Chapter 5: A False Ray of Hope

Sunny

The central suite had become a tomb.

For three days after my failed escape, I lived inside four walls. The balcony doors were deadbolted from the outside. The windows were locked with key latches. Heavy velvet curtains swallowed the gray water, and two guards sat in the anteroom so close I could hear them breathing.

I didn’t mind the locks, I minded the silence it was suffocating.

Roman hadn’t come back since then. The last thing he’d said to me was you will live in the dark, and then he had walked out and left me with it. Every hour was a tick on a clock counting down to whatever he’d meant. Was Aiden all right? Had Roman already started with his promise? Was Aiden standing in an empty office right now because of my foolishness?

Not knowing was worse than anything Roman could have done to my body.

On the fourth afternoon, the lock turned.

I didn’t look up from the edge of the bed, because it’s either a tray or doctor, I assumed. Another meal I wouldn’t eat.

“A bird in a gilded cage,” said a voice I didn’t know. “A wet one, from what I hear.”

I lifted my head.

The man in the doorway wasn’t a guard. He was tall, in a navy suit with an open collar and no tie, golden-brown hair swept back, light green eyes that took in the room as if he found it funny. He looked like a man at a party who knew a secret about everyone else.

He did not look like he belonged in Roman’s house. That was the first thing that frightened me.

“Who… who are you?” My voice was rough with disuse. I stood and backed toward the bed. “How did you get in? The guards—”

“Currently very busy with a rumor about a broken pipe in the east wing.” He stepped in and closed the door with two fingers. “I’m Zane Rainer.”

“Are you one of Roman’s men?”

He laughed, a short, warm sound, as if I’d said something delightful.

“Roman would rather burn this island to the waterline than let me through the gate. We’re in the same business. Mostly we spend our time trying to bankrupt each other.”

I went still. “You’re his rival.”

“His favorite.” Zane tipped his head. “Which is why I was fascinated when my people told me Roman Sterling had left Geneva in the middle of a board crisis to personally babysit a woman on a rock in the island.”

“What do you want?”

“To see who shook the iceberg.” He leaned a shoulder against the bedpost, easy as breathing. “And to offer you something Roman never will.”

“Which is?”

“Hope.”

My heart jumped. Then my head caught up with it, and I stamped the jump out like a spark on carpet.

“I don’t know you,” I said. “You could be working for him or even esting me.”

“If I worked for Roman, I wouldn’t have paid two of his guards five thousand euros apiece to look at the ceiling for ten minutes.” From his jacket pocket he took a flat silver object and held it between two fingers. “A man who worked for him would have a better lie.”

A smart phone. A small, plain one.

I wanted it so badly my hand was already halfway out before I could stop it. He tipped it out of reach.

“Nothing in this world is free, Sunny.”

“I have nothing to give you.”

“Not true. But let me start with what I can offer.” His eyes had lost some of their amusement. “Roman keeps you cut off because isolation breeds dependence. He wants you to believe he is the only thing in your universe. I’m a crack in that. I can tell you what’s happening to your sweet boyfriend.”

“Aiden.” It came out like a gasp. “Is …is he all right? What has Roman done?”

“At the moment, he’s fine. Roman’s lawyers started quietly leaning on his firm’s biggest client three days ago. It will get less polite.” He watched my face. “But I can stop it. I can cover him in the city and I can get you off this island. In return, I need one tiny bitty favor.”

“Anything.”

“Don’t say anything to a man you’ve known for four minutes, sunny.” But he smiled, pleased. “Roman is obsessed with you. A man like that gets careless. He keeps locked files in his private study on the third floor. I need one file from it. A pass key to his European port logistics.”

And it was all there at once, as simply as a light coming on.

He didn’t care what happened to me. I was a door. He had spent months trying to break into Roman’s empire from outside, and I had walked through the one gap he’d found, the one thing Roman wouldn’t guard against himself.

Zane wasn’t a hero. He was another man who wanted to use me, with better manners.

But he was also a crack in the wall.

I thought of every locked door I’d seen. Roman was an iron box, and I had been hammering on it with my bare hands. Zane was the first tool anyone had offered me.

“I want proof first,” I said.

His eyebrows rose. “I’m sorry?”

“You say Aiden’s fine. I want to see it. Not a promise.” I held out my hand. “Give me the phone. I’ll check the news. If there’s a single line about his firm that doesn’t match what you’ve said, I’ll tell Roman everything.”

Something sharpened in Zane’s expression. Respect, maybe, or just interest.

“Tough little thing,” he murmured, and set the phone in my palm. His fingers lingered a second longer than they needed to. “I almost thought you’d be tearful.”

“I was tearful for three days. It didn’t help.”

“No, it doesn’t.” He smiled again, but the green eyes weren’t smiling, and for an instant I thought I saw something that looked uncomfortably like regret. “We’ll get along very well, you and I.”

I closed my fist around the phone. “Why does it matter to you? The file.”

“Because he’s been strangling half of Europe’s ports for a decade,” Zane said. “And because he’s never been this distracted.”

He pushed off the bedpost and crossed to the balcony doors. From inside his sleeve he drew a thin metal pick and, in the time it took me to blink, the deadbolt on the outside was moving. The doors swung open on wet air.

I stared. The guards in the anteroom hadn’t made a sound.

“One more thing.” He stood at the threshold with rain on his shoulders.

“Roman told you he picked you from three hundred candidates.”

My stomach tightened. “Yes.”

“I don’t think he did.” His voice had gone quiet. “I’ve seen the file that moved through the recruiters. It didn’t come through the front door. A woman delivered it herself.”

“What woman?”

“I don’t have a name. Yet.” He smiled thinly. “Keep the phone hidden. I’ll find you tonight.”

Then he was gone, and the doors swung shut behind him, and the deadbolt turned back into place from the outside as smoothly as if it had never been moved.

I stood in the center of the room with the phone burning in my fist.

A woman delivered it herself.

I didn’t want to think about who. I didn’t have to. My head started sorting names, a long list, a stranger’s face, my landlady, my old boss, and none of them fit, and I held very still until the list went quiet.

The phone buzzed once against my palm.

Don’t trust anyone in this house, it read. Including me.