Chapter 6

She was halfway to the departure terminal when her phone rang.

She let it ring. It rang again. Seven times. Eight.

On the ninth call, she answered.

"Stella bet you to someone else," Lucian said, voice stripped of everything except the bare information. "Twenty-four hours. Consider yourself loaned out. She didn't realize she'd lose."

Sophia laughed—short, clear, bewildered.

"Then will you sign the divorce papers after? I'd rather whoever picks me up doesn't know I'm still technically married. It might make things awkward."

The line went dead.

Seconds later, a message from Stella: "I'm so sorry! He promised he wouldn't hurt you—he's a harmless old man, I swear! I feel terrible about this!!"

Sophia read it twice, changed into clothes she'd borrowed from a nurse's locker, and walked out the back entrance of the hospital instead of the front.

Twenty yards from the staff gate, she saw them—a wall of security contractors around the rear exit, and at their center, a heavyset man in his seventies, holding a document with Lucian's signature on it.

"Don't be in such a rush, Mrs. Drake. We've still got twenty-four hours."

He had a device. The kind that sends electricity through the body in controlled pulses. Every nerve fires at once. You don't fall from weakness—you fall because the human nervous system was not designed to receive that kind of input and stay upright.

Sophia collapsed. Then she got back up. The twenty-four hours passed.

At dawn, she was released. She walked back through the gate, up the steps, and into the villa where Lucian was waiting with a bowl of hot congee and an expression of complicated concern.

She looked at him for a long time before she spoke.

"Those men," she said. "Were they yours?"

She said it as a statement, not a question.

"You booked a flight," he said carefully.

"Because Stella was jealous."

He crossed to her and gripped her arms.

"You've been in love with me since you were ten years old," he said, voice rough. "You followed me to secondary school. You confessed at sixteen. You begged to marry me at twenty. Sophia—" His voice cracked. "I will not let you leave."

He released her and walked away before she could answer.

He didn't see Stella in the corridor, listening. Didn't see the flash of something vicious move through her expression before her usual wide-eyed softness slid back into place.

Stella pulled out her phone. She composed a message—one line, carefully worded, designed to look accidental—and sent it to Lucian's personal account. A message about the hotel reservation she'd made in the upmarket district of the city center, a room under a name he would recognize.

Then she leaned against the wall and waited for the fallout.