Chapter 1 - The Wrong Twin
The heavy rubber of the cargo mat smelled faintly of wet wool and gasoline, clinging to the back of my blouse as the SUV lurged around another sharp bend. Up front, the man who had called me Sabrina—a hulking figure with a broken nose and a wool overcoat that smelled of cheap cigars—kept glancing back in the rearview mirror.
"Quiet back there," he grunted, though I hadn't made a sound. My breath was coming in shallow, measured hitches, the kind of controlled rhythm I used when my mother was having a bad night in hospice and I had to count backward from a hundred to keep from panicking.
Sabrina.
My twin sister, Sabrina.
We had stopped speaking three years ago, right after our twenty-fifth birthday, when she walked out of our shared apartment with two designer suitcases, a burner phone, and a casual wave goodbye, leaving me behind to deal with the medical collections agency calls. While I spent my days verifying root-canal insurance codes for Brightwood Dental, Sabrina had apparently climbed into a very different world—a world of private airport hangars, encrypted wire transfers, and men who kidnapped people in underground parking garages.
The SUV ground to a halt. The engine died, plunging the interior into a suffocating quiet punctuated only by the drip of cold Seattle rain against the roof.
A door slammed. Heavy boots crunched on gravel.
Moments later, the rear cargo door swung upward with a pneumatic hiss. The gray, weeping light of the Pacific Northwest washed over my face, revealing an expansive slate courtyard surrounded by towering evergreens. Beyond the courtyard sat a sprawling, dark-timber modernist house perched on the cliffs of Magnolia, overlooking the gray expanse of Puget Sound.
A pair of polished black dress shoes stepped into my field of vision.
"Get her up," a voice commanded. It wasn't the broken-nosed thug from the front seat. It was smoother, richer, carrying the casual, bone-deep authority of a man who owned entire zip codes.
Two pairs of hands grabbed me by the elbows, hoisting me out of the cargo bed with unceremonious rough grace. My scuffed black flat hit the wet slate, and my knees buckled slightly, but I caught my balance. I refused to let them drag me.
I looked up.
Standing in front of me was a man in his early forties, wearing a charcoal-tailored overcoat that probably cost more than my sedan. His dark hair was silvering at the temples, and his eyes—the color of slate under a stormy sky—fixed on me with cold, calculating intensity.
Dante Moretti.
Even from my dull suburban life, I knew the name. Moretti Shipping lines, waterfront real estate syndicates, and enough municipal political contributions to keep the Seattle Police Department looking the other way. He was the kind of man people whispered about in restaurants, the undisputed king of the city's private docks.
And right now, Dante Moretti looked like he wanted to put a bullet through my skull.
"Sabrina," Moretti said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, rhythmic hum as he stepped closer, the scent of expensive bourbon and rain rolling off him. "You’ve been very difficult to reach over the last seventy-two hours. And yet, your little company seemed quite eager to siphon four point two million dollars out of my primary escrow account."
I stood frozen, the wind whipping my hair across my face.
If I told him the truth—that I was Isidora, the boring accountant who spent her lunch breaks calculating dental co-pays—they would realize they had grabbed the wrong twin. They would figure out Sabrina had set me up, or that I was useless to them, and they would probably dump my body into the Sound to cover their mistake.
If I stayed silent and let him call me Sabrina...
I looked down at my scuffed shoe, then back into Dante Moretti's stormy eyes.
May you like
A strange, cold clarity washed over the fear. For three years, Sabrina had used our identical faces as a shield, leaving me to clean up her financial messes while she lived high on stolen money. She had built this trap, and she had expected me to be the casualty.
"Four point two million is just the retainer, Dante," I said, my voice steady, surprising even myself with its cold, flat confidence. "If you want to know where the rest of it went, you'd better untie my hands."
