I pulled both simultaneously, and the ceiling trembled, the floor shifting beneath my feet.
The bookcase groaned and squeaked, moving slowly as it parted into a door leading to a steep, pebbled stairway.
Goose bumps shot from the base of my spine all the way to my skull.
I stepped inside before I changed my mind. The door clicked shut behind me. I took a deep breath and made my way down. Danger soaked the walls, the air, even my lungs.
Why was I here, doing this?
Because if he’s in trouble, you’ll help him. And if he isthetrouble, you’ll be able to blackmail him out of this arrangement.
It was a win-win situation, really. Unless I had just signed my own death warrant and this ended with my body in someone’s trunk.
Music reverberated in the narrow, curving stairway, bouncing off the walls like bullets. It sounded like it came from somewhere deep and far. “Search and Destroy.” The Skunk Anansie version. The bass danced in the pit of my stomach.
Muffled voices rose from the foot of the stairway, ribboning around my limbs like chains.
My fingers gripped my seashell bracelet. I had spent my entire life doing the right thing, always on the straight and narrow, and this was where I landed.
In the secret basement of my ruthless billionaire husband, while he did God knows what to God knows who.
Not everything you did was right. You do have one very messed-up secret.
I reached the end of the stairway. A panic room. Small and square, paneled by metal walls, and scarcely furnished.
Inside, my husband, still clad in his work suit, crouched over a dead man on the floor, surgically sewing what appeared to be a small, black thorn between the corpse’s eyes.
I slapped my mouth and clamped my teeth, desperate not to make a sound, but a frightened moan escaped anyway.
Tate twisted around, expression vacant, eyes dead.
And that was when I started to run.
Age ten
Two, six, two.
Two, six, two.
Two, six, two.
I was considered a genius student, but I did not test well.
Tests were followed by a whole lot of punishments and no rewards if I didn’t succeed. I’d been trained to think of them as my enemies.
Yet the academy forced me to enter this stupid math contest. I was already breezing through the material most people who pursued a bachelor of science in mathematics were still struggling with.
I found myself sitting on a Zurich stage with high schoolers on a crisp winter afternoon, solving equations in front of an audience.
We were given little clocks they put on our tables and pencils engraved with the name of the insurance company that sponsored the competition. My fingers quaked around my pencil. I could not focus on the numbers in front of me.
Two, six, two.
Two, six, two.
Two, six, two.
My eyes traveled up to the crowd. Teachers, professors, and family members of the contestants. The only person who came to see me was Andrin.
