PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE

Kirsten braced herself against the Boston cold, adjusted her scarf around her neck, and readied herself for the four-block walk ahead of her, into the black night. She passed all the closed bars, realized it was too late to be walking, and had a pang of sudden fear. She glanced back to the door of the apartment complex she had just stepped out of, and thought of changing her mind. Maybe she should have stayed over at her friend’s place.

Amy had insisted that she stay—that it was too late and miserably cold outside. And while both of those things were true, Amy had said them with her face nuzzled into the neck of a guy she’d met at the bar. And while her face had been there, the guy’s hands had been elsewhere. And honestly, Kirsten did not want to sleep on Amy’s couch while listening to her best friend and some random (but cute) guy going at it in a drunken stupor all night.

Honestly, she also didn’t want be there in the morning, working with Amy to come up with a clever reason to get the guy out, either.

Besides, it was only four blocks. And compared to the blistering cold that had ravaged Boston about a month ago, tonight would seem like a brisk little jaunt in a spring breeze.

It was nearing three in the morning. She and Amy had gone out intending to get hammered, to drink the night away and do whatever their drunken primate brains suggested. After all, here, in their senior year of college, their dreams had come true. Somehow, against all odds, they had both been selected out of their photojournalism class—two of eight candidates—to go on assignment in Spain in the summer. They’d be working for an up-and-coming nature magazine that catered specifically to educational markets…and would be getting paid more for that one assignment than Kirsten’s mother had made all of last year.

And that would shut her up,

Kirsten thought. She loved her mother dearly but got

really

tired of hearing her gripe about how pursuing a career in photography was a pipe dream—a waste of time.

She came to the end of the first block, checked the crosswalk and found it dead, and then headed on. The cold was beginning to nip at her. She could feel it on her nose like an actual presence, starting to pinch.

She idly wondered if Amy and her random dude were naked yet. She wondered if the guy was any good or if he’d be hindered by the copious amounts of liquor they’d had.

Well, not that

she

had enjoyed much. She’d eaten a small dinner at the very bar they had holed up in for the night. She wasn’t sure if it had been the nachos they’d shared as a table or if it had been something in the pizza, but her stomach had

not

been happy. After four beers, she knew her night was over—that she’d be doing nothing more than keeping Amy company as she annihilated herself shot by shot.

She figured she’d get all the lurid details tomorrow. And thinking of those lurid details as well as how much they’d enjoy their summer in Spain, Kirsten at first barely even noticed the sound she heard behind her. Footsteps.

The hair stood on the back of her neck, but she dared not look back.

She increased her pace. Two blocks behind her, two blocks to go. And now the cold really was nipping at her.

Suddenly, the steps were right behind her, and a man came stumbling up right next to her. He appeared to be drunk and when Kirsten jumped back in fright, he snickered to himself, clearly amused.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you. I was just…well, can you help me? Drinking with some friends and…supposed to meet them somewhere after the bar but I don’t remember where. I’m from New York…never been to Boston before. No idea where I am.”

Kirsten couldn’t bring herself to look at him as she shook her head. It was more than being uncomfortable around a strange drunk man this late at night. It was knowing that she was

this

close to being home and just wanted the night to be over.

“No, I’m sorry,” she said.

“Seriously?!” the man said.

All of a sudden, he didn’t seem so drunk. Funny enough, he sounded amused that someone would be so defensive over something as innocent as helping a lost guy in a city he wasn’t familiar with. That struck her as odd as she started to turn away, intending to quicken her pace.

But then the slightest motion caught her eye and made her hesitate.

The man was holding his stomach, as if he might puke. It had been there the whole time but Kirsten was fairly certain this was not the case. He reached into his jacket and that’s when she saw that he was suddenly holding something.

A gun,

her panicked mind thought. And while it

did

look like a gun, that wasn’t quite right.

Her muscles demanded that she run. She looked to his face for the first time and saw that something was off. He

had

been pretending. This wasn’t a lost drunk man at all. He looked too sober in the eyes—sober and, now that she was starting to panic, a little demented, too.

The thing that looked sort of like a gun came up quickly. She opened her mouth to yell for help as she also turned away to run.

But then she felt something strike her from behind. It hit her in the side of the head, just below the ear—sharp and immediate. She stumbled and then fell. She tasted blood in her mouth and then felt hands on her. There was another of those sharp sensations in her head, small but somehow thunderous at the same time.

The pain was immense but she was not able to experience the full extent of it before the night seemed to swell around her. The street faded, as did the man’s face, and then everything went black.

Her final thought was that this life of hers had turned out to be quite short—and that the trip that was set to change it all was never going to happen.