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PART 1 The chapel was supposed to be empty. Mara Ellis slipped through the side entrance barefoot, her shoes dangling from one hand so her heels wouldn’t alert anyone to her presence. Five months pregnant and terrified in ways she couldn’t name, she made her way toward the mahogany box positioned on the stone altar….

PART 1 “Don’t turn me away. Something’s wrong with my baby.” Dr. Celeste Marlowe’s voice sliced through the crowded emergency lobby the instant another contraction bent her double over the reception counter. Blood had already darkened the hem of her pale dress. Her face had drained to the color of paper, but she kept one…

PART 1 The pin slipped from her fingers before the door even finished opening. Maren Ashby had spent thirty years training her hands not to shake. They didn’t shake now, either — they simply stopped, mid-motion, holding a lock of chestnut hair suspended in the mirror’s reflection, while behind her a groom stood frozen with…

PART 1 The smell hit her first — antiseptic and old coffee, the particular sourness of a hospital corridor at an hour when nothing good ever happens. Elena Marsh registered that smell before she registered the pen someone had pressed into her fingers. Her wrist ached where a hand had gripped it too hard. The…

PART 1 The first time Marisol Reyes raised her voice inside Damian Cole’s mansion, fifteen armed men reached for their guns. “Don’t go outside tonight!” The warning cut through the marble hallway at 2:47 a.m. Damian stopped, one hand on the courtyard door. His head of security, Rourke, spun so fast his jacket flew open,…

PART 1 The instant Priya Malone laid her hand on Dario Conti’s shoulder, three men reached inside their jackets. A wineglass shattered somewhere behind her. The dining room went so quiet she could hear her own pulse. Dario moved before she could pull away — twisted in the booth, seized her wrist, brought her arm…

PART 1 The pen didn’t shake in Elena Ashworth’s hand. Seven months pregnant, barefoot on cold marble in a forty-third-floor Boston penthouse, she signed the last page of her divorce petition while her husband laughed with his mistress ten feet away. Marcus Ashworth thought the call was private. Turned toward the floor-to-ceiling windows, hand in…

PART 1 Delphine Cross woke with a billionaire’s arm locked around her waist and the terrifying certainty nothing in her life would ever be simple again. For a few warm, disoriented seconds she forgot the blizzard, the canceled reservations, the ridiculous pillow wall they’d built down the middle of the hotel bed. She only knew…

PART 1 The first thing Margot Calloway noticed was that her husband had thanked everyone in the ballroom except her. Julian stood beneath a chandelier worth more than the house they’d started their marriage in, champagne in one hand, the other resting on his tuxedo lapel. Behind him, a forty-foot screen glowed with the silver…

PART 1 Forty-three minutes before Weston Cole was set to marry another woman, a six-year-old at a bus stop looked straight at him and said, “Mommy, that man has my eyes.” The words drifted through the open window of the limousine. Weston stopped breathing. Outside, cold April rain swept downtown Raleigh silver, hammering the glass…