Beneath the Shadows

She saw a man killed in an alley. She couldn't describe his face. That's the only reason she's still alive.

Tessa Bell has four thousand one hundred and sixty dollars in an envelope taped under a dresser drawer, and a plan that runs two more years. Then she takes a shortcut past the wrong doorway and watches three men do something she was never meant to see.

She does what you're supposed to do. She goes to the police.

What nobody tells her — not for nineteen days — is that her protective custody was denied on the second morning.

By then she's in a house at the end of an ungraded track with a man called Rourke, who was sent by the people she witnessed, who was given an order with a hole in the middle of it, and who has decided, for reasons he can't defend to anyone including himself, to fill that hole differently.

He won't answer a single question she asks. He tells her the truth about everything else.

And every week she spends working out what protecting her is costing him is a week closer to the night his employers stop asking politely — and to the discovery that the person she trusts most in the world isn't the one lying to her.

A standalone romantic suspense novel. Also by Blake Sutton: Obsession in the Shadows and Power Play.