America, land of the puritan posers.

Slipping Brianna’s bedazzled “Lights out!” eye mask on, Olivia wrapped herself in the slippery, satiny duvet—the same one on which she and Brianna had spilled nail polish the previous week when they were ragging on their absent mothers. She felt the circular dry spot that had stiffened the fabric. She picked at the spot with her long, slender fingers. It felt slick and smooth.

It wasn’t the last thing she would feel that night.

WHERE OLIVIA’S SLIP ENDED and the sheets of Brianna’s bed began was impossible to pinpoint in the dark. Olivia tossed, turned, wriggled and, finally, started to get comfortable. As she drifted off to sleep, Olivia sensed movement in the far reaches of Brianna’s expansive bedroom.

“Hello?” Olivia called out.

No response. Just the sound of a girl screaming on the TV downstairs.

Again, the air moved.

“Who’s there?” she asked. Olivia unsuccessfully tried to lift her arms and head from the mummy-like yardage of sheets and the white fabric of her slip that had encircled her limbs and torso like a malevolent wisteria vine. She got one arm free and pulled off the eye mask. Olivia looked over. Silver glinted in the darkness as a shadowy figure moved toward her.

“Who are you?” she asked, still unable to see a face. Olivia was annoyed, but not unnerved. It was, after all, a party. Whoever it was might be looking for a place to crash just like she had when the beer hit her. Or maybe it was a Halloween prank? The living room and family room downstairs were full of kids looking to be the center of attention. Fighting to make an impression. Tweeted about. Facebooked.

“This isn’t funny,” she said, in her clipped accent.

It wasn’t. Not at all.

It happened so fast, the way awful things almost always do. The mattress dipped under the weight of another person kneeling on the bed. The first cut wasn’t the deepest. It was tentative, a slight jab through the snow-white fabric just above her navel.

“Hey! Stop!” Olivia cried.

Her voice, loud as it was, was lost in the sounds of the music and laughter downstairs. If anyone had heard her muffled scream, they might have mistaken it for that terrified teen with the fake boobs on the enormous plasma TV in the family room where half the partygoers congregated.

Yet there was nothing fake about Olivia Grant or the fear that seized her. Her manicured fingertips found her abdomen. She pressed it lightly with the heel of her palm and cried out in pain. She barely had time to process the fact that her hand was wet.

All too quickly, someone was on top of her, holding her arms down. Everything conspired against her. Her flowing slip, Brianna’s bedding, the eye mask, and even her long red hair entwined in her attacker’s fist gave her little hope of escape.

Is this a sick joke? Did the geek pirate not understand NO means NO?

Pain shot through the sixteen-year-old’s body and she started breathing hard. This was no trick-or-treat prank. Her mind reeled. Olivia thought back to the self-defense moves she had seen on American TV. The key was to have a survival plan, a strategy to save your life. She worked up a scenario to use her knee to shove off her attacker, freeing her arms and scooting to the edge of the bed where she could—just maybe—get away.

But that damn sheet. It was a magician’s endless handkerchief. Olivia couldn’t move her feet. It was like she’d been spun up in a cocoon. The force of the continued onslaught pushed her, wrappings and all, crashing to the floor.

“Stop it! Stop!” she screamed. “That bloody hurts!”

Despite her beauty, Olivia Grant was no English rose. She was not frail, passive, or genteel. She was a fighter. Finally free, her arms and hands flailed into the darkness. Once, twice, she was hit by something sharp. Hard. It was hot and agonizing. Olivia realized what was happening was not a prank. She was fighting for her life and she knew it.

Was it a knife? Scissors? A box cutter? Something very sharp and deadly.

It passed through the teen’s mind right then that she might never get to Hollywood. She’d never have a real boyfriend. She’d never get back to London. She’d never design that dress that every other girl in the world would covet. Her life and all her big dreams would be extinguished right there in her friend’s bedroom.

With everything she had, Olivia lurched herself upright. She ran her bloody hands under her slip as she tried to extricate herself from the shroud, once white, now red.

Tears came as she thought of home. Her mind flashed to a memory. She and her mother were packing her suitcases for the trip in Olivia’s bedroom back in London. Her mother implored her not to take her finest things to America, as she was all but certain that they’d be stolen.

“Everyone thinks that Aussies are descended from criminals, but I think there’s a mix-up there. Take a look at America’s crime rate,” her mom had said. She sniffed in that superior-than-thou affect she used whenever the occasion called for it, which was always. “The U.S. is worse than Down Under by far.”

She had been right. Her mother, with whom she’d battled about the smallest of things, had been absolutely right.

Just as the lightning bolt of memory passed, a pair of hands grabbed Olivia’s shoulders and shoved her body backwards against the wooden floor. Hard and complete. So fast and so slow at the same time. She gasped.

I’m not going to die here, am I? she thought, though the answer seemed all too clear. Am I?

Olivia filled her lungs and screamed once more—only to have a wad of fabric violently shoved into her mouth. She started to choke, but she refused to give up. She had come to America to snag a boyfriend, be discovered for the rocking talent that she was, and to import everything she had learned back to the UK. She, most assuredly, had not come to America to die.

Get. Off. Me.

The teenager felt hot breath against her face. It came at her in quick puffs and it smelled of beer. Jason? Kurt? All the boys had been drinking. It could be any one of a dozen or more. As Olivia tried to roll away from her attacker, the blade of a knife flew at her, burying itself in her throat. It came with speed and fury.

Just like that.

Over.

Out.

In a second, blood soaked the fabric gagging her, slipping over her tongue with a peculiar metallic taste as it spilled from the corners of her mouth like candle wax.

In the final beats of her life, Olivia Grant caught a glimpse of her killer. Like a camera with a fading battery, her green eyes captured the image until they could no longer see.

Only her killer knew the irony of her last words.

That bloody hurts.

Chapter 2

TAYLOR RYAN WOKE UP WITH A START. Something was very, very wrong. She gazed out into the blackness through her bedroom window overlooking Port Gamble Bay. It was that again. The feeling she could never explain to anyone. The same feeling that only her twin sister Hayley also felt: a gentle but unmistakable wave like low-level electrical current that most might not even notice. The last time it had come over her—or at least the most memorable time—was Christmas night the previous year. That was the night that Katelyn Berkley, just fifteen years old, had died.

Without reaching for her robe, the sixteen-year-old walked toward the window. It was so cold in her little upstairs bedroom that she could almost see her breath. She made a mental note to ask for a space heater for Christmas. At the foot of her bed, the family dachshund, Hedda, lifted her head and then dropped it back down. Whatever Taylor was doing apparently held no interest for the world’s laziest dog.

The bay was empty and its surface was a stark sheet of glass. Taylor leaned closer, and her breath condensed on the wavy vintage glass of the house built in 1859. A perfect circle appeared. A circle? Then just as quickly as it had come, it vanished. That feeling, a strange urgency that came from nowhere, also evaporated.