Chapter One
Friday, July 24
4:55 a.m.
La Trinité, Martinique
In a moment of blinding clarity, Dr. Tiffany Peters knew she was dying.
It didn’t scare her. The macabre had fascinated her throughout her life, and her death was no different. The clinical part of her brain reeled off the symptoms of death, and her body was checking every box. She wished she could document what was happening. Doctors and scientists had spent centuries trying to understand death. She wished she could tell someone how it felt, but when she opened her mouth, no sound escaped.
The hotel room around her swam in and out of focus, and each breath was a chore, like an elephant sat on her chest. Her belly felt full. She bet if she cut herself open, she’d find a whole lot of blood in there.
She was so damn cold.
A bullet to the stomach wasn’t how she’d expected her life to end. Tiffany wasn’t a particularly adventurous person. She liked routine, and was okay with sticking to her little corner of the globe and viewing the rest of it through the viruses she saw under her microscope. In a few months, she was supposed to get married—though now she knew that would’ve been a mistake. She’d planned to have a couple of kids. Maybe win some recognition for her work in virology. She always figured she’d live long enough to see her grandchildren grow up, then die old and frail like most people.
Never in her wildest dreams had she expected to be hemorrhaging internally on a hotel bed in a five-star Caribbean resort during a hostage situation.
Funny how only one week could change so much.
A flash of movement at the foot of her bed caught her attention, and she blinked to clear her vision. Someone was pacing there. A young man with a mean, hard-edged face and cold eyes. She remembered him, the kid with the orange sneakers. He was part of the group of people trying to keep her alive, but he was different from the rest of them. He was trouble.
“This whole thing is fucked,” he said, and it took her a long moment to realize he wasn’t speaking to her, but into a cell phone. “I warned Briggs this was a bad idea, but he’s lost his goddamn mind and taken the whole fucking hotel hostage. Dr. Peters is dying. Dr. Oliver is MIA. And HORNET is everywhere.”
Hornet? Like the bug? What did that have to do with anything? But one thing he said did make sense to her.
Dr. Oliver is MIA.
Claire Oliver, her best friend and research partner, had somehow escaped this hotel of horrors. Claire was safe. She was okay. Tiffany grasped the thought, held it tight, and something loosened inside her. Another tether holding her to life snapped free.
The kid in the orange sneakers stopped pacing at the foot of her bed and stared at her. His features showed no concern, no empathy, nothing but mild annoyance. He noticed she was awake and met her gaze. She thought his eyes cold, but they weren’t even that. They were dead, with no flicker of humanity on the other side. She thought she’d seen evil before—the man who had shot her less than six hours ago had certainly seemed evil at the time. But she was wrong. That man had been a human making bad decisions. This kid was a psychopath.
“Sir,” he said evenly into the phone, all the while holding her gaze. “If I mop up this mess, it’s over. My cover will be blown.”
Mop up.
He meant kill her. Would he find Claire and kill her, too? Oh God, and there was no way to warn her.
Tiffany tried to sit up, but she barely had the strength to lift her head. She opened her mouth, tried to call out, to warn someone, but all that came from between her dry lips was an inhuman moan. Even though she was dying and could feel her body shutting down one process at a time, she still had to try. For Claire’s sake.
“Yes, sir,” the kid said and then pocketed the phone. He shook his head and produced a gun.
This was it, she realized. He’d pull the trigger, and she’d be gone before she even registered the pain. She turned her head slightly, looking for the door, praying nobody walked in and got caught in the crossfire. There was no help for her, but if she could save someone else…
Except she and the kid weren’t alone in the room. On the queen bed next to hers lay an unconscious blond man in a bloodstained New Orleans Saints T-shirt. She remembered him. Jean-Luc? She’d heard someone call him that during one of her bouts of consciousness. He’d rescued her from the floor of the hotel’s lobby, had brought her here, to safety in this room. And now he’d die, too. All for helping her.
She looked at the kid again and choked out, “Please, don’t.”
“Sorry,” he said, not sounding the least bit sorry. “You’ve outlived your usefulness, Dr. Peters.”
Yeah, that’s what he thought.
Tiffany sucked in a lungful of air and screamed with everything she had left in her. The sound that tore from her throat was raw, ragged, primal.
It was the last thing she ever did and, in the split-second before the bullet struck, she hoped it was enough to save the blond man.