Standing up, he stretched his stiff, weak body, ignoring that all too familiar nausea, and walked toward his lover. She was a good girl, Anne, with none of the brashness of many common whores, and she did a fine job of tolerating him. Some nights he even suspected she felt love, such as she was capable of, for him. He read it in her anxiety, her eagerness, that desperate desire to please. In return he felt something like gratitude. Now he simply wanted to capture her features, her expression, see and appreciate how her lovely, worrisome face relaxed into innocence in her sleep.

Still two feet from the bed, Gabriel’s boot heel slipped on the floor and he cursed, nearly going down before grabbing the bedpost for balance. Glancing to see what had halted his progress, he saw a dark spot on the floor, raised like a puddle. Unsure what it was, he shifted forward, his hand sliding along the side of the mattress as he leaned for a better look. There was dampness beneath his fingers, and he realized the puddle appeared to be originating from the bed, a stained trail descending from the sheet to drip upon the floor.

Head snapping up, mouth hot, room spinning from the alcohol, Gabriel rushed his gaze past Anne’s perfect arm and hand, to her face.

Or where her face should have been.

Unrecognizable, covered in blood, Anne was lacerated from hairline to waist with multiple stab wounds, a bowie knife placed mockingly in her other hand, her chemise and huge areas of her flesh shredded.

She was dead.

Bile rose in his throat, and he turned and spilled the contents of his stomach on the floor beside that dark circular stain of her life’s blood, his heart racing, his mind registering a rapid succession of shock, horror, regret, fear. Anne had just been alive, warm and anxiously eager to please him. Now she was irrefutably and grotesquely dead.

Slashed to bloody bits while he floated in a pleasure cloud of drugs.

While he could never die, she had been viciously yanked from this mortal coil, and for him there would be no escape.

Ever.

Chapter One

MICHAELS MURDER TRIAL NEARS END OF TESTIMONY

In a case that grows more complex by the day, defendant Dr. Rafe Marino quoted the Bible, implying he was a positive influence upon her when asked about his relationship with the victim, girlfriend Jessie Michaels. “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age,” Dr. Marino told reporters outside the courthouse yesterday.