Adriana's POV
The camera shutter clicked three times before my brain caught up with what I was seeing.
Through the rain-streaked windshield, CEO Richard Morrison pressed his mistress against the hotel's glass door. His wedding ring caught the streetlight as his hand slid down her back. Click. Click. Click. Evidence. Proof. Another marriage about to explode.
I'd done this job for three years, and it never got easier watching people destroy their own lives.
My phone buzzed. Marcus. I almost didn't answer—I was packing up my camera, ready to drive home and pretend I hadn't just documented someone's worst day.
"Ana, you need to come back to the office. Now."
Marcus never sounded like that. Excited. Almost breathless.
"I'm finishing up a case," I said, wiping rain off my lens. "Can it wait until morning?"
"We have a walk-in client."
"So? Take their information and—"
"Ana." Marcus cut me off. "It's him."
My chest tightened. "Him who?"
Silence. Then: "David Hammond."
The camera slipped from my hands.
David Hammond. The name that ended everything five years ago. The case I'd built for six months—evidence, witnesses, recordings. The trial that would've made my career as Manhattan's youngest prosecutor. The defendant who walked free after my own fiancé destroyed every piece of evidence I had.
Hammond. The reason I stopped believing in justice.
"Ana? You still there?"
I couldn't breathe right. "Tell him I'm not interested."
"He says someone's trying to kill him."
"Good."
"Ana—"
"I mean it, Marcus. I don't care if he's dying. I don't care if—"
"He says he'll confess everything. The whole conspiracy. He says you were right five years ago, and he wants to make it right before they silence him."
My hands gripped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles turned white. Five years. Five years of rebuilding myself from nothing. Five years of pretending that case didn't haunt every single day.
"How do you know he's not lying?"
"Because he's terrified, Ana. I've never seen anyone look this scared."
Rain hammered the car roof. Morrison and his mistress disappeared into the hotel. Another secret, another lie, another person about to get hurt. That's all this world was anymore—people destroying each other.
"I'm twenty minutes away," I heard myself say.
"Drive safe."
I hung up and sat there, engine running, wipers clearing rain from the glass over and over. My reflection stared back at me in the rearview mirror. Thirty-two years old. Dark circles under my eyes from too many late nights. Hair pulled back tight because loose ends were dangerous in my line of work.
I looked nothing like the woman I used to be. The prosecutor who believed in truth. The girl who thought love and justice were real.
That woman died the day Dominic Cross stood up in court and ripped apart everything I'd built.
My phone buzzed again. A text from Marcus: He's bleeding.
What?
My fingers flew across the screen: Bleeding from what?
Says someone shot at him an hour ago. Grazed his arm. Won't go to hospital. Won't call police. Says they're all part of it.
Part of what? The conspiracy I'd tried to prove five years ago? The network of corrupt officials I'd sworn existed while everyone called me paranoid?
I threw the car into drive.
Traffic was light—everyone smart was already home, safe from the storm. I drove too fast, ran two yellow lights, didn't care. Questions circled my mind like sharks.
Why now? Why me? Why would Hammond confess after five years of silence?
And the question that made my stomach hurt: What did this have to do with Dominic?
I forced his name out of my head. Dominic Cross didn't exist anymore. Not to me.
The office appeared through the rain—a converted warehouse in Brooklyn that Marcus and I called home. Lights blazed from the second floor windows. Someone was definitely there.
I parked and ran through the downpour, jacket over my head. The door was unlocked. Marcus always locked the door.
"Marcus?"
No answer.
I took the stairs two at a time, heart pounding. The office door stood open.
Marcus sat at his desk, face pale. And across from him, in the chair we used for clients, sat David Hammond.
He looked terrible. Skinny. Sweating despite the cold. A bloody cloth wrapped around his left arm. And his eyes—they darted to the windows, the door, everywhere except at me.
"Ms. Vale." His voice shook. "Thank you for coming."
I didn't move from the doorway. "You have five minutes. Talk."
Hammond flinched. "I deserve that. I deserve worse. What happened five years ago—"
"Four minutes."
He pulled something from his pocket. A small flash drive. His hands trembled as he set it on Marcus's desk.
"Everything's on here. Names. Dates. Bank records. Proof of fifteen years of corruption. Judges taking bribes. Police covering murders. Prosecutors fixing trials." He looked up at me finally. "You were right, Ms. Vale. About all of it. And they destroyed your career because you got too close to the truth."
My mouth went dry. "Who's 'they'?"
"Judge Elena Vasquez runs the whole operation. When you started building the case against me, she panicked. She couldn't let you expose everything, so she—"
Glass exploded.
The window shattered inward. Hammond's chest bloomed red. He fell sideways, chair clattering.
I dove behind the desk. Marcus hit the floor. More bullets tore through the office—one, two, three, four. Wood splintered. Papers flew. The sound was deafening.
Then silence.
Car tires screeched outside. An engine roared away.
"Marcus?" My voice came out wrong. "You okay?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm okay."
I crawled to Hammond. Blood spread across his shirt. His breathing came in awful, wet gasps.
"Ms. Vale..." He grabbed my wrist with surprising strength. "Dominic... they threatened... Dominic knows everything..."
"What? What does Dominic know?"
But Hammond's eyes had already gone empty and still.
I sat there, his blood on my hands, his final words echoing in my head.
Dominic knows everything.
My phone buzzed. Unknown number. I almost didn't answer.
"Hello?"
"Adriana." That voice. God, that voice I hadn't heard in five years. "We need to talk. Right now."
Dominic Cross.
And somehow I knew—everything was about to get so much worse.