Chapter 6: Shadows in the East Wing

Sunny

The phone burned against my thigh through the pocket of my sweater, a small secret in a room full of watchers.

Seconds after the balcony doors locked behind Zane, the main door opened and Dr. Linda walked in with her leather case and two guards.

My heart nearly stopped.

“Miss Jane. Mr. Sterling wants a full checkup. Hypothermia, lung infection, anything lingering after your… swim.”

“Of course,” I said.

I sat on the edge of the mattress with my left hand buried in my pocket, pinning the phone flat against my hip so it couldn’t shift or buzz while she pressed a stethoscope to my back and examined my throat. My pulse was running like a rabbit. She would hear that but I hope she would think it was the cold.

“Your vitals are good,” she said at last, snapping the case shut. “Your stress levels are still dangerously high but Mr. Sterling will be pleased you’re recovering.”

“Where is he?”

“Finishing a call in his study. He says he’ll see you at seven.”

She left. The deadbolts shot home. I counted to twenty minutes, then slid under the duvet, pulled it over my head, and turned the phone on in the dark.

One contact in the address book: Z.R.

The message was already there.

Z.R.: Guards on your door change at 10:00 tonight. The third-floor study has a biometric lock. Every night between 10:15 and 10:30 it drops to maintenance mode while the server updates you have fifteen minutes.

Sunny: How do I get to the third floor? I’m locked in.

Z.R.: In your bathroom. Behind the linen cabinet is an old maintenance hatch to the service stairs. Unbolted. I made sure.

He’s been in my bathroom, I thought. When?

I ignored the shiver and typed:

Sunny: I need to check Aiden’s okay before I do anything.

Z.R.: Search for yourself.

I did. The satellite connection crawled like a snail, and each second felt like someone leaning on my chest. Then the screen populated.

Whitlock & Miller Architecture Faces Emergency Audit Over Unfilled Municipal Contracts.

I read it three times. Aiden’s name wasn’t in the article, but I knew the firm. I knew the contracts. I’d held his hand under the table at the holiday party when they’d landed the last one.

Roman hadn’t destroyed him yet.

He was going at it the way he did everything: quietly, from underneath, cutting one support at a time until the whole thing came down by itself.

I made myself breathe. I typed with fingers that wouldn’t stay steady.

Sunny: Who delivered my file to the recruiters? You said it was a woman.

A long pause. Then:

Z.R.: I’m working on it. Get me the file tonight and you’ll have the name by morning.

Of course. He’d put the one thing I couldn’t walk away from in front of me, and he’d made me pay for it.

I wasn’t a fool. Every step he’d laid out was a step deeper into a trap with a pretty ribbon on it. But Roman was a wall, and the only way through a wall was to find someone willing to hand me a crowbar.

I cleared the messages and hid the phone inside the pillowcase.

At seven, the deadbolts turned.

Roman came in alone. Charcoal shirt, top two buttons undone, his dark hair slightly disordered like he’d been dragging a hand through it. It should have made him look softer but it didn’t. The set of his shoulders said he’d had an hour to think and had decided what to do with the thought.

I was sitting by the window and I’d moved the phone back into my sweater pocket before he came but I regretted it the instant I heard the lock.

“Dr. Linda says you’ve recovered,” he said, closing the door.

“I’m fine.”

He crossed the room and stopped a few feet away. His eyes went over my face the way a man reads a contract, slowly, hunting for the line that doesn’t fit.

“You’re quiet today.”

“I’m just tired.”

“Quiet usually means you’re planning something, Sunny.”

I looked up and met his gaze and did not look away, and the lie came out very smooth. “I tried to swim across an ocean, Roman. I don’t have the energy to plan anything.”

Something moved at the edge of his mouth. Not quite a smile.

He took my hand.

I didn’t see it coming. He lifted it from my lap, turned it palm up, and looked at it: the raw scrapes across my heel, the flaking scabs the hull had left. His thumb brushed the edge of one, very lightly. It hurt. It shouldn’t have felt like anything else.

“These should have been dressed,” he said. He sounded like a man reading a deficiency out of a report. But his thumb didn’t move.

My other hand was in my pocket, clamped around the phone that could have gotten me killed, and I felt the tiny vibration of an incoming message ripple through the fabric against my hip.

Don’t look. Don’t flinch. Don’t breathe.

“Cramps,” I said, and flexed my hand in his. “From holding the boat. They come and go.”

His eyes lifted to mine.

It lasted perhaps three seconds. I counted them. In three seconds I watched a man weigh something and decide not to ask.

“If you say so,” he said. He let go of my hand and cupped my chin, lifting my face. His thumb ran across my lower lip, lightly, almost tender, in a way that was infuriating from a man who’d locked me in this room.

“Because resistance only prolongs your distress. Accept that your place is here, with me, and I’ll give you everything you want.”

“Except my freedom.”

“Freedom is an illusion.” His voice dropped. “Out there you are fragile. In here, you are mine, and no one touches you.”

I should have felt only revulsion. I did. But under it, small, ugly, and impossible to dismiss, was the fact that I’d noticed the shadows under his eyes. He hadn’t slept, either.

Stop it Sunny.

He bent and pressed a firm, lingering kiss to my forehead, then straightened, his face smoothing back into stone.

“Dinner is at eight,” he said, and went out.

The deadbolts locked behind him.

I sat very still until the sound of his footsteps had faded entirely. Then I pulled the phone out and read the message I’d felt buzz against my hip.

Z.R.: Wear soft shoes. And Sunny, whatever happens tonight, don’t look at the clock when he’s in the room.

I stared at it.

When he’s in the room. Not if.

Across from me, in the corner of the ceiling, the camera’s little red light blinked once and went dark. I told myself it was Zane’s work, maybe a bribe or a glitch.

I almost believed it.