The echo of the gunshot was still ringing in his ears. The smell of cordite hung in the air, sharp and acrid, mixing with the metallic tang of blood. Cole's finger was still curled around the trigger, frozen in place, the weight of the weapon pulling his arm down.
Evelyn's body was slumped forward on the desk, her head resting on a stack of papers. A thin stream of dark liquid was spreading across the wood grain, seeping into the edges of a half-finished letter. The pen she'd been holding had rolled to the floor and come to rest against a leg of the chair.
He couldn't look away. The image was seared into his retinas. His mother. The woman who had given him life, who had held him as a child, who had read him bedtime stories and made him soup when he was sick. The same woman who had orches
