The yelling customer made Lily sigh. “We’ll chat later.”
Four hours and thirty-two calls later, with zero minutes left on her phone, Hannah was still seated in the same corner but now her hopes were even smaller than when she started, wondering how she could have left Markus’s office without agreeing to his offer.
She picked up her cell to call Mr. Jones when she remembered she’d used up all her minutes, and she couldn’t spend any money to add more. She grabbed her wallet to search for quarters for the payphone in the back just to close it with a snap. Are you crazy, Hannah Kristensen?
She rolled her head on her shoulders, already not recognizing herself for considering being a whore to Markus.
There is a job out there for me. She opened the newspaper again. I am just not trying hard enough to find it.
The Blackthorn Corporation headquarters
5:45 p.m.
“Sir?” Thomas called Markus away from his musings. “Ms. Gonzalez called. She is sick and won’t be able to bring Miss Victoria to visit you tonight.”
“Again?” His hands closed into fists. Nicola had been coming up with one excuse after another to deny Markus time with his daughter. “What is this new sickness she is inventing?”
“She said—” Thomas breathed deep. Incurring Markus’s wrath was not something he wanted, and Nicola had been a thorn in his boss’s side. “Sir, perhaps you should call her.”
“Thanks, Tom.” The door closed softly behind him as he walked to the windows overlooking Central Park.
All the satisfaction he had felt from closing the Haskell & Sons deal the day before, left him with an exhalation. “Nothing more than a passing shock of blue in my colorless world.”
Markus had been thoroughly irritated with Nicola when she declared herself pregnant. He had even tried to talk her into having an abortion. For many reasons—most of them centered in his childhood—his life plans didn’t include kids. But it had taken just one look at Victoria’s delicate face for him to fall head over heels in love with her. The first time her tiny hand wrapped around his large finger, he swore he would give her all the love and attention his parents hadn’t given him.
And he had been failing miserably since his divorce.
It had gotten worse since Nicola had asked for and been granted a provision requiring supervised visitation as part of the divorce decree, having convinced the judge that Markus had been violent with her and posed a threat to Victoria. Now Nicola was doing whatever she could to keep him from having any time with his daughter.
He took his cellphone from his pocket and dialed his ex-wife’s number.
“What’s wrong with you now?” he snapped at her as soon as she offered a candy-coated hello.
“Thanks for caring, Markus,” she said. “I told you I have fibromyalgia. This isn’t something new.”
“Of course. How could I forget?” he groaned sarcastically. “The medical condition that encompasses any and all symptoms under the sun not explained by any other condition and for which there’s no greater diagnosis than the patient thinking—”
“Did you call just to berate me and try to make me feel worse?” Nicola whined. “According to my therapist, stress aggravates my symptoms. Oh, I can feel myself swelling up just listening to you yell at me.”
“I’m tired of you finding excuses to keep Victoria from me—” he cut off his growl. Let her hang herself with her own lies. Changing tack, he said, “That sounds very serious, Nicola. I’ll send my doctor over right away and he’ll evaluate you.”
“Thank you, but no. According to my therapist I’ll be fine if you would just be civil with me and treat me nicely for a change.”
“Wow! That’s it!” he exclaimed, remembering why he had sworn off involving himself with any other women. Nicola was more than he could take.
There was a brief silence before Nicola asked in an uncertain voice, “What’s it?”
“Your therapist found a cure for fibromyalgia. The first disease that vanishes when people are civil.”
The click on the line told him he had just made her mad, and that wouldn’t help his cause.
Markus put his forehead on the glass and closed his eyes, wondering how he could have been so faulty in his choice of a wife and why he was unable to maintain a civil—or any kind of—relationship with her.
Before the gloom set in, he crossed to his desk with firm, angry strides, sat on his chair and typed an email to his lawyer. As he reread the text, he hissed to the empty room, “You have no idea whom you are dealing with, Nicola. No idea.”
The Eagle Nest
6:30 p.m.
As far as nightclubs went, The Eagle Nest was by far the most expensive, the most elegant, and the most exclusive in the entire city of New York. Oddly enough, it was also the most obscure.
There was no listing in the phonebook. No gaudy ads on billboards, or flashing neon lights to reveal its location. In fact, the sprawling house and gardens were like any other in the area.
It was still early, yet there were already members drinking at the bar in front, while others indulged in a variety of nefarious activities in the back. Gambling, drinking, flirting, fornicating in pairs, threesomes, and even orgies. All of which cost the club members a small fortune.
Anyone who was anyone knew how to find the place. And those anyones didn’t include normal or poor people, like Hannah. Unless they were in trouble.
She’d applied for more than a hundred jobs in the past month, and only three employers had called her back. One opening had been at a night-school, not as a teacher but as a supervisor, yet the position was given to another applicant. The second was at a private residence, and they’d told her she didn’t have enough experience. The third job…well, she didn’t really know if she should call what Markus Blackthorn was offering a job.
But her need for money was just too desperate to let her have an impartial opinion of said job.
Hannah had always worked hard to make something of herself and make her mother proud. She’d been at the top of her class, studied hard, and she didn’t prioritize socializing, unlike so many other college students.
After everything she’d gone through and all she’d worked to accomplish she was not about to reduce herself to becoming some man’s—or rather, Markus’s whore.
It is not time to think about Markus.
For two years she had been delivering an envelope at the club on the first of day of every month. She’d been paying the interest on her debt without fail but since she had lost a part-time job as a private teacher for a disabled boy, she started to fall behind on the monthly installments. And since last July, when she lost her job as a kindergarten teacher, she had not only been late on the payments but missed some completely. What she earned as a babysitter barely kept her alive.
The black doors at the end of the pristine white fluffy carpet were opened by two big men as the one walking beside her made a sign.
Here you go. Hannah gathered all her courage and firmed her steps as she walked into the den of the man who held her life in his hands.
“Ms. Kristensen, welcome, welcome.” Luciano Aquila, the Eagle, leaned back and made a show of spreading his arms over the back of the sofa. He was a big man with the wingspan of a giant.
Hannah’s eyes followed the movement but when she saw him leering at her, she lowered her eyelids. Most would have considered him handsome, and maybe he was with his built frame and rugged Italian features, but all Hannah could see was a monster. Willing her hand not to tremble, Hannah pulled an envelope from her purse and held it out for one of the men.
“I—I don’t have all of it, but I brought whatever I could raise.” Hannah had cleaned out her bank account and had put every dollar she could scrape up into that envelope. “And…I—I have been interviewing for jobs. Good jobs. That pay very well,” she said. “I’m just waiting to be called.”
“You are already forty-five hundred overdue.”
“I’m doing everything I
can. I swear to you. I just need to find another job…or something. I only need a little extra time.” Even shaking inside, Hannah babbled, “I’ll get the money. I promise.”
“Do you have something else to say?”
“I’m sorry the payment was late again this month,” she said, talking to Luciano’s shiny black leather shoes rather than facing the man sitting on the plush black velvet sofa, or the three others standing behind him.
“You are sorry.”
“Yes.”
Luciano slid off the sofa. His footsteps drew closer, deliberately slow as the space between them shrank rapidly. When he stopped she could smell the expensive tobacco on his dark suit. It took all her courage not to cringe when he reached out, plucked a coil of her hair from her bun, and wound it around his fingers.
“We had a deal, you and I, didn’t we?” His hand moved from her hair to her jaw and closed around her neck, tight enough to be threatening, yet not tight enough to cut off her air. He pulled her in closer so their mouths were mere inches apart and she was forced to swallow his breath. “So far, I have more than kept my end of the bargain, but you haven’t kept yours.”
“I’m sorry—”
He backhanded her so hard she stumbled back and was caught by one of Luciano’s goons who stood behind her.
Hannah shook herself loose and tried again. “I’ll bring the money next month. I pro—”
Luciano’s hand closed around her throat again, but this time his fingers bit into tender skin as he wrenched her closer and vaulted her up so her feet were not touching the ground anymore. Her hands grabbed his wrist, her nails digging into the skin, her legs kicked fruitlessly as she began to choke.
“Sorry doesn’t get me my money, bitch,” he murmured in a taunting whisper.
Crippling terror filled her body when his other hand dropped to cup her hard between the legs and the hand around her neck tightened until black dots clouded her vision.
“Be here with the money by next Friday.” He threw her face-down to the floor. “If you don’t, I’ll be adding another form of interest.”
Hannah had no recollection of how she came to be in the parking lot outside The Eagle Nest. Shakily rising, she used the wall to heave herself up onto unsteady legs. Her face hurt and her legs trembled so much, she was afraid she couldn’t make it to her rented room but she grabbed her purse and slowly made her way to the busy New York underground.
Her entire body felt raw. Chills rushed over her in a hot and cold torrent as the train shook on the rails. People glanced her way, but no one made any move to ask if she was alright.
Once in her room, she leaned back against the door. Her throat closed and she struggled to breathe until her chest heaved with a huge sob.
Sinking down the wood panel of the door, Hannah curled in on herself for what seemed an eternity begging for the oblivion of sleep, but it never came.
CHAPTER 5
Markus Blackthorn’s penthouse
Thursday, October 2, 2014
6:30 a.m.
Markus pulled on his shorts and tennis shoes and left his bedroom for his work-out room before the sun came up, hitting the treadmill with a vengeance.
He’d slept fitfully; his altercation with Nicola and his interview with Hannah running loops in his mind. When was the last time a woman had him turned on the instant she walked into a room?
He knew the answer to it was: Never.
Hannah had always been a surprisingly quiet teenager: shy, intense, thoughtful. She tried to blend in by not drawing attention to herself when he was home on the weekends, and for a few years, he had not paid much attention to the pretty girl. Until one of his friends pointed out that she was a beauty and suggested he asked her to their parties. He did, and once or twice she had made a quick appearance. But before he had a chance to get anywhere with her, she and her mother suddenly left one day, and he never saw her again.
She was even more beautiful now, with all that flaming-red hair, green eyes, and more mature body.
But it was more than that, more even than the soft swell of the curves on her thin frame, a nice contrast to the women in the city who honed themselves to muscled, hard planes and over-sized, hard fake breasts, which offered little in the way of comfort.
It had been in her eyes; something familiar, something lonely. Something that had connected to a hidden part of his psyche—that one part he didn’t like to acknowledge, that made him too human—but in the moment she had stood in front of him, all he’d wanted was to banish that loneliness from her, forever.
He didn’t know what he’d expected when he propositioned her to whore herself for him. Perhaps, it was that very need to keep himself hidden.
My hormones are obviously out of control. His senses felt oddly sharp in spite of his lack of sleep, and he ran for longer than usual. She is just a very important pawn in a very important game of chess; my best hope of getting Victoria back. If she doesn’t want to sleep with me, her loss. He could sleep with any woman in the city; they fell at his feet. Stop that, Markus. You just need to get laid.
Hoping to banish the distraction, he turned his thoughts to the more practical aspects of his day, but his eyes kept checking his phone for a confirming message from his lawyer that Hannah would meet him.
Markus pushed a button to increase the speed, a kind of punishment for his lack of discipline.
And though he wouldn’t admit it to himself, a punishment for sneaking into where his fears—and his hopes—hid.
7:45 a.m.
Hannah rose and crossed to the window. Dark, low clouds hugged the skyline. The sun would soon rise unseen behind the turbulent shades of gray.
All she wanted was to be the young woman she’d been before her mother had fallen ill—the one who’d just secured a place at a prestigious university, who’d loved books and children, and who’d laughed with her one or two girlfriends as they walked to the movies to catch the late show.
She had discovered the world wasn’t as black and white as she’d thought it was when she was younger and finally understood why desperate people made shocking decisions. What had happened was only the tip of the iceberg and she had no doubt Luciano would make good on his threat if she didn’t pay at least the interest. She was under no fantasy that the nightmare would ever end. Unless she made it end.
Call Markus. All you have to do is endure one year of sex—probably good, satisfying, orgasmic sex.
She threw back three aspirins, downed them with water, and climbed into the shower stall without glancing in the mirror. The hot jets felt like they were piercing her cold flesh. Hannah sank to the floor and stayed there until the feeling returned to her otherwise numb body.
She dragged herself out of the stall when the water turned cold and forced herself to look in the mirror to apply a thick concealer on her face, then got ready to go out.
When she unplugged her cell phone from the charger she saw that she had an incoming message.
Mr. B would like to discuss your request. Pls confirm if you are able to meet him tomorrow 9 am, at his office.
The message was a day old but Hannah rushed out of her room and crossed the street in a run. She entered the bar and went straight to the back where the payphone was. After depositing a few coins, she dialed Mr. Jones’s number.
The Blackthorn Corporation headquarters
9:30 a.m.
Markus could never be mistaken for a patient man when it came to incompetence. People who went through life living on excuses of injustice and righteous indignation infuriated him to no end. The man across from him was no exception.
Jacob Muller, CEO of Haskell & Sons, the company he’d just acquired, was a minor nobody Markus had no time for. Yet, here he was wasting his time listening to the monotone of Jacob’s voice while he tried to justify his mistakes to Markus and his partners and explain how he was the perfect fit to be leading the company into a new era.
Jacob had all the right credentials: He’d attended top professional s
chools and worked for some of the best organizations in the industry before landing at Haskell, but despite his impressive background, Jacob supposedly had not adjusted to the massive technological, competitive, and FDA regulatory changes occurring in the market over the last three years, and it showed in the company’s declining stock. But there was something more, something Markus hadn’t been able to put his finger on.
He felt Aleksander Maximilian, one of his partners and Blackthorn Corporation’s CFO, tense next to him. Benedict Lockheart, his other partner and Blackthorn Corporation’s CLO, caught their eyes and discreetly motioned a finger across his neck.
But Markus shook his head. He needed to do an in-depth examination of the company and a thorough questioning of Jacob before releasing him of his lawful responsibilities.
“Thank you, Muller,” Markus said, standing up. “We’ll be reviewing your contract later this week. For now, you can email Maximilian your ideas and we’ll reconvene to discuss them.”
Jacob smiled. “You made the right decision, Mr. Blackthorn.”
Hannah rose from the sofa and ran a hand over her clothes when Markus stepped out of the meeting room followed by three other men.
He noticed she was wearing the same dark-gray suit from their previous meeting—but now it was wrinkled—paired with a black silk scarf fashionably tied around her neck.
She looked beautiful and desirable with her flaming hair down. She was his best chance: not only because she had the education to fit in his world but also because it would be more than believable he had fallen for her looks once more after a chance meeting. When she stepped by him, he put his hand on her waist, pulled her towards his body, leaned down, and kissed her on the mouth. “Hello, darling.”
She blinked, surprised.
“There are people watching,” he murmured.
So this is how it is going to be. Goosebumps raided her body but she placed her hand on his face and gave him a peck on his mouth. “Hi, Markus.”
“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting for too long.”
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