Chilled air rushed against her legs. Exposed and vulnerable to the confusion around her, Ana jerked the hem of her skirt down.
“Wh—where are you going?” Ana loathed the fearful catch in her voice. It was bad enough to go to pieces once; she wouldn’t display weakness again.
“I’m poking my head out. Don’t move.”
She craned her neck to peek over her shoulder. Particles of plaster floated in the air like ashy snowflakes and the wall studs behind her desk were exposed. Daniel crouched, one hand resting on the desk for balance.
“Hey? Anybody hear me? Maggie? Irene?”
Daniel’s voice, loud in the desk’s confines, masked the backdrop of crashes and the howl of distant alarms.
“Who’s that? Where’s Ana?”
Ana exhaled in a rush at the familiar voice of her friend and fellow lawyer, Joel Cameron. She rolled onto her knees and crawled to Daniel’s side.
“You don’t follow instructions well, do you?” he asked.
Ana ignored the dig and shouted, adrenaline spiking her voice to a fingernails-on-chalkboard pitch. “I’m here. Nadia’s brother is with me. Are you okay?”
“Think my arm’s broken. Bloody bookcase fell on me,” he said.
“Joel? Ana?” her secretary called from across the hallway.
“Maggie? Are you hurt?” Ana blinked away hot tears. Two of her friends were, if not safe, at least alive.
“No. I’m fine, I think.”
Daniel raised his voice again. “Joel? Is the bookcase still on you?”
“Yeah, can’t get the stupid thing off my arm. What a mess.”
“What about Irene?” Ana shouted. Joel’s office was closest to the reception area. “Can you hear her?”
Joel shouted Irene’s name and a couple of beats passed before their receptionist replied.
“I’m here, I’m here.” Irene’s hoarse voice drifted down the corridor, followed by a couple of sharp, barking coughs. “Don’t worry about a tough old bird like me. Sort Joel out.”
Ana squeezed her eyes shut in relief for a moment. When she opened them, Daniel was looking at her with intense focus.
“Who else is here today?”
“Sean’s at court,” she said. “Angela and Denise are away, so it’s just us four.”
“Right. Do you have a staff room table here? Something that can protect us from aftershocks.”
“The conference room has a big table in it.” She edged forward, preparing to show him where it was. “We’ll fit under it if we huddled—”
“We need to move fast.” He stood and glanced at her feet. “You have any sensible shoes with you?”
“Ah, no. I’ve running shoes in my gym bag, but they’re in the car.” She leaned forward again.
He crouched, effectively blocking her exit. “You need to stay here. There’s broken glass all over the floor.”
Ana rocked back on her heels, her mouth open in protest, but he continued to speak as if he hadn’t noticed. “I’ve got boots on. I’ll help Joel and—”
“You’re not listening.” Her stomach dropped to somewhere in the region of her knees. One other time she’d experienced a similar combination of frustration and helplessness. The night more than two years ago when her husband, Neil, was killed.
“Go ahead.” Daniel’s gaze locked with hers, twin blue lasers that pierced through the shadows.
For a moment, looking in his eyes, Ana forgot the point she was making. Then panic clawed at her once again from the inside out. She sucked in a deep breath and fought to expand the bands of emotion constricting her lungs.
Keep it together, woman.
“I can’t stay under here.” The words slid smoothly from her tongue. “I have to get home to Alyssa—she’s only two. Then I have to find Theo.” She latticed her fingers into knots on top of her thighs. “I can’t stay here.”
“In time. All in good time.”
Ana glanced down, startled to stillness when the rough warmth of his hand covered her numb fingers.
“Nads will take care of your little girl, and teachers will be with your son at his school. You can’t just bolt out of this building. You have to think, not react.”
He rubbed a thumb across the smooth skin of her knuckles, and the rough edge of a callus sent tingles along her arm. “We have to help the injured. If you come with me now, if you sprain your ankle in those heels, or glass cuts your feet, where will we be then?”
Ana pounded a fist on the floor, raising a small plume of dust. The leather crossing over her toes and digging into her skin was now a frustrating reminder of her powerlessness. The shoes were headed for the garbage first opportunity. Daniel was right. She needed to use her analytical mind and stop reacting to the terror that had hijacked her common sense. “All right, fine. You go.”
Sensibly not waiting for her to change her mind, Daniel squeezed her hand once and left.
Chapter 3
Daniel strode around Ana’s desk, swiftly noting the conditions—evaluating, strategizing. Once, being on constant alert, never fully relaxed, had been second nature. But habits, even ones ingrained by a decade in the armed forces, disappeared without discipline and conscientiousness.
He’d been a civilian for too long.
Glass glittered on the beige carpet. On the way in, he’d paid scant attention to the huge glass-faced offices set on either side of the short corridor. Now most of the panes lay in impressive shards, and each time he moved they crunched underfoot. He made a mental note to search for something to move the worst pieces so Ana could walk safely.
An image of her slid into his mind. Ana curled next to him as the floor pitched and heaved. A brief awareness simmered between them under the desk. He’d seen Ana not as his sister’s employer and not as a woman trapped with him in a desperate situation. He’d just seen her.
Daniel flicked the thought away and stepped into the hallway littered with more glass and chunks of plaster. Dust tempests whirled in the dim light, and the muffled voices of survivors from the two lower floors drifted up from under his feet. He opened the door directly opposite Ana’s office where he thought he’d heard the secretary’s voice coming from. The office floor was white with a jumble of papers, the black office chair tipped on its side in front of her desk, the wheels still spinning. Books had fallen off shelves, her desktop screen had fallen flat on its face, and on the floor by the desk lay an upside-down keyboard. His gaze tracked down into the shadows under the desk where Maggie was huddled, one arm wrapped around her bent knees, the other hand at her mouth as she gnawed on a fingernail. She stared up at him with wide, vacant eyes.
“Maggie? Are you okay?” he said.
The woman’s gaze skidded to a spot above his shoulder. She waved in a half-hearted manner and then frowned, as if she’d forgotten the correct protocol for greeting a stranger after a natural disaster.
“All good,” she said, but her voice quavered on the last word.
“Uh, I think it’s safer if you stay here for a bit while I check things out,” he said.
She nodded and continued to chew off her fingernails. Daniel backed away. At least she wasn’t bouncing off the walls in hysterics. The next office along from Maggie’s was empty, as was the one next to Ana’s. In the office closest to the reception, he eased his head through the empty window, keeping well away from the remaining glass trapped in the frame. A man lay on his stomach with the wooden back of a large bookcase covering the left side of his body from his upper arm down. The flushed-pink dome of his bald head poked out from beneath one end of the case and stubby legs kicked ineffectually at the other.
Daniel squeezed through the partially blocked door. “Joel, I’m guessing? I’m Daniel.” He edged around the man’s feet. “Mate, you’re pinned like an entomologist’s wet dream.”
Joel huffed and tried to roll an eye backward to see him. “Who’re you calling a bug?”
Daniel picked a hard-covered book off the stack spilling over Joel’s legs and t
ossed it aside before scanning the rest of the office to see if anything else would fall on them during an aftershock. He checked his watch and estimated less than ten minutes had passed since the initial quake. Filtering through his knowledge of earthquakes and how soon they could expect aftershocks, he drew a blank.
“What’s that sound?” Joel’s ear was pressed to the carpet.
“What can you hear?” Wary of expected aftershocks, Daniel chucked books faster. If necessary he’d drag Joel to safety, but the sudden movement would hurt like hell and possibly cause more damage.
“I’m not sure. It’s weird. Maybe it’s just buildings settling.”
Daniel removed the last pile of books. As long as it wasn’t an aftershock, he couldn’t care less about stuff outside right at this moment. Crouching beside Joel’s legs, he got a firm grip on the case. “It’s gonna hurt like a son of a bitch, but you need to roll on your back or shuffle over to the right when I lift this.”
“Gotcha.”
Joel better move quickly. Who didn’t screw such a monstrous bookcase to the wall in an earthquake-prone city? He shook his head and counted. “One, two—”
The solid wood creaked as he got his shoulder under and heaved. Joel swore a blue streak, his legs scissoring on the carpet as he flipped laboriously onto his back. After checking he’d rolled clear, Daniel lowered the case gently back to the carpet, just in case the floor wasn’t as solid beneath his boots as he hoped.
“Hell’s bells.” Joel rested his forearm on his chest and cradled his wrist, sweat popping on his brow. “Forty-four years old and I’ve never broken a bone before. Didn’t think it would hurt this much.”
The arm below Joel’s rolled-up shirt sleeve had begun to swell. Fortunately, no bone fragments had broken through the skin.
“Joel? Are you all right?” Ana called from next door.
“Just peachy. Your friend’s doing a bang-up job,” Joel yelled back. “For a bleeding sadist.” His voice lowered to a growl, but the corner of his mouth twitched up.
“Harden up.” Daniel spotted a suit jacket on the floor, dragged it over, and tucked the folds around Joel’s torso. Not much, but it’d do. “Where’s the first aid kit?”
“Staff room. Last door on the right, top cupboard.”
Daniel stood and glanced through shattered glass to the hallway. “I’ll grab it in a sec then get you under the conference table and fix you up.”
“What about Irene? Can you go make sure she’s really okay? She’s not half as tough as she likes to think, and she’s gone quiet. Trust me, when Irene’s got nothing to say, something’s up.”
“I’ll go check and come back for you.”
“Okay, I’ll live. We lawyers are like cockroaches.”
Daniel offered a contorted smile at the weak joke. How effective would a basic first aid kit be in treating a broken arm? And the odds of getting the man to a fracture clinic any time soon were slight. “You said it, mate, not me.”
Daniel entered the reception area, expecting to find the woman in much the same position as Maggie. “Hey, Ir—” His mouth snapped shut on the last syllable of her name as he stepped behind the giant desk.
Irene was lying with her upper body under the shelter of her desk, but her legs were splayed gracelessly open poking out from it. He dropped to his knees and lifted her hand, finding the skin of her palm smooth but clammy. On her face her bright yellow spectacles were knocked askew, and even in the poor light he could see the older woman’s lips were tinged an unhealthy blue, her complexion the color of concrete.
He blinked.
Another woman, years younger. Eyes wide with pain and shock, mouth pressed tight in a grimace while raindrops left dark blotches on her still—too still—camouflage pants.
Daniel wrestled the picture from his mind and touched her shoulder. “Irene? Can you hear me?”
Irene’s eyes inched opened then flickered shut again. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven movements.
Daniel dug into his jeans’ pocket and pulled out his cell phone. No reception bars, but that was not unexpected. A phone headset poked out among the jumble of stationery on the floor, and he snatched it up, pressing the speaker to his ear. Dead. He swore and tossed it aside.
Irene needed urgent medical treatment and she wouldn’t get it here. Someone had to care for her while he went for help. Ana was the logical choice since Maggie seemed out of it. God only knew if Ana would cope or fragment into pieces like before.
“Ana,” he bellowed. “Irene needs you. Be ready.”
Chapter 4
Friday, July 23. 10:35 a.m. Seatoun, an eastern suburb of Wellington, New Zealand.
* * *
Around him came coughs and soft sniffles. The silence of shock had come and gone, then the cries for help grew hoarse, throats clogging with sobs of despair. He’d no doubt that the weeping and wailing would soon gather momentum again. Something huge and gray blocked the windows that usually let in the morning sun’s glare. Now the light resembled twilight, only with dust, grit, and who knew what else floating around in it. Probably asbestos, since he wouldn’t put it past the tight-ass principal to have conveniently avoided paying for its removal from the old buildings.
Skimming his hands over his body, he sucked in a shuddery breath. He was alive and uninjured after a major earthquake. Sweet as, as some would say. Disorder would reign in the city while authorities struggled to deal with the scale of the disaster. Suited him to a fucking tee.
Years ago he’d overheard a snippet of conversation as two men discussed the 2004 Asian tsunami. One said to the other, “My mate reckoned you could’ve got away with murder afterward. No one would’ve known if you killed your mother-in-law—or your wife.” The man had laughed at his own black humor. “Dead bodies were everywhere anyway. What’s one or two more?”
He’d homed in on that chance remark, the idea fueling all sorts of delicious plans for revenge. Logic had forced him to accept the odds of a tsunami wiping out his enemies were pretty fucking slim. And those happy daydreams were not nearly up close and personal enough to satisfy his dark fantasies.
He coughed, shoving against whatever kept him under his desk, but it wouldn’t budge. Crunched up on his side like a prawn, his cramped muscles had little power. A natural disaster now provided a window of opportunity to set things in motion. An outlet to release his pent-up hatred for the monster who’d destroyed his family and the monster’s bitch daughter—that poor widowed lawyer who used to defend vermin like her dear daddy. They’d both pay.
Sweat dripped off his nose and his heart tripped into high gear. It could work. He could make it work. Except he was a trap-door spider confined to its lair, full of venom and aggression, ready to attack. But unable to escape.
For now.
Chapter 5
Friday, July 23. 10:39 a.m. Lower Hutt, greater Wellington area, New Zealand.
* * *
Ana had helped defend men accused of heinous crimes and represented clients with the dead-eyed stare of hardened sociopaths. Once she’d even been chased along the sidewalk by an enraged relative.
But waiting alone under her desk tested Ana’s ability to remain calm more than all the years of courtroom dramas. Every clunk and crash, every murmur of Daniel’s voice, every siren scream, sent mini shocks to her heart.
Since Daniel had left she’d tried Theo’s cell phone, her home phone, and Nadia’s cell a dozen times. It was a futile exercise with no signal, but the focus of punching their numbers over and over served as a momentary distraction.
Dammit, she couldn’t stay under there one second longer, glass or no glass. Ana crawled out from under the desk and struggled to her feet. Stepping past a broken ‘No. 1 Mum’ mug, a Mother’s Day gift from Theo, her stomach clenched hard, almost twisting around her spine.
Oh, Theo.
Wobbly legs propelled her across scattered papers and ballpoint pens. If she paused to think any more about her kids, she might just go nuts.
/> When Daniel called for help, Ana’s heart ricocheted against her ribs. Irene had a tough spirit and a can-do attitude, but they’d celebrated her sixtieth birthday last week. That their receptionist wasn’t currently bellowing orders like a drill sergeant sent skitters of unease over her scalp.
Footsteps pounded outside and Daniel strode into the room, the expression on his face unreadable.
“Is Irene hurt? What’s—”
Two long steps later, he scooped her up against his chest. Ana’s mouth snapped shut. Thirty-five years old and a man had never swept her off her feet. How lame was it that when one finally did, she had her poor choice in footwear to thank?
Daniel’s sensible boots crushed the glass and plaster littered on the office floor as he carried her into the hallway, moving as though she weighed nothing. The warmth of his body and the faint scent of his cologne tripped her stomach into a tumble.
“Don’t worry, I won’t drop you,” he said as her fingernails dug into his shoulder. “I’m used to hauling bags of fertilizer on the farm.”
Fertilizer? Her ego squawked. “Thanks for the reassurance, Farm Boy.”
“You’re welcome, Counselor.”
The nickname startled a hum of amusement from her. “You’ve been watching too much TV. We don’t call lawyers counselor here.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Well, counselor suits you.”
Daniel set Ana on her feet in the reception area, the only place so far free of broken glass. She appreciated his banter as an attempt to distract her from Irene and her kids. While effective in the short term, her shoulders still tensed again at the toppled coffee table and chalky dust covering every surface.
“I’m no medic but I think Irene could be having a heart attack.” He moved behind the desk and Ana followed him. “You stay with her while I get help from outside.”
Irene was sprawled half underneath the desk. She’d obviously tried to get herself to safety. Tried, but failed. Palm pressed so hard against her mouth her teeth dug into her lips, Ana staggered and dropped to her knees. She cradled Irene’s limp hand, forcing the scratchy obstruction from her throat. “I’m here, Irene. I’m right here.”
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