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of the gallery.
    There was one small window set in the gallery’s north wall, overlooking the alley. She looked through it and gasped. There were two men there, one aiming a big black gun at the back of the other. The man holding the gun was tall, heavy, with long reddish-brown hair, his victim shorter, broader, with close-cropped dark hair.
    The long-haired man with the gun tightened his grip on the trigger. Grace was horrified to think that she was about to witness a cold-blooded murder. If she could have, she’d have screamed a warning to the victim, but she barely had enough air to breathe. And even if she could scream, not much sound bled out through Harold’s thick windows.
    Instinctively, though, she fought against the man holding her, trying to get some kind of sound out. Maybe if she kicked the wall…
    The dark-haired victim suddenly dropped from sight and Grace stilled, stunned. He was there and then…he wasn’t. He’d just disappeared.
    The goon holding her moved forward, together with the other two thugs, to the small window. There was a clear view of the alleyway and she could see that the man hadn’t disappeared. He had simply dropped to the ground like a stone. Grace would have thought that he’d been shot, but it looked like he was…
    Oh my God, yes. He wasn’t down for the count. He was fighting. From the ground. And winning, too, from the looks of it. He had his attacker in some kind of complicated hold, completely paralyzed.
    The victim’s legs tightened around his attacker’s middle and he held the attacker’s neck in the bend of his elbow, squeezing. One hand was squeezing the gun out of the attacker’s hand. The attacker was kicking madly, like a pig in a slaughterhouse, but nothing he did could dislodge the dark-haired man. The gun clattered to the ground and the dark-haired man snatched it up, handling it with familiarity.
    One of the thugs in the gallery kicked open the door to the alleyway and the man holding Grace moved forward until they were spotlit in the doorway.
    The two men on the ground looked up, both breathing hard, muscles straining.
    “Drop the gun. Now.” Leather’s Coat’s voice was hoarse, as if he didn’t talk much, with a heavy Hispanic accent. He lifted his arm until her feet dangled again. The gun barrel cruelly ground into the skin of her temple. The entire right side of her face was covered in blood now. She could smell her own blood—a dark metallic smell. “Drop it or I pop her one right in the head.”
    God. Watching the attack in the alley, she had, for a second, completely forgotten about the man holding her tightly against him with a gun to her head. She started trembling. She had no idea who the victim of the attack was. How could using her as a threat possibly work? It hit her like a sledgehammer to the heart that she was one second away from dying.
    She twisted in her captor’s hold, trying to kick him, suddenly desperate now to get away. There wasn’t enough oxygen in her head to make plans, she only knew she didn’t want to die without putting up some kind of fight.
    The arm around her neck was like steel, the muscles she could feel against her side and back thick and hard. He probably outweighed her by over a hundred pounds. Fighting was insane.
    But the animal part of her refused to die without a struggle. Grimly, she clawed again at the arm around her neck and kicked as hard as she could at his shins, but all she encountered was something stiff and unyielding. The man was wearing boots that went to his knees.
    Her tormentor growled low in his throat and squeezed. Tight, tighter.
    Oh God, she was going to die. Right here, right now. All the things she had left to do with her life, all the paintings she wanted to create, the music she wanted to listen to, the walks she wanted to take—it was too late.
    “Throw it,” her tormentor rasped.
    The dark-haired man kept his gaze fixed on Leather Coat, unblinking in the rain that threw a scrim over