Free Sample
Preview from chapter one
The city at that hour wasn’t a city: it was a map of weak lights and asphalt that still held the day’s heat. Nate drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the window frame, the air conditioning at half strength because he liked to feel a little night on his skin. It was past eleven; the dash clock blinked 23:17 as if it meant to remind him he should be home, or anywhere that wasn’t this empty avenue.
He was forty-three, with a body that lied for him. Gym three times a week, a diet without drama, the discipline of a man who refuses the nest and easy beer. The black shirt marked his chest and shoulders; the short beard, the clean cut, the look of someone used to being obeyed. In the rearview he looked younger. He had always looked younger. And he knew it.
The red light stopped him without violence. A wide intersection, a gas station to the left, cheap motels two blocks down with signs promising vacancy in tired neon. Nate braked, shifted into neutral, and let the engine purr. He pulled out his phone out of habit, looked at it, set it back on the seat. No messages that mattered.
Then he saw her.
She didn’t come running. She came walking like someone who knew the trade: low heels, short skirt, open jacket over a top that left little to the imagination. Hair half-up, makeup that could survive the night. She approached the driver’s side with that catalog smile the streets teach fast.
“Hey, handsome,” she said, leaning in just slightly. “Want to spend a little time?”
Nate wasn’t interested. He’d been through it a thousand times: the offer, the price, the motel, the forgetting. He shook his head, polite but dry, and was about to raise the window when she lowered her face a little more… and the whole street went still on him.
Kate.
Twenty-one years old. He knew her. Not from the corner: from another life, another context, a place where this scene shouldn’t exist. Recognition hit his chest before his mind. She froze too. The professional smile cracked on her mouth. Her eyes went too wide. One second. Two. Three. Neither spoke. The light stayed red like an idiot witness.
He hadn’t expected to find her like this. Hadn’t expected that, away from him—or from whatever they shared—she’d be doing this. She hadn’t expected to see him at the wheel, looking up at her, with that face that passed for thirty and lied about everything else.