Chapter 2 - The Exit Nobody Saw

Grant reached for Nora's wrist. Eli caught his hand halfway there.

From the kitchen came the clatter of dropped plates and somebody praying out loud. Nora caught sight of herself in the steel doors of a commercial refrigerator: white blouse twisted, mascara smudged, hair half out of its pins. Two hours earlier she'd worried about whether the dress made her look too plain. Now she was trying to decide if a stranger with a scar and a familiar voice deserved her trust. She wanted Eli to be real so badly that the wanting itself frightened her. Hope, she realized, could be another way to get hurt.

"Don't touch her."

"You crashed my dinner," Grant snapped. "You don't get to give orders."

Nora stepped between them. "Both of you, stop. Somebody photographed me sleeping. That's the problem."

Her best friend, Tessa, pushed through the crowd. "Nora, your phone. Check your phone."

There was a video waiting. It showed Eli crossing the hotel lobby twenty minutes earlier. A man in a gray cap followed him with one hand inside his coat.

"That's a gun," Tessa whispered.

The ballroom's lights went out. Three screams cut through the dark. Eli dragged Nora behind a marble column just as something cracked through the place where she'd been standing. A bullet struck the chandelier chain. Crystal fell like ice.

"Stay low," he ordered.

"Don't order me around. You vanished. You let me bury you."

"And I hated every second of it. Move."

Tessa knew the service corridor because she'd organized half the party. She led them through a swinging kitchen door while chefs ducked under stainless-steel counters. Behind them, Grant shouted Nora's name, but it was the wrong kind of shout: angry, not frightened.

They ran past stacked linens and a loading dock. Eli stumbled. Nora grabbed him and felt warm blood soaking through his shirt.

"You've been shot."

"Just scraped."

"Liar. Still a liar."

A black sedan waited in the alley, engine running. Tessa hesitated. "Whose car?"

"Mine," Eli said.

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Nora looked into the driver's seat. Her face went numb. Behind the wheel sat Detective Marcus Vale, the man who had personally informed her of Eli's death.

"Get in," Vale said. "Unless you want to meet the person who paid me to lie."