Chapter 5: Unravel

 Isla POV 

I open my eyes to a white ceiling and all I remember is the tunnel, the hands grabbing me from behind, the doors slamming shut between me and Adrian, and his voice cutting through all of it like he was trying to make sure I remember his promise.

I will find you.

I sit up and swing my legs off the bed, my bare feet hitting the cold marble and I pull them back up instinctively. The sheets are pale and smooth, nothing like the dark heavy quilt I have woken up under every morning for a month, and I cross to the window and yank the curtain back.

Bars.

Black iron bolted deep into the frame. Outside is a garden I don't recognize. Trimmed hedges, pale sky, no skyline, nothing that tells me which direction leads back to anything I know. I try the door. Locked. I press my back against it and take in the room properly. Large, white, a wardrobe, a bathroom, everything clean and deliberate and arranged for someone whose arrival was expected.

They knew I was coming before I did.

I put that thought down before it opens into something I can't afford right now.

I don't scream and I don't pound on the door because that is exactly what they want. Me loud and scared and burned through before anyone even walks in.

I go to the wardrobe instead and find clothes in my size, tags still on, and I pull on a heavy knit sweater and boots because if I get a chance to run I am not doing it barefoot again. The bathroom has no window and walls too smooth to be useful, but the ceramic soap dish on the vanity sits heavy and solid in my palm, its edge just sharp enough, and I carry it back to the bedroom and slide it under the sheet before I sit on the edge of the bed and wait.

The lock clicks an hour later and she steps in. Young, neat uniform, breakfast tray, a smile that has been practiced into habit.

"Good morning—"

I grab my stomach and fold, letting my knees crack against the marble as I go down hard, a sharp ragged gasp tearing out of me on the way.

"Oh god—" The tray hits the table and she drops beside me, hands reaching for my shoulders. "What's wrong? Can you hear me?"

The second her palms make contact I move.

My fingers close around her wrist and my other hand comes up with the ceramic dish, edge pressed flat and firm against her throat. She goes completely still, her breath catching in her chest, her eyes blown wide.

"Don't make a sound," I say quietly, "I don't want to hurt you but I will if you make me. Your name."

"Clara," she breathes.

"Where are we, Clara."

"An hour outside the city near the old rail yard. Please, there are guards at the front gate, you won't make it past the lawn."

"The man who brought me here. Who is he."

"I don't know his name, I swear it, he pays the agency and he only comes at..." Her eyes cut to the door and the color drains from her face. "He's here," she whispers.

I shove her behind the bed and straighten up just as the door swings open.

He's tall and unhurried in a dark suit with no tie, and he doesn't scan the room the way nervous men do. He looks at the space like he already owns it, like he has owned it for a long time. His eyes find me immediately, moving once across my boots and my stance and the ceramic gripped in my right hand, and then they settle on my face and stay there.

"You planned that," he says..

"Just like your father."

I don't answer.

He reaches into his jacket and my grip tightens on the ceramic and he stops, holding my gaze, then slowly draws out something small and silver and worn. He sets it on the table between us without explanation, and takes one step back.

My eyes drop to it.

The scratches along the casing. The silver worn thin along the left edge from decades of the same hand reaching for it the same way, day after day after day. The small dent near the crown from the time he dropped it on the kitchen tiles when I was seven and laughed so hard he couldn't pick it up.

My father's watch.

The one that was never not on his wrist.

The ceramic is still in my hand when I cross to the table and snatch it up, the familiar weight landing in my palm like a blow.

"Where did you get this." My voice comes out low and dangerous and I don't recognize it. "Where did you get it." I take a step toward him and he doesn't move back. "This doesn't belong to you. It has never belonged to you. Who gave you the right to—"

"He did," the man says.

I stop.

"Your father came to me eleven months ago," he says, his voice steady and unhurried, like he has waited a long time to say this and he is not going to rush it now. "Three days before the scandal broke. He knew what was coming, had known for months, and he knew about the contract and what it would mean for your family." His eyes don't leave mine. "He knew about Adrian Vale long before you ever signed that paper."

The watch is burning in my palm.

"Then why," I say, my voice fracturing on the edge of something I won't let break, "didn't he stop it."

The man looks at me and for the first time something moves in his face. Not pity. Something older and harder than pity, something that has been carried a long time.

"Because by the time he came to me," he says quietly, "Adrian had already made sure that stopping it would cost your father his life.He didn't come to me to stop it, Isla. He came to me to make sure that when the time came..." his eyes hold mine, steady and unflinching. "You would still be standing."

The room is very quiet.

"Who are you," I whisper.

He doesn't answer immediately and that silence, stretches long enough to make my skin prickle.

"Someone Adrian Vale has spent three years trying to make disappear," he finally says. "And someone who knew your father well enough to know that you are the only person who can finish what he started."