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least not to me. I’m very sorry about your head. I didn’t mean to hit you that hard.” The doors opened for her and she hesitated just a moment before continuing. “I...I’m staying in Mr.
    Byron’s apartment now. I work for Dr. Grant on the top floors. Just in case you see me around, I can be here now.” Without waiting for him to reply, she stepped into the elevator and pushed the button for the fourth floor.
    Later that night, after she’d taken a two hour nap, she sat looking out the window to the street below. She’d tried sleeping in the big bed, but she couldn’t relax. She’d finally had to take her sleeping bag into the bathroom and put it in the tub. It was more what she was used to, the tightness of the room and there was only the door, no windows for anyone to get in. Now she was sitting at the kitchen table thinking about her life.
    There was no family that she was aware of. She’d spent the first seventeen years of her life in a state run facility for homeless children. Morgan had never been adopted like most babies brought into the home. They had said it was her coloring. Her hair was a deep red and her eyes were the lightest blue, and her skin was so white it defied description. She was also tall for her age.
    When Morgan looked in the mirror, she saw a woman, not even a pretty woman at that. She’d heard people, women included, tell her she was beautiful, but she just didn’t see it.
    Morgan worked hard and stayed to herself even as a small child. She discovered early she had a photographic memory and could learn languages very quickly. That had served her well throughout high school and her little bit of college she’d taken on the outside. Then when she was able to, she had taken classes to finish up her degree and now had a BA in business management. Not that it had done her a lot of good. Once people saw that she had been an inmate of the State Pen, they stopped right there.
    Morgan reflected on her life on the inside. She’d spent the first eighteen months in the infirmary. Having been raped and beaten as badly as she had, it was months before she could even walk very far. Then there was the two self-inflicted gunshot wounds, one to her head the other to her left shoulder. Her hand had taken the longest to heal. She had broken it in four different places that night so that she could get the cuff off her wrist to escape.
    Randall Bennett had told her that she was going to die. She hadn’t cared at that point whether or not she did, but he was definitely going to. When he had left her to go upstairs to get his gun, she had begun slamming her hand hard against the wall between the cot headboard and the wall.
    After the first two breaks, she pretty much hadn’t felt the other two and with the help of her blood, was able to get her right hand out of the cuff and drop to the floor, sliding the whole cuff out of its hanger. Dizzy from pain and exhaustion, she crawled to the door and waited for him.
    When he came through the door, she tripped him and took his gun. It took her two tries to get the gun’s trigger to work; then she simply pulled it seven times and killed him. When the police arrived after a neighbor had called in the sound of gunshot, she was just putting the gun under her chin for the third time.
    The first shot had gone awry and a ricochet had caught her in the shoulder. The second time, she’d let the gun slip and it grazed her head in a deep cut. The young officer begged her to stop and, in the end, had had to shoot her himself to prevent her from killing herself.
    There hadn’t been a day that went by that she wished either his aim had been worse, or hers better.

CHAPTER TEN

    Nick didn’t expect her to show. It mattered little that she had signed the contract and had taken the apartment; he knew her type. He looked down at the file his investigator had given him yesterday at home and frowned. Well, he amended, he thought he knew her type.
    The detective had managed to