LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 1

      Zoe didn’t remember screaming.

      Didn’t remember pursing her lips or emitting the loud, piercing sound less than a heartbeat after she’d opened the door.

      Didn’t remember crossing over the threshold into the room, or bending over Celia, who was lying faceup on the floor.

      The exquisite wedding dress her sister had taken such all-consuming delight in finding was now ruined. There were two glaring gunshot holes in her chest and her blood had soaked into the delicate white appliqué, all but drenching it. The pattern beneath it was completely obliterated.

      The whole scene, which was whizzing by and moving in painfully slow motion at the same time, seemed totally surreal to Zoe, like some sort of an ill-conceived, macabre scene being played out from an old-fashioned B-grade horror movie about a rampaging slasher.

      And if the dreadfulness of all this wasn’t enough, someone—the killer?—had gone on to draw a bizarre red bull’s-eye on Celia’s forehead. There was a single dot inside the circle, just off center, and whoever had drawn it had used some sort of a laundry marker, so the bull’s-eye stood out even more than it normally might have.

      This can’t be real, it just can’t be real.

      The desperate thought throbbed over and over again in Zoe’s head. She’d just left Celia, what, a couple of minutes ago? Five minutes, tops?

      How could all this have happened in such a short period of time?

      Who could have done this to her sister?

      Why hadn’t she heard the gunshots when they were fired?

      And for God’s sake, what was that awful noise she was hearing now?

      Zoe tried to see where it was coming from, but for some reason, she just couldn’t seem to turn her head.

      She couldn’t even move.

      The noise was surrounding her. It sounded like wailing, or, more specifically, like keening. It approximated the sound that was heard when someone’s heart was breaking.

      Zoe had no idea the noise she was attempting to place was coming from her.

      * * *

      “You realize this is probably going to be the happiest day of your life, you lucky son of a gun.” The declaration, uttered by one of the men waiting to be ushered down an aisle and into a pew, was directed at the bridegroom. “It’s all downhill from here,” the older man chuckled.

      Detective Sam Colton kept the half smile he had been sporting for the past half hour pasted on his handsome, tanned face and merely nodded.

      Words were not his strong suit and he couldn’t think of anything to say in response to that, other than the fact that if this was to be the happiest day of his life, it certainly didn’t put the bar up very high.

      And as for it being “downhill from here,” well, he already knew that.

      He was marrying Celia Robison, who some of the other detectives on the force had made very clear they regarded as being quite an eyeful, as well as a number of other clichéd descriptions.

      None of that had entered into the reason why he was standing here, waiting for everyone to take their seats so the ceremony could begin. Waiting for all this to be over with.

      He was marrying the woman for one reason and one reason only.

      She was having his kid and he’d vowed a long time ago that if he ever did happen to have any kids—most likely by accident, which this was—he was sure as hell going to be there for him or her. He wanted this kid’s upbringing to be completely unlike his own. His childhood had involved his father killing his mother and then his siblings and him being scattered to the winds.

      More specifically, they had all been sent off to different foster homes, but they might as well have been scattered to the winds for all the time they’d managed to spend together during all those awful, soul-scarring years.

      No matter what it took, his kid wasn’t going to go through that, wasn’t going to feel abandoned, alone and ashamed because no one wanted him or her. If he had to marry Celia for that to happen, well, so be it. He’d managed to survive all this time—and had gotten as far as he had—by learning to roll with the punches. He’d roll with this one, too.

      And in the end—

      Sam’s head jerked up as everything within him went on high alert the second he heard it.

      Part of his response was due to his police training, the rest had evolved based on pure survival instincts. The latter had been necessary in order to live through some of the foster home stays he’d been forced to endure.

      “Did you hear something?” Ethan, one of his brothers—they had pretty much managed to find one another and reunite in these past few years—asked him.

      By now, Sam had broken into a run and ran past him without responding.

      “I’ll take that as a yes,” Ethan said, answering his own question and hurrying after Sam.

      Once they reached the hall, it was obvious the sound was coming from the bridal room. It grew louder and more jarring the closer they got.

      “It’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding,” Ethan called after Sam. It wasn’t meant to stop his brother. Ethan was just stating a point of fact.

      The next moment, as he came to a skidding halt behind Sam and took in the scene Sam was viewing, he muttered under his breath, “And this has got to qualify as the worst possible kind of luck a groom ever encountered.”

      For an excruciating, shattering moment, Sam froze several steps away from Zoe. At first, he wasn’t even aware she was the one screaming.

      He couldn’t take his eyes off Celia.

      It wasn’t a sense of loss that was echoing through every fiber of his being. It was shock. Complete, total and utter shock, swaddled in disbelief. The shock was not tied to the fact that Celia was dead, but to the symbol he was looking at on her forehead.

      He knew that symbol.

      He

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