Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR

The glass hits the wall and explodes.

Ryan doesn't even flinch at the sound he just made. He's pacing. Three steps left, three steps right, the way he does when the math stops working in his favor.

Selena is sitting on my couch. My couch. In my apartment. With her legs crossed like she owns it already.

"Stop pacing," she says. "You're making it worse."

"She's alive." He stops. Points at the TV where the screengrab is still frozen. My face. Alfonso's hand on my waist. Fifty cameras. "She's alive and she's got the most dangerous last name in Europe and you told me it was handled."

"I thought it was."

"You thought wrong."

Selena uncrosses her legs. Something shifts in her face. The performative grief she's been wearing for three weeks peels back and what's underneath is something I would not have recognized six months ago.

Cold. Focused. Already calculating.

"Okay." Her voice drops. "So we have a problem."

"A problem." Ryan laughs. It's not a good sound. "The fraud filing alone is fifteen years. The asset transfer. The will contest. The missing persons report we filed while she was breathing." He grabs the back of a chair. "That's not a problem, Selena. That's a prison sentence."

She stands up.

"Then we make sure she doesn't make it to a courtroom."

The room goes quiet.

Ryan stares at her.

"What are you saying."

"I'm saying she survived once." Selena picks up her bag. Her voice is completely flat. "She won't survive twice. And she's in Italy right now, which means she's far away from whatever protection Canada could offer her." She looks at him. "Alfonso Tommaso has enemies. Real ones. Men who would love an excuse to get close to his house."

Ryan is silent for a long time.

The smart part of him. The part that is still functioning. Knows this is the moment to walk out the door and get a lawyer and cut a deal before Rose finishes sharpening whatever knife she's building.

He doesn't walk out.

"Make the call," he says.

---

Alfonso has been awake since five.

I know because I could hear him moving through the house at an hour when no reasonable person should exist. When Sofia knocked on my door at six with a schedule printed on actual paper I thought it was a joke.

It wasn't.

"The board meeting is in forty-eight hours," Alfonso says without looking up from his desk. He slides a folder across to me. "These are the seven members most likely to challenge your claim. Background, leverage points, and known alliances." He pauses. "I need you to know every page before tomorrow night."

I open the folder.

It's forty pages thick.

"You want me to memorize forty pages in twenty-four hours."

"I want you to own the room in forty-eight." He finally looks up. "There's a difference. Memorizing makes you a student. Owning means you walk into that video call and every man on that screen remembers that they work for you."

I sit down and start reading.

He drills me for three hours straight. No breaks. He asks questions from across the desk and when I hesitate he moves on and circles back without warning, testing whether I patched the gap or left it open.

He is not a patient teacher.

"Reyes," he says. "Primary concern."

"Quarterly returns in the eastern portfolio. He's been pushing for a merger with Halston Group for two years."

"His position if you block it."

"He'll threaten to pull his shares."

"Will he."

"No. His exit clause costs him too much and he knows I know that."

Alfonso looks at me for a moment. "Better."

By hour four my head is pounding and my ribs still ache when I sit too long and I have read the same page about a man named Callum Reyes so many times his name has stopped looking like a word.

"Again," Alfonso says. "From the Halston position."

"I've done it four times."

"And you're still half a second slow on the follow-up." He stands up and moves around the desk. "Again."

I close the folder.

"No."

He stops.

"I need twenty minutes." I stand up. "I need water and twenty minutes and then I'll do it again. I'm not a machine and running me into the ground two days before the meeting doesn't make me sharper, it makes me sloppy." I hold his gaze. "So either you trust that I know my own limits or this partnership is going to be very short."

The silence is long enough that I start to think I've made a serious miscalculation.

Then he says: "Twenty minutes."

He turns away.

I start for the door.

"Rose."

I stop.

He crosses the room in four steps and I don't have time to back up before he's there. His hand goes flat against the wall beside my head. Not touching me. Just closing the space down to nothing.

My heart does something inconvenient.

"I need to know something." His voice is quiet. The general is gone. Something else is in his eyes. Something that tests differently. "When you walk into that meeting and Reyes pushes back. When all seven of them remind you that you've been missing and your credibility is gone and your fiancé has been telling anyone who listens that you're unstable." His eyes don't move from mine. "What do you do."

"I destroy him," I say. "Methodically. In front of the other six."

"And if they don't believe you're back."

"I make them afraid not to."

He holds the space between us for another second.

"Don't forget who gave you your life back," he says quietly.

It's not gratitude he's asking for.

It's something else and we both know it and neither of us say it and then he steps back and the room returns to its normal size.

I walk out on steady legs.

My hands are shaking by the time I reach the hallway.

---

The envelope is on my bed.

Black. No stamp. No return address. My name written across the front in handwriting I don't recognize.

I open it.

One photograph.

Me. In the hospital bed. Tubes in my arm, eyes closed, bandages on both hands. The angle is from the corner of the room, close enough that whoever took it was standing over me.

This was taken while I was unconscious.

Someone was in this room. In this house. Close enough to touch me while I couldn't move or scream or fight back.

My blood goes cold.

"You aren't the first girl he's hidden here, Rose."

I spin around.

A woman is standing in the doorway. Mid-thirties. Dark hair. A scar that runs from her left jaw to her collarbone, thin and silver and old.

Her eyes are steady and very serious.

"The last one didn't make it out."