Chapter 4

The door opened without warning. I froze, my hand still inside his drawer, and when I looked up, Luka was standing in the doorway, watching me with an expression I couldn't read.

I expected rage. I expected him to walk over and grip my arm hard enough to leave bruises, the way he'd done before. Instead, he closed the door behind him, slowly, and laughed — a real, quiet laugh that was a thousand times more chilling than his shouting.

"How sweet," he said, walking toward me unhurried, hands in his pockets, as if he had all the time in the world. "You think you can snoop around my office and I won't find out."

"Luka—"

"Since you're acting like a spoiled brat," he continued, his voice calm, almost pleasant, "I'm going to treat you like one."

Before I could react, he grabbed my upper arm and shoved me face down across the desk, sweeping the laptop and papers aside with one smooth motion, sending them crashing to the floor in a clatter that echoed through the empty office.

"Luka, let me go—"

"Twenty-seven minutes," he said, his voice right against my ear as he held me pinned to the desk with one hand, his other hand already unbuckling his belt with a sound that sent a chill down my spine. "That's how long you spent in here without permission. The cameras don't lie, sweetheart."

"Please—"

"You're going to count out loud," he said, his voice suddenly turning sharp, commanding. "After each one. And if you get confused, if you miscount, we start over. There’s no rush, I’d like some quality time with my wife."

I didn't even get the chance to respond before he pulled my dress up and yanked my panties down to my knees, and the belt cracked through the air and came down across me, the pain exploding so sharply that I screamed, my body jerking under his hand that refused to let go.

"Count," he said calmly.

"O... one," I sobbed, tears already streaming down my cheeks pressed against the cold surface of the desk.

He laughed softly behind me, satisfied, like a man who’s exactly where he wanted to be.

"Good girl."

Four days ago

Or, better yet, who I saw. Eliot was sitting on the edge of my bed, as though he had always belonged in that space, even though New Jersey had never seen him up close. I closed the door behind me so quickly and forcefully that the frame rattled. He stood up the moment he saw me, and before I could utter a single word, he was already embracing me, holding me tightly as though he were afraid I would disappear if he let go.

“How are you—”

“Olivia,” he said, as though that explained everything, and it probably did. “She told me where your room was and slipped me through the side door while everyone was downstairs.”

I hugged him and kissed him passionately—a moment I was already beginning to miss, even though I had only been here for two days, feeling for the first time since the funeral that I could breathe normally again, but the joy lasted only a moment before reality came crashing back down on me.

“You shouldn’t have come,” I whispered, pulling away and looking at his face. “Eliot, this place isn’t safe for you. If my father sees you…”

“I couldn’t let you go through this alone,” he said, taking my face in his hands. “You left so suddenly, Vivian. We barely even said goodbye. I should have been there.”

I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling my legs tremble, and finally told him everything—the will, the three-day deadline, the name Ortega that still sounded like something out of a nightmare, my parents who had probably already started packing my things as though my consent were merely a formality to be skipped over.

His face grew paler and paler as I spoke, and when I finished, he stood up and began pacing around the room, running his fingers through his hair.

“This is madness,” he said. “They can’t force you to do this. You’re not their property.”

“It’s not that simple, and you know it.”

“It is,” he said, kneeling in front of me and taking my hands in his. “Vivian, let’s leave. Tonight. Go back to London, disappear, let them fight their war however they want, but you don’t have to be a part of it.”

I stared at him for a few moments, wondering whether he was serious about this. When he continued looking at me with determination, for a moment, I realized that the thought of running away seemed like the only reasonable choice I had at that moment.

“If we leave,” I said quietly, “everything will fall apart. People will die.”

“And if you stay, you’ll die,” Eliot said, his voice hardening. “We’ll die. Vivian, please. I don’t want to lose you.”

It took me a few seconds to finally nod, exhausted, frightened, desperate for any way out of the nightmare I had found myself in. We made our plan in whispers, sitting on the floor beside the bed like two children plotting some mischief, even though what we were planning was anything but harmless. The house was full of security, gates at both entrances, cameras positioned throughout the entire estate—an escape that would have seemed absurd in any other world was our only option here.

Sometime after midnight, when the house had finally fallen silent and I was completely certain that my parents were asleep, I took his hand and slowly, quietly made our way down the stairs, leaving the house through a side door that Olivia stubbornly kept forgetting to lock. If it had ever annoyed me before, I thanked God for it now. We moved quietly through the dark courtyard, pressed close to the stone walls, our hearts pounding so hard in our chests that I thought the sound alone might give us away. We passed the garage, where one of the guards was smoking a cigarette, leaning against the wall, and we had to wait, holding our breath behind a pile of wooden crates, until he finally tossed away the cigarette butt and went back inside.

“This way,” I whispered, leading Eliot toward the back of the estate, where the wall was slightly lower, where Luka and I used to climb along the stone ledges as children and jump over it whenever we wanted to escape our piano lessons. And we almost made it. A shadow suddenly emerged from the darkness in front of us, and my heart stopped for a moment before I recognized the familiar silhouette.

“Grandma?” I whispered, stunned.

Margaret stood there in her nightgown, barefoot on the cold grass, her hair loose, her eyes glowing beneath the moonlight with something that wasn’t entirely present in this moment, in this year.

“Catherine,” she said, her voice gentle, almost cheerful, as she looked straight at me. “And Daniel. Finally. I was waiting for you for lunch, but you never came.”

I stiffened. Catherine. Daniel. My aunt and her husband, dead for thirteen years. Suddenly, the thought of her catching us felt more appealing than her replacing me with my dead aunt.

“Grandma, it’s me, Vivian,” I tried quietly, but she wasn’t listening. She stepped closer and took my hand with her cold, slender fingers.

“Did you find out who is threatening you?” she asked, her voice suddenly turning serious, frightened, as though she had returned to a moment only she could see. “I told you, Catherine. I told you to be careful. They do this. They make it look like an accident.”

I felt the blood freeze in my veins.

“Grandma, what do you mean? Who are they?” I whispered, stepping closer, forgetting for a moment about the escape and about Eliot, who stood beside me, confused, not understanding a single word of what was happening. “What do you know about the accident?”

Margaret made a confused face, looked at me, then at Eliot, and to my astonishment, began humming a Spanish lullaby. She turned away from us and slowly started walking toward the house, as though she had forgotten in an instant that she had ever met us.

“Vivian,” Eliot pulled me by the hand when I tried to go after my grandmother. “We have to go.”

I wanted to run after her, to ask her a hundred more questions, but I knew there was no point—even when she was lucid, my grandmother was no longer the same woman who had once known every secret of every remotely important family in the city. And now, at that moment, I had only a few hours before someone noticed we were gone, so I had to make a decision and choose my priority. We continued on, although my thoughts remained with my grandmother’s words, like a weight I carried with me with every step.

The wall turned out to be higher than I remembered, and Eliot had to lift me up, grumbling when the sole of my sneaker nearly crushed his tongue, while I could barely hold back hysterical laughter in the middle of all that tension—the absurdity of the whole situation, the heiress to a mafia family climbing over a wall to escape her own home while her boyfriend coughed and choked underneath her, loudly enough to wake half the estate because he had just tasted the sole of her shoe.

When we finally found ourselves on the other side, we ran toward the road a few kilometers away, where Eliot had left the rental car, our hearts pounding, our breath coming out in little clouds in the cold night air.

“We did it,” he said, almost laughing with relief as he started the engine. “Vivian, we did it.”

I believed him, at least for a moment, as we sped along the dark country roads toward the airport, farther from the estate, farther from the will, farther from everything that was waiting to destroy my life. But just as we had to turn onto the main road to reach the airport, I saw them in the rearview mirror. Three black cars, their headlights shining through the darkness, approaching us at a speed that left no doubt about who was inside. And we were so close to the airport. So close to freedom.

“Eliot,” I said, my voice trembling. “Eliot, they’re behind us.”

He looked in the rearview mirror and cursed, pressing his foot harder on the gas. As the car surged forward, the tires screeched against the asphalt, but the only sound I could hear at that moment was the deafening pounding of my heart, and I didn’t know what would give out first—my heart or the engine of this car.

“Who are they?” he shouted, trying to drive and look behind him at the same time.

“My father, or, I don’t know, his men,” I screamed, gripping the handle above the door as the car tore through the curves at a speed that made my stomach clench. The airport finally appeared in the distance, the small runway lights piercing through the darkness, and for a moment, hope returned to me that we would make it, that we would reach the building, a plane, anything that would take us far enough away.

Eliot suddenly slammed on the brakes in front of the small terminal building, the tires screeching, and before I could even unfasten my seat belt, he had already jumped out of the car, running toward the only taxi parked in front of the entrance. He shouted for me to hurry, and when I reached him, he began pounding his hands against the taxi’s front window until the driver rolled it down.

“Drive!” he shouted at the driver, but the man, confused and perhaps frightened by his tone, only shook his head, saying something about his shift just ending.

Eliot didn’t wait for further explanation. He opened the door, grabbed the man by his jacket, and punched him square in the face.

“Eliot!” I screamed, horrified, as the driver fell backward onto the asphalt, clutching his nose.

“Get in!” Eliot shouted, already getting behind the wheel of the taxi, and I, despite the shock, despite the disgust at what I had just witnessed, ran over and climbed into the back seat as the black cars were already coming to a stop behind us.

The tires screeched as Eliot suddenly accelerated, turning us onto a side road that led farther away from the terminal, farther from the main road, in a direction I didn’t recognize. As he stepped on the gas and, once we had gone three, maybe four kilometers, there were no more lights from the runway or the roads, and the darkness and forest surrounding the road would have swallowed us alive if it hadn’t been for the headlights.

“Eliot, slow down!” I screamed as the car bounced along the uneven, poorly paved road, the headlights of the black cars still visible in the rearview mirror, getting closer.

“I can’t! If we slow down, they’ll catch us!” he shouted, his eyes wide when I saw them in the mirror, his hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles had turned white. Something inside me snapped, and at the worst possible moment, I began crying out loud, clutching tightly to the back of his seat, which only made him more agitated.

The road suddenly curved to the right, and Eliot tried to take the bend too quickly—I felt the car tilt, the tires losing contact with the road, and then everything became a chaos of sounds and movement, metal screeching, glass shattering, my body being thrown from side to side as the car rolled down the embankment beside the road.

I don’t know how long it lasted. Everything was a blur. Maybe two seconds, maybe two minutes. When I came back to reality, I was lying half outside the vehicle, my head throbbing, the taste of blood in my mouth, my ears ringing so loudly that I couldn’t hear anything except my own breathing.

I tried to move, every muscle in my body aching, and slowly, almost crawling, I pulled myself out of the wreckage, my fingers scraping against the cold, damp ground as I tried to collect myself and at least push myself up onto my hands.

“Eliot,” I whispered hoarsely, unable to see him, not knowing where he was, whether he was breathing, whether he was even alive.

The world around me was still spinning, but when I finally raised my eyes, the first thing I saw was a pair of black shoes, polished and perfectly still against the muddy ground, as though the chaos around them didn’t bother them at all.

Slowly, with difficulty, I lifted my gaze up his legs, along his body, until I met a face I knew better than my own.

Luka stood above me, his arms hanging loosely at his sides, his expression completely unreadable, looking at me as though he had known all night exactly where I would end up—at his feet.