Chapter One

      After the second drug deal went down on the corner, with the dealer shooting hard looks her way in between casual reaches into the open window of cars that were too nice for this shitty neighborhood, Sarah’s freak-out reached epic proportions.

      And J.D. still wasn’t answering the door.

      She gave it fifteen seconds before she became a statistic on a news graphic about how even the cold winter weather didn’t have a suppressant effect on the violence in Chicago’s less-gentrified neighborhoods.

      “Dead meat. That’s what he is.” Sarah clenched her jaw tight to stop herself from grinding her molars together. She fisted her hands at her sides and bounced a little on the balls of her feet, toes sore already in spiky high heels. She glanced back at the corner. The dealer slouched toward her, skullcap pulled low over his eyebrows. “As soon as he answers the door, I’m going to kill him.”

      She stabbed a finger at the cracked plastic button of the doorbell buzzer and then pounded again on the solid steel door. Her left hand drifted down toward the nylon medical bag resting at her hip, her constant companion. Maybe she should grab a scalpel, just in case. She could find it in an instant in the precise order of her bag, even one-handed and in the dark.

      And why wasn’t he answering the damn door?

      “Open up before I get mugged!” she shouted at the door.

      And this was the last time she’d listen to Christopher Robin Tyler. She imagined with pleasure the feel of her brother’s thick neck throttled between her hands.

      If she ended up as body parts found in a Dumpster, she was going to haunt her brother forever and do nothing but call him by the two names Tyler had stopped answering to years ago.

      “You’re corpse number two, Christopher Robin. I swear it.” She shook her head as she heard her brother’s words echoing in her ears. This time, she could hear the slickness of a con in his voice in the message he’d left guilting her into this crazy trip. “Remember J.D.? Didn’t you always like him? He’s back in town and his cat is dying or something. You gotta go see him right away. Like now.” Yeah, right.

      Remember J.D.? Sometimes it felt like she’d never gotten over the man, much less forgotten him, which was a sorry way to feel about a guy she’d never even kissed. Except for the one time…

      And as soon as she was done murdering J.D., she was heading straight back to her brother’s pub to hunt her sibling down and kill him. Let Grace try to protect him. Her sister-in-law wasn’t standing after dark in the middle of this abandoned warehouse district west of the Loop in Chicago, dressed in a twelve-hundred-dollar suit that might as well have had Mug Me written across it in fluorescent letters. She loved Grace, but fair was fair. Her brother was a dead man.

      He might at least have mentioned that her old crush was staying in a wasteland. She’d imagined J.D. inhabiting an upscale, fifty-story Lincoln Park condo building. In that scenario, the “I just ducked over from a cocktail party at that chic little place around the corner” excuse could have justified the Armani. God knows she wasn’t going to admit that she’d gotten desperate enough last week to click the “Will Attend” RSVP link in one of the urban professional speed-dating emails that kept arriving in her inbox with intimidating regularity. She’d obviously ended up on a mailing list for hopeless losers who were sucking black holes of relationship doom, attracting men who hid their wedding rings. Telling her brother she couldn’t help his best friend because she was on her way to be so fucking charming for sixty seconds at a time that the perfect man would fall in love with her across a tiny bistro table was a fast lane to eternal sibling torture. She’d bypassed the Loop and headed for the warehouse district with a sigh.

      If she’d also gotten a little thrill out of the idea of J.D. seeing her at her polished best, Tyler didn’t need to know that, either.

      Now she just