A sociopath is a person who will destroy you, without a heart, without a conscience, without even a second glance. At first they are too perfect and too good to be true. Then, they remove your heart, and whatever else they want, with a scalpel. The operation they perform is brilliant, often but not always flawless. And when they’ve gotten whatever they came for in the first place, they leave you traumatized, stunned, and bleeding by the roadside, and silently move on, to do it again to someone else.
d.s.
Chapter 1
Hope Dunne made her way through the silently falling snow on Prince Street in SoHo in New York. It was seven o’clock, the shops had just closed, and the usual bustle of commerce was shutting down for the night. She had lived there for two years and she liked it. It was the trendy part of New York, and she found it friendlier than living uptown. SoHo was full of young people, there was always something to see, someone to talk to, a bustle of activity whenever she left her loft, which was her refuge. There were bright lights in all the shops.
It was her least favorite time of year, December, the week before Christmas. As she had for the past several years, she ignored it, and waited for it to pass. For the past two Christmases, she had worked at a homeless shelter. The year before that she had been in India, where the holiday didn’t matter. It had been a hard jolt coming back to the States after her time there. Everything seemed so commercial and superficial in comparison.
The time she had spent in India had changed her life, and probably saved it. She had left on the spur of the moment, and been gone for over six months. Reentry into American life had been incredibly hard. Everything she owned was in storage and she had moved from Boston to New York. It didn’t really matter to her where she lived, she was a photographer and took her work with her.