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    And not even thirteen years was enough to assuage her guilt, or her doubts, or the way she’d felt about him. Her pulse was racing with an awful mixture of shock and wariness, and a truly horrible excitement at just seeing him again.
    She must be crazy.
    Marilyn. Oh, sweet Jesus, her mother couldn’t have any idea who she’d hired. This was insane—and with that thought, Katya’s headache won, hands down, with a flash of pain.
    Suddenly, her decision to expand her business by buying a gallery in her hometown was looking extremely shortsighted. What in the world had she been thinking? Toussi’s was right smack dab in the middle of LoDo, only a few blocks from the alley where Jonathan Traynor had been found murdered.
    Alex had warned her to have her stars read before she rearranged her whole life, and now she wished she had. Something this cataclysmic must have been splashed all over her personal cosmos like a supernova.
    Had Hawkins seen her? she wondered, and then could have kicked herself for being stupid. Of course he’d seen her. She’d been up on the stage for the last fifteen minutes. Everybody in the whole damn garden must have seen her.
    So what was she going to do?
    Get Alex. Yes, that was right. She needed to find Alex, who had disappeared God only knew where, and tell him he’d been absolutely right: Her mother’s paranoia was extremely well-founded, but her meddling, as usual, had only made things worse.
    Much, much worse.
    The bidding on the Oleg Henri was still going on. She could hear the auctioneer’s voice behind her on the stage, cool, calm, and collected—the way she would be, she swore, in just a minute. She just needed a minute to adjust, to catch her breath and breathe her way through the pain ricocheting between her temples.
    If Hawkins had seen her, what must he be thinking? Maybe he hadn’t recognized her. She’d changed a lot since she was eighteen. Or maybe seeing her didn’t make any difference to him one way or the other, because from where she was standing, it was clear he was not having the same heart-palpitating reaction she was having.
    Which made her wonder if she and Alex had read the situation all wrong. Maybe her mother hadn’t hired him—but if Marilyn hadn’t, who had? Maybe he and the other man weren’t there to protect her.
    What if he’d come for revenge?
    The alarming thought took hold for all of half a second. Then she told herself to calm down and get a grip. He deserved better of her. He always had. No one took revenge for idiocy—and that had been her biggest crime against him, being a weak-willed coward who, no matter how hard she’d tried, hadn’t been able to make her voice heard over the hue and cry for his conviction.
    Katya had never doubted that her mother and Senator Jon Traynor II, Big Jon, had both come down hard and heavy on the judge in the case—Marilyn for a quick resolution that did not involve her daughter, and Big Jon for swift and terrible justice. That his son had been revealed as a drug addict had drawn a lot of attention to his failure as a father, and he’d been hell-bent on finding someone else to blame. Christian Hawkins, a street kid with no visible means of support, no family, and a record had been all too easy to put away.
    And then he’d been pardoned. Two years in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed—he had to be angry about that. Very angry.
    The Prom King Murder, as the media had dubbed the whole horrible affair, was thirteen years old, with poor Jonathan long dead and buried, but the prom queen from that fateful, awful year was still alive and well.
    Though, so help her God, she’d been a lot better before she’d seen Hawkins.
    The boy she’d known would never have hurt her, but he’d had those two awful years in prison since then, and—
    She never got a chance to finish the thought. The explosion that rocked the stage knocked her down with a blast of heat and noise and sparks, throwing her hard onto