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      Chapter One

      THEY’D come to kill her.

      Two years of working on the seedier side of the city had honed her senses and taught her to keep herself sharp. She watched and she noticed—and she’d noticed them. A small group of men drinking too much, although she knew that would please Joe, who always hiked his prices when the punters were too drunk to notice. From her vantage point on the stage, she’d seen the notes changing hands, the bottles of whisky, the empty glasses and the glazed eyes but she’d just kept on singing, her voice pouring honey and whipped cream over anyone who bothered to listen. Ignoring the sick feeling in her gut that warned her that her time had finally run out, she sang about love and loss, knowing that the lonely men who frequented Joe’s Bar knew far more about the second than the first.

      And so did she.

      It was an existence far from anyone’s dreams but Jessie had stopped dreaming when she had been five years old.

      ‘Hey, doll!’ A man seated near the stage leered at her and waved a note. ‘I fancy a private performance. Come over here and sing that song on my lap.’

      Without missing a beat, Jessica backed away from him, flung her head back and belted out the final verse of the song with her eyes closed. As long as she had her eyes shut tight she could pretend that she was somewhere else. She wasn’t singing to a crowd of leering men who had given up on life, she was singing to a packed stadium or opera house—to people who had paid the equivalent of a month’s rent just to hear her voice. In that same fantasy she didn’t have gnawing hunger pains in her stomach and she hadn’t mended her cheap gold dress a hundred times. But most of all, she wasn’t alone.

      Someone out there was waiting for her.

      Someone was going to pick her up from work and take her home somewhere warm, cosy and safe.

      The song ended. She opened her eyes. And saw that someone was waiting for her.

      Several men, but they weren’t from her dreams—they were from a dark, terrifying nightmare.

      And she knew that they’d come for her. Fear had shadowed her every step for so long that she felt worn out with anxiety—tired of looking over her shoulder.

      The last warning she’d received had been a physical one, leaving her with bruises that had kept her home for a week.

      But this time they weren’t here to deliver a warning.

      Feeling her mouth dry and her heart pound, Jessie reminded herself that she had a plan.

      And a knife tucked in her suspender belt.

      He sat in the back of the room, the darkness allowing him a rare moment of anonymity in a life lived in the spotlight. The previous night he’d walked the red carpet with a starlet on his arm. His business had made him a billionaire before he was thirty and he enjoyed the privileged existence of the super-rich, but his life had once been lived in places like this—surrounded by drunks, violence and the ever present threat of mortal danger. He’d grown up here—almost been sucked under by the greasy underbelly of society until he’d finally dragged himself, by sheer grit and determination, into a different world.

      Another man might have chosen to lose those years, but he hated pretence of any sort and he carried the damage without apology, amused that the visible scars had proved as attractive to women as his dark, murky past.

      Nothing aroused a woman’s interest more than a bad boy, Silvio mused, knowing that if they’d been able to see inside his soul they would have run a mile. He was well aware that the women he mixed with liked the idea of danger, but not the reality. He also knew that the girl on the stage lived danger with every step and every breath.

      He couldn’t believe how far she’d sunk and he identified an emotion alien to him—guilt.

      It was because of him that she was living this life.

      His tension mounted as she moved in time to the beat, the subtle slide of her hips causing the man closest to him to lose his grip on his drink. The shatter of glass on the floor was a familiar sound and barely drew a glance from those around. Or maybe they were too numbed by the anaesthetising effects of alcohol to react.

      Silvio sat in perfect stillness and the whisky on the table in front of him remained untouched. The glass was no more than a prop. Knowing what was to come, he couldn’t afford to dull his senses. He also knew that whatever you escaped from today would still be waiting for you tomorrow, and he wasn’t in need of a pause

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