chapter 4

I counted three cars.

Six men.

They were standing very still beside those cars the way people stand when they have been trained to stand still, back straight, hands visible, eyes forward. Not aggressive. Not yet. Just present in the way that a locked door is present. You have not tried to open it yet but you already know it is not going to move.

"What do they want with me?" I said.

Petra shook her head. "They told security they were sent to collect you. That you were needed back home."

Collect.

Like I was a package. Like I was something Roland had loaned out and was now calling back.

I stared down at those cars and something shifted in my chest. Not fear exactly. Something older and quieter than fear. The feeling I used to get as a child when Roland would walk into a room and smile at me and I would smile back and somewhere underneath the smile I would be thinking, what does he want now.

I had spent six years pushing that feeling down.

I was done pushing it down.

"Where is Damien?" I said.

"Still in his room. He said he was not to be disturbed."

"He told me not to leave," I said, more to myself than to Petra.

Petra looked at me carefully. "That is true," she said. "He did say that."

I looked at her. She looked at me. We understood each other perfectly.

I turned around and walked back down the corridor and knocked on Damien's door.

Silence.

I knocked again.

"I said I was not to be disturbed." His voice came through the door flat and cold.

"Roland sent men to the gate," I said. "They are here to take me back."

A pause. Not long. Maybe four seconds.

Then the door opened.

Damien was standing with his phone in one hand and the other braced against the door frame. He was upright, which was already more than any doctor would have recommended after seven months in a hospital bed, and he was looking past me toward the window at the end of the corridor like he could see through walls.

"How many," he said.

"Six men. Three cars."

Something moved in his jaw. Just a tightening. There and gone.

He stepped back from the door. "Come in."

I went in.

He was already on his phone, moving back toward the bed and sitting on the edge of it with the careful deliberateness of someone who was refusing to let their body show weakness. He put the phone to his ear and waited.

"Marcus," he said when someone picked up. "There are six of Roland Quinn's men at my front gate. I want to know why they are here, who sent the order, and I want that information in the next ten minutes." He listened for a moment. "I do not care how you get it. Ten minutes."

He hung up and looked at me.

I was standing just inside the door with my arms at my sides trying to look calmer than I felt.

"Sit down," he said. "You look like you are about to fall over."

"I am fine," I said.

"You are pale and you have been awake all night. Sit down."

I sat down.

We were quiet for a moment, the two of us, in that strange ordinary silence that had no business existing between two people who were technically strangers who happened to be married.

"Why would he send men the morning after your wedding," Damien said. Not to me exactly. More like thinking out loud. "Unless he was not expecting me to wake up."

"Nobody was expecting you to wake up," I said.

He looked at me. "You were not either."

"No," I said honestly. "I was not."

"So you came here thinking you would be a widow inside a year."

"I came here because my mother needed surgery and I had no other way to pay for it."

He studied me for a moment. "And Roland arranged all of this for you out of the goodness of his heart."

The way he said it made it very clear that Damien Voss had not believed in the goodness of anyone's heart for a very long time.

"He said he had no other options," I said.

"And you believed him."

I opened my mouth. Then I closed it again.

Because sitting here in this room in the morning light, with six of Roland's men waiting at the gate and the memory of his too calm face sitting in my chest like a splinter, I had to be honest with myself about something I had been avoiding.

"I wanted to believe him," I said quietly. "That is not the same thing."

Damien was quiet for a moment.

"No," he said. "It is not."

His phone buzzed. He looked at the screen and something changed in his face. Not dramatically. Just a slight stillness that was somehow worse than anger would have been.

He read whatever was on that screen for a long moment.

Then he looked up at me with those grey eyes and said, "How much do you know about your mother's medical shares?"

I blinked. "Her what?"

"Your maternal grandmother left your mother a portfolio of pharmaceutical shares when she died. Are you aware of that?"

I shook my head slowly. "My mother never mentioned shares."

"She would not necessarily know the full value of them. Most people do not understand what they are holding until someone explains it to them." He paused. "Or until someone tries to take it from them."

The room felt very quiet.

"Roland," I said.

It was not a question.

Damien set the phone down on the bed beside him. "The shares are worth considerably more than a surgery. They are worth considerably more than this estate. And there is a clause in the original trust that requires your signature before any restructuring can happen."

My signature.

My mother was sick. I was desperate. I had just become the wife of the most powerful man in the city, which meant I was now close enough to real money that signing a document or two would not seem unusual to anyone watching.

I felt sick.

"He did not send me here to save my mother," I said.

Damien's voice was even and quiet. "He sent you here to get close enough to me that when he needed a signature from you, you would be too embedded in this family to ask questions about what you were signing."

I stood up. I sat back down again. I stood up again.

"My mother," I said. "Does he actually plan to pay for her surgery or was that also—"

"I do not know yet," Damien said.

Three words that hit me like cold water.

I pressed both hands flat against my knees and breathed and told myself not to fall apart in front of this man who did not know me and did not owe me anything and was already looking at me with the focused patience of someone managing a situation rather than comforting a person.

"What do I do," I said.

"Right now you do nothing," Damien said. "You stay inside this estate. You do not contact Roland. You do not respond to his men at the gate."

"And my mother?"

"I will have someone check on her condition today."

I looked at him. "Why would you do that."

Damien picked up his phone again. "Because you are my wife," he said simply. "And because Roland Quinn has apparently decided that my waking up is a problem he needs to solve. Which means his problem is now my problem."

He said it without warmth or softness. Like it was just a calculation. A business decision.

But he said it.

I walked to the door.

"Sera."

I turned.

He had not looked up from his phone. "The things you said in this room last night. About Roland looking like a man who had won something." Now he looked up. "You were right."

I nodded once.

I went back to my room and sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall and thought about my mother lying in a hospital bed not knowing that the man she had married and trusted for six years had been using her like a chess piece the entire time.

I thought about how long I had known something was wrong and kept telling myself I was imagining it.

I was done telling myself that.

My phone buzzed on the bed beside me.

A message from a number I did not recognize.

Three words.

Come outside, Sera.

I looked at the window.

I looked at my phone.

Then I went to the window and looked down at the gate.

One of Roland's men was looking directly up at my window.

He had a phone in his hand.

And he was smiling.