Healing By Nature

  PART 1 The first drop of blood hit the concrete before Sera Vance understood she might actually die there. It landed beneath her bare feet with a soft, obscene sound, swallowed by the cold floor of an abandoned warehouse near the river's south edge, where winter wind slipped through broken windows and made the chains above her wrists tremble. The men around her laughed the way men laughed when the outcome was already decided. Like she was not a woman. Like she was not someone's daughter, someone's almost-love, someone who had kept emergency chocolate in her desk drawer and cried at old Christmas commercials and believed, as a professional article of faith, that numbers were honest even when people were not. ""Last chance,"" said the man in the charcoal overcoat. He stood close enough for Sera to smell tobacco on his breath. His name was Victor Hollis. He ran collections for a Chicago crime network sophisticated enough to have lawyers, offshore accounts...