Looking around at the people crammed into the gallery, all waiting with bated breath for the jurors to file in, Cassandra guessed that at least half of them were journalists.

She had had the feeling of swimming upstream ever since the defendant, Jack Hardy, had been arrested, and now at the conclusion of her assignment—the first big case she had followed in her career so far—Cassandra was torn between feeling excited that she would be the reporter covering the news for the paper, and feeling guilty her career had received a boost on the back of a woman being murdered.

“What do you think the verdict will be?”

Cassandra’s ears pricked up at the words of one of the other members of the gallery. She looked, to Cassandra’s eyes, to be a regular citizen—not a journalist, nor one of the family members or friends of the defendant or the victim.

“Oh he’s guilty, for sure,” the woman’s friend responded with a shrug. “I mean, look at the evidence against the guy.”

Cassandra made a mental note to ask a few of the non-press members of the gallery for their opinions—it would be a good addition to her article, which was due only a few hours after the verdict came out.

“They’ve been holed up for so long though,” someone else observed, joining in the conversation. “Maybe they think the evidence isn’t that compelling.”

“They just want to make sure they’re doing it right,” the second person, a man who Cassandra estimated to be in his thirties, said, brushing aside the concern. “It’s a murder trial; they don’t want to put someone away for life or potentially put him up for the death penalty if they’re not one hundred percent sure of their decision. I’d be more worried if they’d been in-and-out.”

“What do you think? Is he guilty?”

Cassandra noticed some of the other reporters listening into the hushed conversations; they were all interested in a bit of color for their coverage of the conclusion to the trial.

“Oh, totally,” the man said, shaking his head as if to deny there could be any doubt. “You saw the evidence against him. Besides, given his past…”

Before the conversation could get much further, the lawyers filed in, and the officers of the court took up their positions. Cassandra’s heart beat faster in her chest as she prepared herself for the moment she had been waiting months for: the verdict.

Cassandra watched, on tenterhooks, as the lawyers took up their positions, and the judge entered the courtroom. She rose with everyone else at the command from the bailiff, and sat down when the judge did.

She stole a glance at the defendant; Jack Hardy sat almost completely still at the table opposite the judge, his face perfectly expressionless as the formalities dragged on.

He was dressed sharply, as he had been every day of the trial, in a slate gray suit that fit as though it had been made for him. Cassandra thought that his defense team had had their work cut out for them, trying to convince the jury that the man on trial was innocent. Even his stillness radiated a kind of unspoken threat, a calm before the storm that only the most overconfident or ignorant people would ignore. Hardy was built like an oak tree: broad, muscular shoulders, a lean body, perfectly straight when he stood, rippling with power. His light brown hair was combed back from his forehead, parted on the left with laser precision.

Hardy looked brutal, and Cassandra reflected that in his usual line of work, as a professional bounty hunter, and even as a Navy SEAL that, it must definitely be an asset to him. In a murder trial, though, she thought his attorneys should have tried to get him to lose some muscle, to look a little flabby, a little scrawny. As it was, he looked as though he could kill with his bare hands and not break a sweat. Cassandra had glimpsed Hardy’s face up close more than once during the proceedings, and his bright blue eyes had looked out of his face without any trace of fear or remorse, like bottomless pools of deep, arctic ice.

The jurors filed in, taking their seats quickly, and Cassandra’s heart started beating even faster. Contrary impulses danced in her brain: if Hardy beat the murder rap, the surprise verdict would sell so many papers that it wouldn’t matter what she wrote. If, on the other hand, he was found guilty, the paper would still sell, but Cassandra would have to work harder to set herself apart from the other journalists covering the story.

“Madam Foreperson, have you reached a verdict?”

Cassandra nodded along with the formalities, wishing that there was some way to get through them more quickly.

“We have, Your Honor,” the tired-looking woman said.

She passed the written verdict to the bailiff, who brought it to the judge. The court clerk rose.

“In the charge of First Degree Murder, we, the jury, find the defendant, Jack Hardy, guilty.”

Cassandra barely heard the rest of what was said; she already knew the most important part. As the clerk came to the end of the reading, the courtroom began to come to life, people murmuring to each other, a few people audibly crying, others letting out muted cheers and congratulations. Cassandra wasn’t entirely sure how she felt. She looked down at her hands, thinking about her involvement in the case.

At her office, late one night, she had received an anonymous phone call saying a murder had taken place in a house in a respectable suburban neighborhood. After calling 911 with the location, Cassandra had driven to the house, casing the scene, before the detectives arrived. Her bravery and tenacity in following the tip had impressed her boss, who then gave her a huge assignment covering the case. In the course of investigating the murder of Laura Granger, Cassandra uncovered facts about the NYPD officer and city’s sweetheart that had chilled her—and made it clear that the double life she was leading had made it almost a matter of when she would piss off the wrong person, not if.

You’re here to work, Cassandra told herself firmly. Stop woolgathering. She looked up from her hands and scanned the room; the lawyers for the prosecution were congratulating themselves, patting each other on the back, talking to the family and friends of the victim. Happy and sad tears alike were on the loved ones’ faces. Cassandra turned her attention onto the jury and saw both relief and apprehension on the faces of the men and women. There were some, she could see, who didn’t exactly like the verdict they had collectively arrived at. There would be interviews later, and those members of the jury who had doubts—but not enough to count for reasonable doubt—were clearly dreading the grilling to come.

A blur of movement in the corner of her eye caught Cassandra’s attention. She turned her gaze toward it, and saw that it was Jack Hardy, rising to his feet. He turned his head, his gaze moving over the gallery, and in an instant the deep-set blue eyes were on her. Cassandra glanced to either side of herself, trying to convince herself that Hardy was looking at someone else, but when she shifted slightly to the side, she saw his gaze shift with her.

People started filtering out of the courtroom, and while Cassandra’s ears buzzed with the loud hum of conversations going on around her, she couldn’t make sense of anything around her. As Hardy stared at her, Cassandra felt as though she’d been plunged into a vat of ice water, but she couldn’t make herself look away.

Hardy only broke his steady, uncompromising stare when two of the court officers grabbed him and turned him around, leading him towards the exit where he’d be taken to jail to await sentencing.

As he walked away, Cassandra shook her head; she had never seen a look like the one in Hardy’s eyes as he stared up at her. She wasn’t sure whether what it had caused her to feel was a shiver or a tingle. It was like some base reaction to the undeniably attractive man in front of her, mixed with a wave of fear that he might launch himself at her and do to her what the jury had found him guilty of.

“Cass!”

Cassandra started at the sound of her name and looked around to see who had called out to her. She saw Max, her boss, approaching, walking against the tide of people who were heading out of the gallery, towards the exits.

Show’s over, nothing to see here folks, move along, she thought idly, trying to push down the strange feelings that lingered in her mind and body at the strange look Hardy had given her.

“You’re going to have that final draft on my desk by four, right?”

“Yeah—yeah, Max, I’ve got it on lock,” Cassandra said, giving herself another shake.

“You’ve done great work on this so far,” Max said, finally making it to her side. He patted her shoulder and there was something about his touch—about the contrast of Max’s cheeriness with Hardy’s ice-cold stare only moments before—that gave Cassandra a creepy-crawly feeling. “That in-depth on Laura Granger sold so well we had to do a second run, and now this front-page story will do the same.”

Cassandra smiled, trying to push down her nerves so that they wouldn’t show on her face.

“Thanks, boss,” she said. “I should probably get to work on it now, actually, if I’m going to make the six o’clock print run.”

Max patted her shoulder again and Cassandra felt a twitch somewhere around her stomach. Normally her boss was all about business; even when she’d turned in the finished Granger article, he hadn’t seemed all that impressed at what she had managed to uncover.

“You’re on the rise, Holloway,” Max said, giving her the warmest smile Cassandra had ever seen him give someone who wasn’t an advertiser. “As soon as today’s print run is over, come see me for your next assignment. I want to capitalize on your new-found fame and see if we can’t dig up some more readers while you’re still a household name.”

He smiled again, before turning around to speak to someone else—an editor for one of the other city rags. Cassandra noticed that his wedding band was gone from its usual place on his finger. She shuddered, realizing the reason behind his sudden friendliness toward her.

Think about your career, Cass. He’s right about that at least. Strike while the iron is hot, get this scoop on his desk and get the next assignment on the roll.

Cassandra hurried out of the courtroom, trying to put the two odd interactions behind her as she headed to interview the people still milling around outside.