Chapter 2
Khloe woke on a cloud.
That was her first thought, and it was not a metaphor — she was on a mattress so absurdly contoured that her body had stopped registering gravity, and the sheets were silk, cool and impossibly clean, and somewhere to her left she could hear a fire.
She was not on the bloodstained mattress in the apartment on Lawrence Avenue.
Panic hit her before her eyes were fully open. She gasped and tried to sit up, and a spike of white-hot pain went through her side and dropped her flat again with a groan.
“Don’t move. You have two fractured ribs.”
She whipped her head to the side.
An older man sat in a leather armchair beside the bed with a medical bag open on his knees and his sleeves rolled up. Kind eyes, gray at the temples, the unhurried hands of somebody who had been called to strange rooms for a very long time.
“Who are you?” Khloe whispered. Her voice came out as rust.
“I’m Dr. Arthur Hayes.” He said it gently, the way you’d say it to a child who had just woken from a nightmare. “You’re safe here, miss. You’re at the Marchesi residence.”
The name went through her like ice water.
The club. The bass. The doors she had fallen through. The man with the storm-gray eyes, and the glass, and the rug.
She had fainted in front of the head of the Chicago syndicate.
“I need to leave.” She threw the duvet back — and stopped.
She was not in her own clothes.
She was wearing a man’s cashmere button-down, soft and enormous, the sleeves rolled three times at her wrists, and nothing else except a pair of plain cotton shorts that were not hers either.
“Where are my clothes?” Her voice climbed. “Did he— did you—”
“Your clothes were soaked in freezing rainwater and street grime.” A new voice, from the doorway, and it did not belong to the doctor. “A female housekeeper changed you. Her name is Maria. She’s been doing this work for twenty years and she did it in eleven minutes and she has not said a word to anyone about what she saw.”
Khloe froze.
Lorenzo Marchesi came through the mahogany door and the oxygen in the room drained out of it.
He was different in daylight. The bespoke jacket was gone. He wore a black tailored shirt, open at the collar, sleeves pushed to the forearm, and he had the particular stillness of a man who had not slept, and it made him more imposing, not less.
Dr. Hayes closed his bag, stood, and slipped out of the room without being asked.
Khloe pulled the duvet up to her chin and lay there with her heart slamming against two broken ribs like something small and desperate locked in a box.
Lorenzo walked to the foot of the bed and stopped. He kept his distance deliberately. He saw her eyes flick to the door, then to the windows, then back to the door, running the arithmetic of escape automatically, the way a hunted thing does.
“You’re not a prisoner,” he said.
His voice was a deep, resonant baritone and it did something strange along the back of her neck.
“You walked into my club. You collapsed at my feet. I merely ensured that you didn’t die on my Persian rug.” A pause. “It’s antique.”
Khloe stared at him.
Then, out of a throat that had been screaming for forty minutes the night before, a tiny hysterical breath of a laugh escaped her.
Something moved in Lorenzo’s eyes. It was small and it was gone before she could name it.
“What is your name?”
“Khloe. Khloe Bennett.”
“Khloe Bennett.” He said it like he was filing it. “Dr. Hayes tells me you haven’t eaten a proper meal in weeks. You’re significantly underweight, and you show evidence of repeated blunt force trauma across multiple sites.”
His tone dropped an octave, and the temperature in the room seemed to fall with it.
“Who did this to you?”
Khloe looked away at the window. The rain was still going, grey and relentless against the glass, and beyond it the city lay out flat and enormous under its own weather.
“You don’t want to get involved,” she said. “I just need my clothes and I’ll go. I’m sorry about the rug. And the trespassing.”
“I am already involved.”
He stepped closer — she did not hear him do it, which was its own kind of terrifying; a man that size should not be able to move silently, and he moved like something that had never once needed to announce itself.
He sat on the edge of the mattress.
Khloe flinched.
Her whole body did it, an animal contraction away from him, her hands coming up around her own throat before she could stop them. It lasted less than a second and it was louder than anything she had said out loud.
Lorenzo Marchesi saw it. A muscle feathered along his jaw.
Then he did the thing that broke her a little, in a way nothing else that night had managed. He raised both hands slowly into the air where she could see them, empty — and then he put them down again, flat, on his own knees.
“I am not going to hurt you, Khloe. But I need a name.”
“He’ll kill me.” A tear escaped the corner of her eye and tracked down over the bruise on her cheek. “And then he’ll come for you. He has power. He has the law.”
A dark, cruel smile moved across Lorenzo’s mouth.
“The law in my city,” he said. And he leaned in, just slightly, and it should have terrified her and instead it did the opposite.
“Khloe. There is not a judge, a police captain, or a politician in Chicago who does not answer to me in some capacity. The men who write the laws sit at my table and ask for my money, and they ask politely. Whoever this man is — whoever hurt you — he is an insect on my windshield. Give me his name.”
She looked into those storm-gray eyes and looked for the lie.
She didn’t see one. She saw absolute, terrifying certainty, and it was the most restful thing she had ever looked at.
For the first time in two years, something small and warm lit up under her sternum.
“Miller,” she whispered. “Detective Aaron Miller.”
Lorenzo did not blink.
The stillness that came over him was worse than a shout. It went down through his shoulders and into the mattress under her, and for a moment the room was so quiet she could hear the fire crack.
He knew the name. Of course he did. Aaron Miller was a dirty narcotics detective who skimmed off the top of seized product and had, on four or five occasions, sold the Marchesi family a piece of information for a great deal of money. Greedy. Arrogant. Expendable. Every year Lorenzo ran the numbers and every year Miller came in just under the line that would have required his removal.
“He did this to you.”
Khloe closed her eyes and let the tears come, because there was no longer any point in holding them.
“I tried to leave him. He caught me. He told me if I ever ran again he’d arrest me for possession, put me in a cell, and make sure I never saw daylight.” Her hands twisted in the duvet. “I have no family. No one would notice if I went missing.”
“I noticed,” Lorenzo said.
She opened her eyes.
He reached out — she tensed, and he did not grab her. With agonizing slowness he let the backs of his knuckles brush the tear off her unbruised cheek, and his touch was shockingly warm, and shockingly light, and it lasted less than two seconds.
Then he stood up.
“You are going to stay here,” he said. The command was still a command, but the harshness was gone out of it. “You will eat. You will rest. Dr. Hayes will check on you twice a day, and Maria will bring you anything you need and she will not tell anyone she has done it.”
“And Aaron?”
“Aaron Miller is no longer your concern.”
He walked to the door.
May you like
“In fact,” he said, adjusting his cuffs with two precise tugs, “Detective Miller is about to have a very precipitous fall from grace.”
The door closed softly behind him.
