BOOK ONE



Prologue…





A young woman dressed in a severe navy blue Oscar De La Renta suit stepped off the curb and onto Main Street amidst heavy afternoon traffic. Deep in conversation and drinking a Red Bull she never saw the approaching motorcycles or even heard the throaty rumble from their V-Twin engines and straight pipes sans mufflers. Anyone else would have heard and probably felt the oncoming iron tide, but Morgan isn’t just anybody. She’s the up and coming powerhouse trader from the Fortune 500 firm Capital America and she uses her seven figure income much like an ancient Roman gladiator would use his shield in the coliseum; not just to defend but to attack as well.

For Morgan money is the shield that keeps everyone out of her inner circle save for the few she lets in; like her little brother Jaime. Her seven figure income prevents her from rubbing elbows with her housekeeper, her gardener, the man who works on her Porsche, the man at Starbucks where she gets her three cups of coffee a day. She makes sure she only rubs elbows with the city’s financial elite; a right that she has fought hard to obtain. Her money had never let her down until today.

She never heard the angry beep of the horn or the squeal of brakes, and she certainly did not hear the sound of metal on pavement as the rider of the Harley Davidson 2010 Wide Glide motorcycle laid his bike down in a valiant effort not to drive down the idiotic woman in front of him. Sparks showered nearby cars and pedestrians as six hundred-fifty pounds of steel ground away an inch of asphalt. Fortunately for the woman the iron horse was only sliding at forty miles per hour and not upright at sixty-five. Nevertheless it was an ugly collision. When the rear tire came spinning around, it struck the woman’s left leg just below the knee, sending her cartwheeling through the air like a 90 pound stuffed bag of flower. It wasn’t pretty, but it was a much better alternative to being dragged under hundreds of pounds of unforgiving, smoldering metal.

When first responders picked their way through a long stretch of steel, leather, and rubber detritus, they feared there would be no survivors. The motorcycle had pretty much disintegrated when it slid into oncoming traffic and the path of an eighteen wheeler. Fortunately for the rider he wasn’t still attached to the bike when it met its fate. The paramedics were surprised to see the rider sitting up in the middle of the street looking around him. Amidst the debris they also found an unconscious women, cell phone still in hand. Even her injuries were far less serious than they’d expected; both biker and pedestrian would survive.





ONE





Collision





Pain! It hammers into my brain in such a way I cannot begin to escape; despite the warm glow of the morphine they finally give me in the ER. Even then the pain still manages to punch through the layers of medication covering me like a wool blanket.

They still haven’t told me what I’m doing here strapped to what I can only describe as a bed of nails. I try one more time to sit up but someone has had the foresight to strap me down.

“Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on here?” I shout at the first person who wanders through my field of vision.

“Ma’am,” begins a man in blue scrubs with endless amounts of patience. “Same as five minutes ago; you’re at Mercy Heights emergency room. You were hit by a motorcycle. If you can just relax it will go a long way in lessening your pain.”

I try to kick him. I can’t help it. I’m not accustomed to being tied down and fed bullshit. What’s that saying about mushrooms? Kept in the dark and fed bullshit? A second ago I was buying 10,000 shares of Microsoft for my client in Boyle Heights, and now I’m tied up like a crazy person. This is making no sense. I go to turn my head to the side to get a picture of the room I’m in but I can’t seem to move my head at all; not even a millimeter.

Abruptly another face swims into my vision. It’s a handsome face; one that belongs to a doctor. I can tell. He’s got that smug sense of self-importance that follows him around wherever he goes. I can’t stand people like that. Just because he’s spent fifteen years in college doesn’t make him god’s gift to mankind.

“Ma’am, If you—”