LITMIR.BIZ

      PROLOGUE

      Sadie Bliss’s breath caught at the emotive image. Wandering through the ritzy New York gallery surrounded by a crowd of A-listers who blinged and glittered so much it hurt her eyes, she was stopped in her tracks by its starkness.

      The background murmur of voices and clinking of champagne glasses faded as the world shrank to just the photograph, the centrepiece of the exhibit.

      Mortality.

      She’d seen it already, of course, in Time magazine, but there was something so much more immediate about it this close. As if it had just been snapped. As if the tragedy were unfolding before her eyes.

      She felt as if she were standing in the daunting arid landscape, weighed down by the heat perfectly captured as it shimmered like a mirage from the sand. Smelling the jet fuel from the twisted Black Hawk carcass that she’d seen in the other shots. Hearing the cries of the young soldier as he clutched one bloody hand to his abdomen and reached the other rosary-beaded one into the impossibly blue sky. Calling for someone. God maybe? Or his girlfriend?

      Watching his tears turning the grime on his face to muddy tracks. Tasting his despair as life faded from his eyes.

      The caption beneath said: Corporal Dwayne Johnson, nineteen, died from fatal wounds before help could arrive.

      Goosebumps needling her skin, tears pricking at her eyes brought Sadie back to the here and now. She moved on wishing she’d never been given the coveted ticket to the much anticipated opening night of Kent Nelson’s A Decade of Division. All the pieces snapped from the award-winning photojournalist’s lens were disturbing, but this image, known throughout the world, was particularly harrowing.

      A portrait of a young man facing death.

      A private moment of anguish.

      And although the artist in her appreciated the abstract prettiness of the rosary beads against the bright blue dome of a foreign sky, the image was too intimate—she felt as if she was intruding.

      Sadie pushed through the crowd out of the gallery into the sultry June night. She needed a moment. Or two.