Chapter 2: The Monarch of St. Jude's

Roman

The storm was building over the Atlantic, but inside my study the air didn’t move.

I stood at the window with a glass of whiskey I wasn’t drinking. Behind me, on the desk, lay the dossier with her name on it.

Sunny Jane.

She was supposed to be a transaction. I had given my directors exact criteria: clean lineage, excellent health, no complicated ties, absolute discretion. A woman who would understand the terms, sign them, and step aside when the work was done.

Instead I had someone throwing herself at the walls of a room I’d furnished for her.

Marcus knocked and came in, hands clasped behind his back. “Mr. Sterling. Miss Jane refused her evening meal. She knocked the tray off the table again.”

“Has she hurt herself?”

“No, sir. She spent the afternoon trying the windows and the door handle, every twenty minutes. Like a metronome.”

“She still thinks this is a misunderstanding,” I said. “That tears and explanations will fix it.”

“Shall I have the medical team sedate her? Her heart rate has been elevated since arrival, and if we’re going to begin the preparations—”

“No.” I turned. “No sedatives. I want her clear-headed. She should know exactly where she is and who decides what happens next.”

He nodded and left without a sound.

I picked up the dossier and opened it to her photograph. An old ID shot from her office job. She was smiling at the camera as if the camera were a friend.

She had said she was drugged. That her application was a setup. That she had people waiting.

I turned to the contract. Every signature was in place, every clearance, every confidentiality clause, routed through three layers of offshore companies. If someone close to her had betrayed her, or if she was bargaining her way out after second thoughts, it changed nothing. The Sterling family doesn’t negotiate.

So why had I left the folder with her?

I had told myself it was the normal thing to do. Let her read it, see the paper, give up the fantasy that she could argue her way out. But I hadn’t left it for her sake. I had wanted to watch her face when she read the last page.

I put the dossier down and went upstairs.

Two guards straightened as I approached the suite. One keyed the lock as I went in.

The room was dark, lit only by the moon. The overturned tray lay near the door in a spray of cold tea and broken porcelain.

Sunny stood in the middle of the floor in the white cotton slip she’d arrived in, her hair tangled, my folder crushed against her chest.

She didn’t shrink something most people did in this situation. They measured their words, they lowered their eyes, they bowed.

She looked at me as if she would take my throat in her hands if she could reach it.

“Get out,” she said. Hoarse from shouting but it was steady

I shut the door and engaged the lock from inside. “It’s my house, Sunny. You don’t get to tell me where to stand.”

“And You’re holding me against my will. That’s called kidnapping.”

“Call it what you like.” My eyes went to the broken cup and came back to her. “You haven’t eaten in a day. Did you think I’d be moved?”

“I don’t want your pity! I want my life back!” Her breath hitched. “There are people who love me. Aiden is probably tearing the city apart looking for me.”

That name stirred something cold somewhere low in my chest.

It was absurd. I did not care who she’d left behind, or how small his world was. But the way she said it, like a prayer, inside my house, bothered me more than I wanted to admit.

“Aiden Hope,” I said. Her eyes flickered. “Associate architect at a mid-tier firm. Rents on 4th Street. Drives a seven-year-old sedan.”

The color left her face. “How do you know that?”

“I know everything about you.” I closed the distance by a step.

“Where you worked. Where your sister shops. What your boyfriend has in his savings account.”

“Leave him out of it.” The defiance in her voice cracked, and what was underneath was naked fear. She put a hand out as if to push me back, though I was still out of reach. “He’s innocent.”

“No one is innocent. And no one is out of my reach.”

I took her wrist. Her pulse was going wild under my thumb. She fought, hammering one small fist against my chest, and I pulled her against me and held her there until she ran out of room to swing. She was smaller than I’d registered. Her head barely reached my shoulder. She smelled like salt and rain and something warm that was only hers, and my body noticed before my mind gave it permission.

“You lost the moment you stepped onto that plane,” I said into her ear.

“I will never stop fighting you.” Her mouth was against my collar.

“Never.”

“Then let’s talk about who pays for it.” I kept my voice quiet. Quiet is always more frightening. “You think your architect is searching for you? Right now he is sitting in a police station with his head in his hands. Just one call from me and his firm is finished by morning. A second, and he’s facing charges for a crime he didn’t commit. A third…” I let it hang. “Tragic accidents happen on city streets every day.”

She went completely still.

“You wouldn’t,” she breathed.

“Try me.”

For a long moment there was only the wind throwing itself against the glass.

I felt the instant it went out of her. Her shoulders dropped. Her head tipped back against my arm. She did not kneel and did not beg; she just stopped. One tear slid down her temple, and she let it.

It was exactly what I had come for.

So I couldn’t explain the sensation that followed, a hollow pull behind my ribs, like stepping onto a stair that wasn’t there. I’d won. I always did. I had never before wanted to take it back.

I released her wrist. My other hand stayed at the small of her back a second longer than it needed to.

She stumbled and caught the edge of the sofa. Her arms wrapped around her own waist as though she were holding herself together by hand.

“A new tray will be here in ten minutes,” I said, and heard how flat it came out. “You’ll eat all of it. You’ll cooperate with the doctor in the morning. Is that understood?”

Nothing.

“Sunny.”

A single, faint nod. She didn’t lift her head.

“Words”

“I understand”she said

“That’s better”

I went to the door and stopped. She hadn’t moved. In the pale light she looked broken, and not quite.

Something in the set of her spine said that what I’d taken tonight wasn’t everything she had.

“Eat your food and get some rest,” I said, more quietly than I meant. “Tomorrow starts your new life.”

The door shut. The lock engaged.

Marcus was waiting at the end of the corridor with his tablet and his face blank.

“Shall I begin on Aiden Hope, sir? The firm, the accounts? The legal team can have the first filing ready by morning.”

I looked down at my hand. I could still feel her pulse in it, rabbit-fast and furious.

I hadn’t made a single call. I’d told her I would, and she had believed me so completely that she’d given up on the spot. And I had stood there and watched her do it, and let it stand.

“Not yet,” I said.

Marcus’s eyebrows rose a fraction. In nine years I had never said those words to him.

“Keep everything ready,” I said.

“And pull the intake records on Sunny Jane’s application. I want to know who submitted it.”

“Sir, it’s been verified by three—”

“I didn’t ask who verified it.”

I walked on. Behind me, through two doors and a corridor, I heard nothing at all, and I wondered, for the first time in fifteen years, whether I had made a mistake I couldn’t buy my way out of.