Searing pain had Special Agent Cynthia Deming's blue eyes opened and wide as she bolted upright in bed, her blond hair draped over half her face. Heart racing, vision blurred, she threw her legs over the mattress's edge, suffering nausea and a headache that left her gasping. She touched the back of her head and felt matted, sticky hair around a clotted cut. When her vision cleared, she studied the resultant blood smears on her manicured fingertips, on her expensive gray pantsuit, on the worn and ugly bedspread.

Wait. Not her bed, or her bedroom.

"Well, this can't be good." Her voice came out raspy. What the hell happened last night? Fully dressed, injured, in a stranger's bed? This was an unwelcome first.

The stale air did seem familiar, however, as did the brown drapes pulled closed over windows. The bedroom was innocuous, its furnishings dated and worn. Maybe a cheap motel? Bare beige walls, fragrance of carpet cleaner, and a television against the wall did hint at a rented room, but there was no desk, phone, or tiny refrigerator — things that would indicate a motel.

She struggled to her feet, swayed, and felt dizzy. A heavy object fell to the floor. A gun. Cynthia's hand palmed her hip holster and found it empty. No small beans. She didn't remember removing it from her holster. Definitely not good. Cynthia retrieved it from the floor too quickly, inviting more nausea and spiking head pain, forcing her to sit again as panic teased the edges of her composure.

She couldn't remember. Not how she'd arrived here, or even where here was.

Pulling back the gun's slide, she noted the bullet chambered, checked the magazine, counted rounds, and found six missing. A sniff told her it had been discharged recently.

"Well, shit." Bad news was piling up, and it was beginning to feel personal.

Cynthia struggled to her feet. She had to take a moment to find her balance, so it felt like an accomplishment when she'd made her way to the heavily draped window. She nudged aside the curtain, winced as morning sunlight irritated her eyes, and felt relieved to recognize the view.

Chinatown, Boston. She was at a federal safe house she'd used three weeks prior for a case now closed. Why was she here? Injured, with gun drawn, red flags flapping in the breeze. From her vantage point, she could see her black Lexus parked at the curb across the street, indicating she'd driven here. A quick press of her palm to her pants pocket and she found her car keys, which eased her mind enough to holster her gun. There was no sign of her iPhone, or wallet, suggesting she'd been robbed. But then what?

She couldn't remember.

Whatever had happened had prompted her to seek shelter at the safe house. Not the worst decision she'd ever made. An active safe house had on-site personnel who could help her, and fill in some blanks. Hope spiked as she hurried out of the room, and it grew as she continued to recognize familiar wall-to-wall rugs, worn to the backing in places, dingy beige drywall, the dark hallway, the smell of cigarettes and air freshener. She might have lost time, but she remembered these details.

The safe house had a hollow feel, and it surrounded her in silence. Calling out, searching every room, she continued to hope someone was there, until the last room was searched. Nothing and nobody. Not unusual, just damned inconvenient. When not staffed, the safe house was locked up tighter than a tick, heavily alarmed to protect its expensive surveillance tech. So how'd she get in?

The security cameras would have the video. Cynthia hurried back to the surveillance room on the first floor, in the back near the kitchen. It was hard to focus past the stabbing pain in her head and the accompanying nausea, but she did, punching in the door's code with trembling fingers. Afraid the code might have been changed since she'd last been here, she waited nervously, and then enjoyed a wave of relief when the door clicked open. She stepped inside to view a wall-to-wall display of monitors, each screen dedicated to a different live security camera: the building's two entrances, all abutting streets, and the roof. A long desk in the middle of the room was covered with electronics, hard drives, and keyboards.

Cynthia sat at the desk, logged in using her FBI security clearance, and pulled up archived digital video, searching for last night's time stamp.

The desk's phone caught her eye as she scrolled through the video, keeping her finger on the keyboard's down arrow button. It nudged her conscience. Her team leader, FBI Special Agent Jack Benton, would be wondering why she hadn't arrived at work yet. Eight AM. He'd want her absence explained. He'd have questions, deserved answers, and she'd have none.

She'd look like a fool.

Cynthia's heart sank as she thought of the many ways her team would spank her over this bizarre turn of events, but when she factored in the safe house's phone protocols — three levels of security on all incoming and outgoing calls — it had her hesitating to broaden the scope of who knew of her troubles. Staff, rightly, would require explanations regarding a federal agent's unauthorized use of a secret safe house, and her blackout would produce incomplete answers, suspicion, and be noted in her personnel file — a high cost for a potentially benign reason for waking, injured, in a Chinatown safe house.

"Ugh." A lifetime of following rules could not be ignored. She grabbed the phone, and then her image appeared on the monitor's screen, distracting her enough to place the receiver back on its cradle. Digital time stamp: 10:30 PM. Cynthia's image staggered down the center of the street, just outside of the safe house, gun drawn and hanging at her side. Drunk? Cynthia refused to believe her eyes. Then her image moved and a streetlight illuminated her face. She froze the image, zoomed in, and recognized pain — not inebriation — contorting her face.

She'd arrived at the safe house injured. Good to know.

Rummaging in a desk drawer, she found a flash drive, inserted it into the computer's port, and watched as her image progressed past her parked Lexus to the safe house's stairs, and then its stoop. Whatever her level of impaired cognition last night, she'd been clear-headed enough to punch in the door's security code, but not clear-headed enough to drive. Cynthia paused the video, clicking appropriate pulldown menus, and copied, then downloaded, the time-stamped video footage.

Benton would have questions, and this video was all Cynthia had to offer.

She clicked "copy," and flinched as pain flared behind her eyes. It blinded her for a moment, forcing her to breathe through the nausea. Her stomach lurched without warning, forcing Cynthia to lean over a waste bin as she emptied her stomach. Shaken, blinking past watering eyes, she struggled to read the screen, clicking a message panel she assumed said "download complete." Tucking the flash drive into her pocket, she managed to breathe past the worst of her stomach's spasms, and finally her vision cleared.

The screen's pop-up message box stated, "File deleted."

"No!" Cynthia hit the computer's power button, hoping to hard boot the system, maybe activate an auto-recovery program. The computer didn't respond. The screens remained unchanged as the words "File deleted" stared back at her. She hit the power button again. Still nothing. In full panic mode, Cynthia yanked the wires from the hard drive's ports, front and back. All monitors went dark, and the hard drive's motor fell silent. Heart racing, her breathing labored, Cynthia stared in horror at the wall of now blank monitors. What had she done?

She'd fucked up.

This computer system didn't respond like her personal laptop. Where were the fail-safes? High tech federal security hardware should have fail-safes, but tech hated her, so maybe she'd found a way to make them fail. Cynthia couldn't keep a watch more than six months before it died, and had long since given up wearing them. Even her iPhone hated her, always freezing, never working correctly. Why had she assumed she could finesse these computers? Cynthia groaned, realizing there was nothing she could do now but cut her losses. Tech support would clean up this mess as they'd cleaned up her other messes in the past.

She pushed away from the desk, spared a glance for the soiled waste bin, and then remembered the sheets and comforter that she'd bloodied upstairs. Ten minutes later, she tossed them in the dumpster out back and headed across the street toward her car. Clicking her Lexus's key fob, she opened the driver's side door and slid behind the wheel, instantly relieved to see her pink Kate Spade pocketbook in the backseat. Her gym bag was open on the passenger seat. Resting her hand on the clothes, she realized they were still slightly damp, and it triggered a memory. The gym last night. A couple blocks down. It might have security cameras, too, so maybe video there could fill in her memory gaps. Her iPhone lay on top of the soiled gym clothes — battery dead, big surprise — next to a small container of peppermint gum, which she fell on like a starving child. Her wallet was in her Kate Spade bag.

"Hm." Cynthia's anxiety had her chewing the gum frenetically. "Curiouser and curiouser." Finding her phone and wallet ruled out robbery, so what was left? Abduction by aliens?

Fifteen minutes later, she parked at the curb of her Back Bay Gloucester Street apartment, impatient to call Benton from her landline phone. The peppermint gum had settled her stomach and her headache was under control, but she was panicking. Memories were flooding back ... of men on their knees, bags over their heads, hands tied behind their backs. A brick wall. Blood. Lots and lots of blood. So ... definitely not aliens.

Cynthia dropped her keys twice as she worked the front lock to her apartment. Once inside, she hurried down the hall to her landline phone in the living room. In her rush, she dropped her pocketbook, and didn't see him until she flipped on the overhead light. Cynthia lashed out with a punch, shrieking as fear suffused her. He twisted his upper body upon impact, stripping her blow of power, but by then her fright had turned to anger.

"Charlie!" If looks could kill, she'd be planning a funeral.

Charlie Foulkes. The center of her universe, her past, her present, her best friend. He stood between her and the phone, arms folded over his chest, and he was glowering. Totally pissed. Almost as pissed as she was with him. Cynthia had been avoiding Charlie for months, and just looking at him now made her cringe with embarrassment.

"Damn, Charlie!" She holstered her gun, only then noticing she'd even pulled it, and that her living room was a mess. Among other things, an empty carton of mango sorbet with an accompanying dirty spoon littered the side table. Clean laundry waited to be folded on the ottoman, and four pair of heels were underfoot, scattered over her rose-colored Persian rug. Fighting back mortification, she gathered the shoes and tossed them behind the leather couch, pretending not to hear the loud clatter as they bounced off the oak wainscoting. "I almost shot you!" she said.

Charlie — Boston Police Department's forensic pathologist — didn't seem all that impressed with his close call. Sexy as hell, his red hair disheveled, Charlie wore his usual jeans, boots, and short-sleeved shirt. His big blue eyes were hooded by furrowed brows, his full lips thinned with anger, and the sight was impressive. Intimidating, even.

Lifting the laundry basket, she gave Charlie a wide berth as she set it next to the grandfather clock, out of his line of sight. After a last scan of the room, she decided the rug didn't need vacuuming, and the books and newspapers on her antique side tables weren't technically clutter, so she mirrored Charlie's posture — arms folded over her chest, scowling. Cynthia hated when Charlie got mad at her. Other people? She could give a damn. But Charlie? It really bothered her, and he knew it. He'd weaponize himself, and her one defense was being angry back, because it really bothered Charlie when she was angry at him.

They were best friends; it didn't have to make sense. They'd known each other since she was twelve, and up until a few months ago they'd been as close to inseparable as friends could be. Friends. Just friends. Whatever had prompted his drive to her apartment — at nearly the crack of dawn — had him upset enough to interrupt his morning routine. He'd foregone his shave. Cynthia hadn't seen him unshaven since ... well, since the accident, and that was ten years back. The scruff was a menacing layer to his full-bodied frown. Boots braced shoulder width apart, Charlie towered over Cynthia's five-feet, six inches, intimidating her, though he'd be the last person to admit that was his endgame.

"You look like shit," he said. His biceps twitched as he rolled his shoulders, as if working out a kink.

"Kiss my ass." She nudged a matted lock of hair behind her ear, hating that he was right. Hating that he looked sexy and fit in his dishevelment, while she not only felt like hell, he'd assured her that she looked like it, too. She walked to the couch, peeled off her ruined suit jacket, and then sat, using her jacket to protect the leather from her disgusting hair.

"Where have you been?" Charlie lived for his job and his family, and not in that order. He was taking her absence personally. She wanted to throw a denial in his face, to tell him he had no right to worry about her, but she knew it wasn't true. They didn't share so much as a DNA strand, but Cynthia was family by default. Terrance's little sister. Terrance, who'd died ten years ago, after wrapping his new roadster around a tree with his best friend, Charlie, in the passenger seat. "I've been waiting here since eleven last night," he said.

"Who asked you to?" Cynthia hated the guilt he easily summoned. "Since when do you show up unannounced at my apartment, using a key I gave you only for emergencies, by the way, and question my whereabouts?"

"Cynthia —" Her name left his lips on a growl.

"No, really, Charlie." She felt at a disadvantage — sitting, while he towered over her — so she flavored her tone with belligerence to hide her weakness. "What if I'd pulled an all-nighter last night with a strange man I picked up in a bar? Then I find you here when I return home, making things all awkward. I could lie to you, of course, and pretend it didn't happen. That I wasn't doing the nasty between the sheets with some dude named Jeff. Should I? Should I lie?"

She hated that he'd just assumed she'd be here when he showed up last night, as if she had no personal life. Odds were nil she'd do the nasty with a stranger, named Jeff or otherwise, but damn. A woman had her pride and he had no right to assume her sex life was dull as dishwater. That was Cynthia's sad little secret. She wasn't even sure he was listening, because he seemed fascinated by her hair, his anger expanding his chest and widening his eyes.

On a sharp exhale, he said, "Your head is bleeding."

"Huh?" She pressed her palm to the top of her head, instinctively trying to hide the evidence, which was stupid. No hiding that she'd been roughed up.

He finally met her gaze, and looked ready to explode. "Are you telling me Jeff did this to you? You had sex with a 'Jeff,' who did this to you?" Shock nudged aside irritation, and now that she thought on it, it wasn't unreasonable for Charlie to draw that horrible conclusion from her hypothetical social life with the nonexistent Jeff.

"No." She bit her lip, recoiling from the thought. There it was again: guilt, guilt, guilt. There seemed to be guilt connected with every damn interaction they'd had lately. "No, Charlie. I'm sorry. Forget I said anything." Yada yada yada. Her head hurt. She didn't have any more energy to wade through another emotional quagmire. When would she learn to just shut her mouth?

"So Jeff," he said, allowing his words to hang as he waited for more information.

Cynthia waved him off. "Doesn't exist. Forget it." Flushed, she felt stupid now that her Jeff example had blown up, especially since it seemed like a clinical example of a blatant cry for attention. Almost as if she'd wanted to make Charlie jealous. She peeked at him from behind a lock of hair hanging over her right eye, wondering if he was ... but that would be insane, because they were just friends. She wanted to change the subject. Not easy, under the pall of Charlie's dark frowns and him looming over her, making it hard to think.