Chapter 4

Oliver was halfway to the door when his phone buzzed once against his palm. He glanced down at the screen, and whatever he read there made his jaw tighten in a way Liana hadn't seen before.

"We found him," he said quietly.

Liana sat up straight against the pillows. "Found who."

"The driver." Oliver's thumb moved over the screen, typing something short and sharp. "The one who took you that night."

Her heart slammed once, hard, against her ribs. "Where."

"Doesn't matter where." He slid the phone back into his jacket. "What matters is where he's going now." He turned toward the door and spoke without looking back, his voice flat, almost bored, the way a man talks when he's said something like it a hundred times before. "Send him to the room. The one where I keep people alive right up until I decide they shouldn't be anymore."

Liana felt a chill move through her that had nothing to do with the open window.

"You found something," she said, half question, half disbelief, needing to hear it confirmed out loud.

"Yes."

"Can you walk," he asked, turning back to her, and there was no gentleness in the question, only practicality, the tone of a man checking whether a tool still worked.

"Yes," she said, though her legs still felt unsteady even sitting still.

"You'll need help." He didn't wait for her to argue. He was already calling for one of the maids stationed outside the door, a young woman named Rosa who appeared almost instantly, as though she'd been waiting the whole time for exactly this kind of summons. "Get her downstairs. Stay with her."

Rosa slipped an arm beneath Liana's shoulder, steady and sure, and together they made their way out of the room, down a wide staircase, through a hallway that grew colder and darker the further they walked from the sunlit parts of the house.

The room at the end of it looked nothing like the rest of the estate.

Bare concrete. A single drain set into the center of the floor. Two men stood near the far wall, guns resting loosely in their hands the way men hold things they've long stopped fearing, and the sight of them made Liana's breath catch and her steps slow without meaning to.

Rosa's grip tightened gently around her arm. "It's all right," she murmured. "He won't let anything happen to you in here."

Then the door on the opposite side opened, and two more men dragged someone through it, a man with his hands bound and a bruise already blooming dark across one side of his face, and the moment Liana's eyes landed on him, everything in her went very still.

"That's him," she said, her voice barely above a whisper before it cracked upward into something louder, sharper. "That's him. Yes. It's him. You're the one who tried to kill me."

The man lifted his head slowly, and something like disbelief crossed his face when he saw her standing there.

Oliver crossed the room without a word and stopped just in front of him, close enough that the man had to tilt his head back to meet his eyes.

"Who paid you," Oliver said.

The man laughed, a short, ugly sound, blood catching at the corner of his mouth. "Wonders," he rasped, looking past Oliver toward Liana. "You're still standing. After the shot. After I dragged you into that river myself."

Liana lunged forward before she even decided to, her hand already curling into a fist, but Oliver's arm shot out and caught her by the shoulder, holding her back with barely any effort at all.

"Don't waste your energy on him," he said, low, even. "He's not worth it."

He turned back to the man, rolling up one sleeve with unhurried precision, and one of his men wheeled forward a metal cart carrying something that made Liana's stomach turn the moment she understood what it was.

"I'll start the interrogation myself," Oliver said.

What followed happened fast and slow all at once. They forced the man into a basin of water, held him under just long enough to feel the panic set in, then dragged him back up gasping before the current hit him, a violent jolt that arched his whole body against the restraints. He screamed. He begged. He spat curses that dissolved into pleading somewhere in the middle, over and over, the room filling with sounds Liana would hear again in her sleep for weeks afterward.

She turned her face away once, unable to watch, and Oliver's voice cut through the room again, patient, almost gentle in its cruelty.

"Who paid you."

Nothing.

Another shock. Another scream that tore itself ragged by the end.

By the time the man's head finally sagged forward, his whole body trembling, his strength completely spent, something in him had broken loose.

"It's," he gasped, barely able to form the word, "it's Lucas."

The room went utterly silent.

"Lucas," Oliver repeated, crouching slightly to bring himself level with the man's face. "Say the rest."

"Lucas," the man said again, weaker now, his eyes rolling briefly before he forced them back open. "Lucas and Grace. They paid me. They wanted her gone before the wedding. They said it had to look like an accident, or, or nothing at all, just, just a disappearance."

Liana's whole body went cold, colder than the concrete floor beneath her feet, colder than anything she had felt since waking up in that unfamiliar room weeks ago.

"What," she breathed, the word barely escaping her.

She turned to Oliver, searching his face for some sign that she had misheard, that the water and the shocks had made the man delirious, that this was some mistake, but Oliver's expression hadn't changed at all. He looked exactly the way he had the moment he walked into that room, calm, certain, as though he had already known the answer long before he'd asked the question.

The man's head lolled forward again, blood dripping steadily from his split lip onto the concrete, and he opened his mouth once more, as if there was something else he needed to say, something Liana would never get the chance to hear.

Oliver raised the gun in one smooth, unhurried motion and fired.

The shot cracked through the room like thunder, and the man's body slumped sideways against the restraints, still.

Liana stood frozen, her ears ringing, her mind refusing to process the two things at once, the sight in front of her and the name still hanging in the air behind it.

Lucas.

Grace.

The two people she had trusted most in the entire world.