1
GISELLE
Someone is watching me.I can feel it like a knife to the throat.
Every New Yorker has a sixth sense for being watched, and mine’s been surgically enhanced by six years with the NYPD. I turn my head around to search for the source.
There!
Across the avenue, standing between two garbage cans and a skeletal streetlight, is a massive man in a suit so black that it swallows the air around him.
He stands just outside of the soft yellow light spilling from the street lamp overhead. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t shift his weight. There’s not a hint of motion from him as he stares at me.
He might as well be a statue for all I know.
Except for his eyes.
Bright and uncomfortably blue.
Not sky, not sea. More like a glacier. Something solid, silent, and patient. He’s not looking at the gala, or the banners, or the celebrities still posing for the dregs of the press.
He’s looking at me.
I freeze and stare back like a deer about to bolt.
I should look away, but his gaze demands my attention. Commands me to look back at him just as intensely as he’s looking at me. With every moment that passes, a darkly delicious shiver runs down my spine and I canfeelhis blue gaze drill into mine.
Then, two young men in suits jostle each other as they walk in front of him. And when they pass, he’s gone.
Not just moved.
Gone.
As if he’d never been there at all.
I scan up and down the block and find no hint of him. Slowly, the breath I’d been holding tumbles from my mouth. My hands relax from the fists that had formed instinctively and reach up to rotate Serena's earrings—silver and cheap, with three stones missing on the right—until the jagged edge sits flush against my skin.
The pain is small, sharp, and controlled.
My kind of pain.
In the window of the black SUV idling at the curb, I catch a glimpse of my profile. Dark hair pulled back tight. Even with my teeth clenched, I present a softer version to my sister’s cut-glass jaw. Blinking, I quickly look away.
They say people stay alive in your memories. But that’s a lie. I see Serena every time I look at myself.
She’s still dead.
And when I look across the street again, the man is still gone.
But I canfeelthat piercing blue gaze lingering around here.
“Get a grip, Giselle,” I whisper and force myself to look back at the garish gold on the banners strung between the double columns at the entrance bearing Councilman James MacDougal’s name.
He was a no-show for his own speech.
Go figure.
Knowing him, he’s probably got his newest intern—a girl half his age on a good day—face-down on his desk. One hand between her legs, the other holding her in place while she pleads with him to be gentle.
