CHAPTER 2: Stairs and Strangers

The first man caught her wrist. She stamped on his instep, and when he doubled over she drove her elbow into the back of his neck.

She had never hit anyone in her life. It turned out that terror was a very good teacher.

The second man lunged and she slammed the heel of her hand into his nose. Something crunched. Laila screamed. Julian stood with his mouth open, as if the scene had gone off script.

Vivian ran.

"Vivian!"

Julian shouted after her, and for the first time that day his voice cracked with something like real fear.

"Don't be stupid. You have nowhere to go!"

She did not turn around. The worst part was that he might be right.

The main doors were blocked, with black cars at the curb and silhouettes beyond the glass. She turned for the only other way out, the stone stairs that wound up to the choir loft. Behind her, Magnus spoke without raising his voice.

"Nobody leaves the building."

She climbed. Her bare feet slapped the cold stone and her lungs burned. Boots rang on the steps below, and a radio crackled. On the third landing, she rounded the corner at full speed and hit something that did not give.

A pair of hands closed around her arms and held her upright.

"Easy."

She looked up. The man was tall, with black hair pushed back from a hard face and a scar through his left eyebrow. His collar was open. Ink curled up the side of his neck and ran down both forearms, where his sleeves were rolled. Gray eyes moved over her face, the torn hem of her dress, her bare feet, and then past her, down the stairwell.

"Please."

She caught his shirt in both fists.

"They're going to take me. Please help me."

He said nothing for the length of a breath. It felt much longer. She watched him tilt his head toward the stairwell and listen, the way a man listens who is counting rather than frightened. Whatever he counted, he did not seem to dislike the number.

"Magnus Dray's men?"

He asked.

"You know them?"

"I know the coats."

He glanced once at her bare feet, then at the cut on her palm, and something in his face tightened.

"Magnus dresses his people like undertakers. It's meant to frighten the ones who haven't met them."

His eyes came back to her.

"How many?"

"Four. Five. I don't know."

"Can you run?"

"Yes."

"Then run when I say."

He took her wrist, not roughly, but like a man who had never been refused.

"Stay close."

Below them the footsteps split, some climbing, some spreading across the nave. Vivian had a clear, absurd thought that if she had stayed in the office she would be dead of shame by now, and that running was at least a kind of dignity.

Behind the choir loft was a narrow door she hadn't noticed. It opened onto a servants' passage that smelled of candle wax and dust. He moved through the dark without feeling for the walls. With his free hand, he lifted a phone to his ear and said,

"Alley door, two minutes,"

Then put it away before anyone had finished answering. Behind them, a voice shouted,

"She went up!"

"Who are they?"

He asked.

"I'll explain later."

"Later, then."

They came out into a side alley. A black car waited with the engine running and the rear door already open. The driver glanced at Vivian's state and looked straight ahead again.

"Drive,"

The stranger said, and the car left the curb before the door had finished closing.

Through the rear window, Vivian saw the church shrink behind them, its white spire catching the last of the sun. Two men burst out of the side door and stood in the alley watching the car go. One of them was holding his nose. She would have laughed, if her teeth had not been chattering.

For three minutes Vivian heard nothing but her own heartbeat. She sat curled against the door, staring at the cut on her palm where she'd caught the banister.

"Two cars,"

The driver said, without turning.

"Three streets back. Gray sedan and a van."

"River road,"

The stranger said.

"Then the service lane behind the cannery."

"Yes, boss."

That was all. No raised voices, no argument. The driver changed lanes and the city began to blur past in a different direction, and Vivian realized that the man beside her had not once looked behind them. He had simply decided where the cars would go.

Then the car took a corner hard, and she slid. She slid until she was against his chest, her arms around his neck, his hands at her waist. He held her very still, as if she might break.

His heart was racing. She could feel it through his shirt.

"You've been like this for a few minutes,"

The man said, close to her ear.

"I tried to tell you on the stairs. You were afraid."

Heat rushed through her body. She threw herself back and hit her head on the window.

"I'm sorry. I didn't notice. I wasn't thinking."

"Don't apologize."

"It was fear. That's all it was."

"I know."

One corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. He opened a compartment and handed her a folded handkerchief. His fingers brushed hers. The shock that ran up her arm was only adrenaline, she told herself.

"I was supposed to get married tomorrow,"

She said, and heard how it sounded.

"Was. I'm not now."

His eyes sharpened a little.

"To whom?"

She pressed the handkerchief against her mouth, then lowered it.

"To someone who sold me to a man named Magnus Dray."

The man was silent for a moment. His thumb moved once across the leather seat, the only sign he'd heard.

"Did he say why?"

He asked.

"Money. His father's company is failing."

She wiped her face with the back of her wrist.

"He said it as if he were explaining a parking fine."

"That sounds like Julian."

"You say that as though you know him."

He didn't answer, and she was too tired to press.

"What's your name?"

"Vivian."

"Vivian," he repeated, as if testing its weight.

"And yours?"

He didn't answer. The car turned between iron gates that opened without anyone touching them and climbed a drive lined with cypress. At the top stood a villa of pale stone, walled and lit, built like a place that expected to be attacked. Two men stood at the gate with rifles slung across their backs, and neither looked at the car as it passed.

"Where is this?"

Vivian asked.

"Somewhere they won't come in."

The driver lifted a hand from the wheel and spoke two words into a radio on the dash. Behind them, at the bottom of the drive, the gate swung shut and a second car rolled across the entrance and stopped. Nobody had told it to. Vivian, who had spent her whole life in rooms where people waited to be told what to do, noticed that detail more than the rifles.

His phone buzzed in his jacket. He took it out, glanced at the screen, and silenced it without expression. Vivian saw the name before the screen went dark.

Julian.

Under it, in smaller letters, he had saved the contact as Godson.

Her mouth went dry.

"You know Julian Marsh,"

she said.

The car stopped. Vincent Cross got out, came around, and opened her door.

"Come inside,"

He said.

"Then ask me whatever you like."