trembling hand and pointed vaguely toward the front of the building. “Baño?”

No one moved for a second. Then the woman with the knife pointed through a swinging door.

I walked.

Not fast.

Not slow.

Just a woman who belonged somewhere, even if it wasn’t there.

The dining room was bright and loud, full of families bent over plates and couples sharing baskets of chips. Nobody screamed. Nobody stopped me. They glanced, then looked away with the trained politeness people used when they saw something they didn’t want to explain.

I made it to the bathroom, locked myself in the farthest stall, and finally bent over my knees.

The shaking came hard.

Violent.

I pressed both hands against my mouth, but the sob still tore through me, muffled and wet. I gave myself about ten seconds before I forced my fingers to order an Uber. 

I couldn’t stay there.

Grief could wait.

Shock could wait.

Everything could wait until I was behind a locked door with curtains drawn and a weapon within reach.

I cleaned what I could with damp paper towels while I waited on the Uber. 

By the time I reached my apartment, the city had blurred into streetlights, headlights, and the hollow thud of my own heartbeat. I locked the door behind me, then locked it again, then stood there with my palm pressed flat against the wood as if my body alone could keep the world out.

For a while, I didn’t move.

Tiny was dead.

The one person who knew I wasn’t only pretending to be Stormie Fox.

The one person who had started asking the same questions I had.

The only ally I’d had in a war I was never supposed to survive.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

My purse slid from my shoulder and hit the kitchen counter. I stared at it, numb, then dumped everything out because my hands needed something to do.

Wallet.

Keys.

Lipstick.

Phone.

A compact.

A folded receipt from the restaurant where I’d met Tiny last month.

And a small black flash drive.

It skidded across the counter and stopped near my fingers.

My breath caught.

Tiny had handed it to me right after I arrived, before the coffee, before the first shot, before everything in the world split open.

“Hold on to this for me, Fox.”

“What is it?”

“Something ugly.”

I’d arched a brow. “That narrows it down in our line of work.”

He had almost smiled.

“Give me five minutes and I’ll explain.”

He never got five minutes.

Slowly, I picked up the drive and crossed to my laptop.

My hand shook as I plugged it in.

The screen flashed once.

Then a password box appeared.