Only this wasn’t a trickle of water. It was a man’s eyes. His eyes. And they’d gone the color of blood.

His gaze was boring into her as if he could see straight through her blouse, past her bra, and into the most intimate places of her heart.

“Get out,” he said in a voice that she would swear later, when she told her mother about it, didn’t even sound human.

Natalia turned, threw open the door, and flung herself through it, flying with a face as white as death past the other students waiting to see their professor.

“Well, that obviously went well,” Iliana said with a sneer.

But when Iliana tried Professor Antonescu’s office door, she found it locked. She knocked and knocked, finally cupping both hands around her eyes and pressing them to the door’s frosted glass.

“The lights are out. I don’t see him in there. I think…I think he’s gone.”

But how could the professor have left a locked a room from which there was no other exit?

Chapter Four

9:45 A.M. EST, Tuesday, April 13

Outside the ABN Building

East Fifty-third Street and Madison Avenue

New York, New York

Good morning, Miss Meena. The usual?” Abdullah, the guy in the glassed-in coffee stand outside her office building, asked her when it was finally her turn to order.

“Good morning, Abdullah,” Meena said. “Better make it a large. I’ve got a big meeting. Light, please. And don’t bother toasting the bagel today, I’m running really, really late.”

Abdullah nodded and went to work as Meena narrowed her gaze at him. She could tell he still hadn’t seen a doctor about his out-of-control blood pressure, despite the talk she’d had with him about it last week.

Seriously, she was the one who was going to stroke out one day if people didn’t start listening to her. She knew taking time from work to go to the doctor was a pain.