“What the hell are you doing?”

Chapter One: The Coffee

The whole diner heard it.

One second I was standing beside the leather booth with a full coffee pot in my hand. The next, I was dumping hot coffee straight onto Sawyer Voss’s expensive charcoal suit.

Coffee splashed across his black shirt and dripped to the tile floor.

My hand shook so hard I nearly dropped the pot.

The man in the dark brown leather jacket lunged at me at once, grabbing my wrist hard enough that I bit back a cry.

“Let her go,” Sawyer said.

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

The man loosened his grip but stayed close, blocking me. I could smell rain and cigarette smoke on his jacket. Sawyer sat very still in the booth, wet and furious in a way colder than shouting.

“Why did you do that?” he asked.

My throat was dry. “That coffee was poisoned.”

Nobody moved.

The leather-jacket man laughed, too quick to be real. “She’s insane, Sawyer.”

“Ask him what’s in his pocket,” I said, pointing.

Sawyer turned his head slowly. The man touched his coat pocket without meaning to — just once, but enough. His face went pale under the diner lights.

“Why are you shaking?” Sawyer asked him.

“I’m not.”

Sawyer reached into his coat, pulled out a thick stack of cash, and set it on the table. “Keep the change.” He stood, tall and dangerous, coming close enough that I stopped breathing.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“That’s all for tonight,” he said, and walked out into the rain.

Ten minutes later, I stood outside with my takeout bag, staring at a black car by the curb while a driver opened the back door.

“Am I being kidnapped?” I whispered.

“Mr. Voss wants to see you,” the driver said.

I wasn’t expecting Sawyer in that back seat. I was expecting him even less beside a gray-haired woman holding a photograph of my mother.

“Get in, Delaney,” she said. “We need to talk about Marisol.”

Chapter Two: The Woman in the Car

Nobody had said my mother’s name in years — not like that, not with the voice of someone who’d known her.

The woman wore a camel coat and pearl earrings, seventy or close to it, tired and elegant and clearly sick of secrets. Sawyer sat beside her, watching me, unreadable.

“How do you know my mother?”

“Please. Get in before someone sees.”

I got in anyway. The city sounds vanished behind the closed door, leather and rain filling the quiet.

She handed me an old, bent photograph — my mother at twenty, laughing beside a younger version of the woman, in front of a lake I didn’t recognize.

“My name is Eleanor Voss,” she said. “Marisol worked for my family when she first came to this country.”

Worked for. Not friend. Not sister.

“My mother cleaned houses.”

“Mine was one of them.”

Sawyer spoke for the first time. “How did you know the coffee was poisoned?”

“Your man switched cups when he thought nobody was watching. Poured from a small silver vial into the cup near the wall, then swapped them while a customer asked me for napkins.”

“The man in the leather jacket?” Eleanor asked sharply.

I nodded.

Sawyer’s jaw tightened.

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