Prologue

Adeline Bellamy has lived most of her life watching everyone around her just make it by so when she finally succeeded she wasn’t about to let some sleaze bag attorney steal it from her. Maybe that’s what brought her to follow him. If she could just get some leverage on him or proof of what he was doing it wouldn’t matter what she said about him because it would just be true.

She saw him slip into the costume room of the theatre, watching as the door closed softly behind him. Flattening herself against the wall she pressed her ear to the costume room and pulled out her phone to record the conversation on the other side of the door.

“No. You said if I helped you you’d let him go.”

His voice had an air of urgency and desperation to it that didn’t sound at all like the man she had spent the last few weeks fighting with.

“Things change. I was just acting as a messenger. I'd have been harsher.” A calm and measured voice answered. The words seemed to flow like there was no thinking behind it...just instinct.

Adeline jumped and had to slap her hand against her mouth to muffle her breathing as a large body was slammed against the door she was standing next to. The phone started to shake in her hand as it vibrated announcing that somebody was calling her. As slick with sweat as her hands were she couldn’t seem to get her phone to acknowledge that she was trying to decline the call so it kept vibrating.

There was a thump on the other side of the door. All she could think was that it sounded like a body being dropped to the floor.

Sweat beaded at her brows and slid down to the creases of her eyes as she shrank into the shadows of one of the columns that held up the floor above her. Her throat seemed to freeze as if trying to choke her into silence. Her heart was beating so loudly she couldn’t even hear the footsteps coming from the costume room but she could see his shadow as he walked down the opposite end of the hallway.

The door seemingly stuck open or caught on the carpeted hallway gave her enough cover to look around to see if she was safe to go back down to her seat.

Perhaps if she had been more calm, more aware she would have noticed that her dragonfly hairpin had fallen to the floor near the door. That it had fallen out as she slid along the corners and columns in efforts to avoid the man on the other side of the door. But she wasn’t. Her heart was racing and she could feel the wetness under her arms from the sweat.

She didn’t even take notice of the fact that only one man had left the room. That a pool of blood was spreading out into the hallway. That her once diamond and emerald dragonfly hairpin was turning red.