PAY UP OR DIE.

Cooper Lindstrom stared at the memo line of the e-mail and fought the urge to put his fist through the screen of the desktop computer.

One, he couldn't afford a broken hand. Two, he couldn't afford a new computer. And three… He didn't know what three was.

He deleted the message without reading it. There would be others. So far he'd received half a dozen, each one escalating the level of violence that would befall him if he didn't make good on his mother's online gambling debt.

"I wonder what comes after death?" he muttered. "This moron isn't a deep thinker. He should have hung on to loss of life until he'd exhausted the removal of all body parts."

He sighed and shook his head. He hated the way his brain worked. When he was supposed to be concentrating on the weighty matters of his life—of which there were many at the moment—his "butterfly brain," as his mother often referred to his mind, would flit off to another, more interesting flower.

His mother.

Lena Lindstrom. Powerhouse backstage mom who had watched after her only child and his career with a devotion most people found…unusual, if not faintly disturbing.

But not Cooper. He'd loved her—even when she'd hovered. He'd loved her enough to overlook her faults. Until she suddenly collapsed in a casino in Vegas, then died the following morning, hanging on just long enough for him to reach her, touch her hand and say her name. But not long enough for anything else he'd wanted—needed—to get off his chest.

That had been eight weeks earlier. Eight life-altering, eye-opening, icon-shattering weeks. He could no longer say he loved his mother.

He looked at the four-inch stack of bills that had a