Page 1 of Shadow Of Sin

PROLOGUE

EVA

I’ve learned a lot of lessons in my life, and the harshest one was that business and pleasure should never mix. Now I’m about to spend the next fourteen months regretting that I opened my legs for that bastard.

Daniel McCabe sits in the courtroom gallery three rows back from me. He’s wearing a suit that’s too nice for a man who just destroyed someone’s life to save his own ass. But the joke’s on me because the mastermind himself is walking out the front door of this courthouse scot-free while I’ll be led out of here in handcuffs and loaded into a fucking paddy wagon.

He never once looked at me. Not during the trial, not during his testimony, and not now, while the judge reads my sentence.

Fourteen months in a federal penitentiary for corporate data theft.

They said I stole proprietary data from the tech firm I worked for. Client files, financial records, the kind of stuff that sells for a lot of money to the right buyer. I didn’t. But the digital trail said otherwise, and digital trails don’t lie. Except when someone builds them to.

Daniel planned the whole thing, recruited me, ran half the operation, and then cut a deal before I even knew there was a deal to be cut. By the time I figured out what was happening, my name was the only one on the indictment.

He walks out the front door today. I will be behind bars by dinnertime.

My lawyer puts his hand on my arm. I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything except rage so hot it’s making my vision blur and my gut twist with a deep-rooted shame that’s worse than the anger because at least anger has teeth.

Shame just eats you from the inside.

I did this to myself. That’s the part I can’t get past. I’m not some naïve kid who got swept up in something she didn’t understand. I’m a grown woman who saw the red flags and fucked him anyway because he was smart and charming, and he looked at me like I was the most brilliant person he’d ever met.

And I fell for it. All of it. Like a goddamn amateur.

“Ms. Moreno.” The judge finally looks at me. “Do you have anything to say before sentencing is carried out?”

Oh, I have plenty to say. I want to tell him the operation was built for two people and the evidence proves it if anyone bothered to look close enough. I want to turn around and ask Daniel how he sleeps at night. I want to scream until my throat bleeds.

But my lawyer told me to keep my mouth shut. And right now, he’s the only person in this room on my side.

“No, Your Honor.”

The gavel comes down and I shudder at the finality of it. Two marshals step forward. Cold metal closes around my wrists and the sound of the cuffs clicking shut reverberates between my ears.

That’s when I hear the noise.

It comes from my brother Sal who’s sitting behind me…a raw, gutted sound that isn’t a word or a sob. It’s the sound of someone watching the only family they have left get taken away. I recognize the sound because I made the same sound in a hospital hallway when they told us about Mom and Dad. I was nineteen. Sal was seventeen. That’s when the world ended for the first time.

It’s ending again. Right now. In a courtroom that smells like floor polish and stale coffee.

My pulse lodges in my throat along with the knot of tears.

I can’t turn around. If I see his face, I’ll lose it. And I will not lose it in this room. Not in front of the judge, not in front of the lawyers, and not in front of Daniel, who doesn’t have the balls to acknowledge what he did.

The marshals lead me toward the side door. I keep my spine straight and my chin up because it’s all I have left. My legs are on the verge of buckling. My chest heaves with short, sharp gasps. But I will walk out of this courtroom like a person who still has her shit together, even if it’s the biggest lie I’ve ever told.

My eyes betray me and I sneak a look at Sal. I can’t help it.

He’s standing, his finger gripped tight on the back of the bench in front of him. White knuckles. Red eyes. Absolutely destroyed.

He mouths my name. No sound comes out, it’s just his lips moving around the two syllables that have meant “I’m here” since we were kids.

I mouth back, “I’m okay.”

But I’m not okay. I’m about to go to prison because I couldn’t keep my hands off a man who was playing me from day one, and my brother is going to be alone for fourteen months with no parents, no family, nothing except a nasty gambling habit and a heart too big for the world he lives in.

The door slams closed behind me, jolting me from my toxic thoughts. I shiver at the chill as we walk the length of a concrete hallway, my rubber soles squeaking on the linoleum.