Midnight Run

Chapter One

Sometimes, Nora felt like the only reason she bothered getting up in the morning was her daily run.

Cold mist swirled across the trail, making Central Park feel ghostly and foreign, and Nora's feet hit the ground with a rhythm as familiar as her heartbeat. She'd stopped running with music after her first 5k; the songs that had once pushed her to keep going when she didn't think she could take another step became superfluous as the runner's high took over. Now, the city provided her soundtrack, and her runs were almost meditative.

Somewhere across the park, a dog called out a greeting, but Nora couldn't see him. The dense fog still obscured her surroundings, making it seem as if she were running in a dream, and Nora wasn't sure how long the other runner had been following her until he pulled up alongside her.

She heard him before she saw him; the echo of footsteps that didn't quite match her own, and then, suddenly, a tall figure with jet black hair loomed up at her elbow.

She gave him a quick nod as he pulled alongside her, her brown ponytail bobbing with the motion, but the guy barely glanced in her direction. Maybe he didn't notice me in the fog, Nora thought, fighting down the irritation that flared as the other jogger moved ahead without acknowledging her at all.

But the run had turned sour, and Nora was distracted as she finished her final loop around the park. By then, the fog had started to lift, and the air was sharp and smelled like snow. Drenched in cold sweat, Nora hurried through her cool-down and rushed to catch her train, glancing at the cloudy sky nervously. The sun had started to rise while she ran, but the buildings around her blocked it from view. It would be tight, but she should still have time to hit her apartment and shower before her shift. And besides, she thought grimly, it's not like anyone will notice if I'm a few minutes late.

***

She was wrong; they noticed. Books and Brew had been getting increasingly popular, and now that NYU was back in session, the coffee shop was slammed by the time Nora punched in, thirty minutes after her shift was supposed to start. Her manager, Todd, tugged on his moustache and glared at her pointedly as she took her place behind the register, and Laurel, one of the other baristas, rolled her eyes.

"Looks like the princess is late again," she announced to Caity, another girl behind the counter.

Caity snorted. "What's the matter, Nora? Did your morning run turn into a walk?"

Nora felt her cheeks heating up, but she tried to ignore the girls and their barbs. Self-consciously, she pushed her tortoiseshell glasses higher on her nose and tried to smile. She usually got along pretty well with everyone, but from the moment Laurel and Caity had been hired, it was almost like they had it out for her. Nora wasn't sure what she'd done to piss them off, but that didn't stop them from tormenting her.

Luckily, there wasn't enough down time for the girls to do more than snipe at her when she first came in, and Nora was soon up to her elbows in lattes and coffee grounds, juggling three orders at once all while trying not to slip on the old, cracked tile floor. The college kids liked Books and Brew because it had atmosphere; the mismatched walls gave off a funky vibe, and the broken ceramic tile that covered the floor, left over from a long dead business that had filled the space before the coffee shop existed, made everything feel a bit old-fashioned. Cleaning the cracked tiles, however, was hellish; coffee and spilled milk had a way of collecting along the grout lines, and the floor looked pretty disgusting at the end of each day. If Nora hadn't taken to scrubbing it on her hands on knees after the shop had closed every night, she was pretty sure the health inspector would have shut them down already.