Chapter 5
IRIS
I wake to the smell of lavender, starch, and sea salt.
For a long, hazy moment, I drift in the space between sleep and consciousness. My body is so heavy. I’m sinking into a mattress that is softer than clouds, wrapped in sheets that feel like cool water against my skin.
Silk. Expensive.
Am I at home?
I try to open my eyes, but my eyelids stay glued shut by exhaustion. A dull throb pulses at the base of my skull.
I force a breath into my lungs. My throat burns. It’s raw, the muscles aching and stiff, as if I’ve been coughing for hours. I try to swallow, but it triggers a sharp spike of pain that radiates down my neck.
Water. I need water.
I shift, reaching out instinctively for the nightstand where I keep my carafe. My hand brushes against smooth, cold mahogany.
Wrong. My nightstand is white lacquer.
The dissonance snaps my eyes open.
The room spins.
Nausea rolls in my stomach, violent and sudden, a tidal wave of bile. I clutch the duvet, anchoring myself until the world stops tilting on its axis.
I’m not at home.
I blink, trying to clear the fog from my vision. The light in the room is bright, harsh, and unfamiliar.
I push myself up to a sitting position, my head swimming.
The room is spacious, massive even, decorated in a minimalist, masculine style that screams wealth but lacks warmth.
The walls are slate gray, the color of a storm cloud.
The furniture is dark wood and black leather, favoring severe angles with clinical precision.
There is a sleek desk in the corner with nothing on it.
A sitting area with two velvet armchairs facing a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows.
It doesn’t look like a bedroom. It looks like a holding room dressed up as luxury.
But something is wrong. The silence is artificial. There is no hum of city traffic. No distant sirens.
Just... nothing.
I throw off the covers. I’m still wearing my clothes. They are dry now, but stiff against my skin, crusted with dried sweat and the starchy residue of the vase water. My sneakers are gone. I’m barefoot.
I swing my legs over the edge of the bed. My knees tremble as my feet touch the plush carpet.
Where am I?
Rising to stand, I sway slightly. My balance is off.
His name.
I search my memory for a name, something to call the monster who took me.
Did he tell me who he was?
No. I heard him on the phone. Or maybe the other men said it? Team 6. Sanitize the room.
They called him Boss. Nothing else. Only a title.
The memories hit in violent, strobe-light fractures.
A vase of white hydrangeas shattering on white marble. The metallic tang of copper in the air. The dead man’s eyes staring at the ceiling. A man with eyes like the void, his arm locking around my throat.
I gasp, my hand flying to my neck. I feel the phantom pressure of his arm, the terrifying strength of his body pinning me to the wall. He was so cold. So efficient. He didn’t kill me. He killed the man. Put two bullets in him without blinking.
But he took me.
“He’s going to kill me,” I whisper to the empty room. “He’s just waiting.”
Tears prick at my eyes, hot and stinging. I squeeze them shut, fighting the urge to crumble.
No. Don’t you dare cry.
Crying gets you nothing. Crying makes you weak. Tired women make mistakes. Hysterical women die.
I take a deep breath, forcing the air past the lump in my throat.
I am Iris Hale. I am the daughter of Judge William Hale. I have survived a lifetime of psychological warfare disguised as parenting. I’m not some helpless victim to be discarded in a stranger’s bedroom.
I need to assess my environment. Analyze what he missed. Find what I can use.
I walk to the bathroom. It’s en-suite, separated by a frosted glass door. Inside, it is all black marble and chrome. A rain shower large enough for two people. A deep soaking tub.
On the vanity, there are toiletries arranged with military precision. Aesop soap. Molton Brown shampoo. A new toothbrush, still in the wrapper.
I check the drawers. Empty.
No razor. No scissors. No heavy glass tumblers.
A shiver traces my spine. He removed anything sharp. Anything I could use to hurt myself. Or him.
I walk back into the main room and go to the windows.
The view stops my heart.
The ocean.
Endless, gray, churning ocean crashes against jagged black cliffs hundreds of feet below. White foam sprays high into the air, battering the rock. There is no beach. No coastline. Just a sheer drop into violent water.
I press my face against the glass, trying to look left and right. I see nothing but scrub brush clinging to the precipice. There is no city skyline. No familiar landmarks. Just the storm and a sky the color of a bruise.
My fingers skim the glass. It’s thick. Cold.
I tap it with my knuckle. Thud.
It doesn’t sound like windowpane glass. It’s solid. Dense.
Reinforced polycarbonate, my brain supplies. Bulletproof.
I look for a latch. A handle. A crank.
There is nothing.
The pane is a single, seamless sheet sealed into the steel frame. It doesn’t open. It isn’t a window; it’s a transparent wall.
I swallow a wave of panic and turn away from the window to run to the door. It’s solid oak.
I reach for the handle.
There isn’t one.
I stare at the smooth wood where the hardware should be. There is nothing but the grain of the timber. No knob. No lock. Just a flat, polished surface flush with the frame.
I press my palms against the wood and shove. It doesn’t budge. It’s as solid as the wall itself.
“Hello?” I scream. My voice cracks, scraping against my bruised throat. “Is anyone there?”
Silence.
I pound on the door with my fist. “Let me out! You can’t keep me here!”
My fist hits the wood with a dull thud that barely echoes. The room is soundproofed.
Of course it is.
A man who kills with a silencer wouldn’t build a prison that leaks noise.
I slide down the door until I hit the floor, pulling my knees to my chest. The reality of my situation begins to assemble itself, brick by terrifying brick.
I’m trapped in a fortress on a cliff, locked in a room with no exit, held by a man who murders people as casually as I arrange flowers.
Why am I alive?
The question gnaws at me. He killed the stranger instantly. I’m a witness—a liability. Why go through the trouble of kidnapping me? Why put me in a luxury suite instead of a dungeon?
Leverage.
He knows who I am. I told him my father was a Judge while I was begging in the back of the car. That must be why I’m still breathing. He is going to trade me. He wants money, or a reduced sentence, or a favor from the bench.
Except I didn’t tell him who my father was until we were already on the highway.
Why didn’t he put a bullet in my head right there on the marble? Why take me at all?
A new, colder terror slides into my veins.
He either thought I was someone else... or he already knew exactly who I was before I ever opened my mouth.
My father.
The thought is a lifeline. I grab onto it with desperate strength.
My father is the most powerful man in the judicial circuit. He has the ear of the Governor, the Mayor, and half the Senate. He can make the right phones ring.
If I’m missing, and I am missing, he will know.
I check my watch. Quarter past ten.
I left my apartment at 2:30 a.m. I’ve been gone for eight hours. The choke took me out at the museum. The needle in the garage took me out again. I have a vague, blurry memory of a sharp sting in my arm before the lights went out for good.
By now, the cleaning crew at the museum has found...
I pause. Found what?
I remember the men in black tactical gear. Team 6. I remember the foam that turned the blood pink. I remember the man putting the lilies in a trash bag.
There is no body. There is no blood. There are no broken shards of glass.
But my car. My car was in the alley. It’s a silver Audi. My father bought it for me. It has a built-in GPS tracker.
And my phone...
A surge of hope rushes through me. My phone.
Technology is my father’s greatest weapon.
He tracks everything. He has the “Find My” app on my phone linked to his security detail’s dashboard.
He insisted on it when I moved out. “Safety,” he called it.
“Surveillance,” I called it. “I need to know where you are, Iris, in case enemies of the court try to get to me through you.”
I hated it then. I resented the digital leash.
But right now, I don’t care what it is. It’s a beacon.
If my phone is active, his security team can see it. They will pull carrier pings, call in favors, and turn my disappearance into a manhunt.
I scramble to my feet, my hands flying to my pockets.
Empty.
I check my back pockets. Empty.
The pockets of my sweater.
Nothing.
I pat myself down, feeling my waistband, scanning the floor where I woke up.
Maybe it fell out onto the bed?
I tear the sheets off the mattress. I shake the pillows. I drop to my knees and look under the bed.
“Where is it?” I gasp, my breath coming in short, panicked bursts. “Where is it?”
Then, the memory hits me.
The car ride. The rain. The window lowering.
I see it vividly now, the memory cutting through the haze of the drugs.
I remember him holding my phone. The screen lighting up with a notification. He shoved the device through the gap in the glass.
I didn’t see it land or hear it smash, but I remember the window sealing shut.
You don’t exist anymore, he said.
My hands drop to my sides. I sink back onto the carpet, the strength draining from my legs.
Gone.
He destroyed it.
And if he destroyed the phone... he destroyed the car. He is a professional. He sanitized the room; he wouldn’t leave a silver Audi sitting in the alley with a GPS transponder in it.
A heavy, leaden dread settles into the marrow of my bones.
I’m not just kidnapped. I’m erased.
My father isn’t coming. Not because he doesn’t want to, but because he can’t find me. There is no trail. There is no evidence that I was ever at the museum. I simply vanished from my apartment in the middle of the night.
“He’ll find me,” I whisper, the words sounding hollow even to my own ears. “He has resources. He’ll burn this city down to find me.”
But will he?
A treacherous thought whispers in the back of my mind, snaking through my loyalty.
What if he thinks I ran away?
I’ve threatened it before, haven’t I? In moments of weakness, after a particularly harsh critique, I’ve muttered about moving to Europe. About disappearing. About escaping his suffocating control.
Just last week, after the rehearsal dinner incident, I told him, “Sometimes I wish I could walk away from all of this.”
He looked at me with that cold, dissecting stare and said, “You wouldn’t dare. You are nothing without this family.”
If the police find no sign of a struggle... if my apartment is empty and my car is gone... will he assume I finally snapped? Will he spin a story to the press?
Judge Hale’s unstable daughter runs away due to stress.
It would be easier for him. A runaway daughter is a tragedy, but it’s a personal one. A kidnapped daughter is a scandal. It implies weakness. It implies he couldn’t protect his own. And with the Supreme Court nomination hanging in the balance...
No. I shake my head violently. He loves me. In his own twisted way, he loves me. He won’t give up.
I walk back to the window, pressing my forehead against the cold reinforced glass. The ocean churns below, indifferent to my terror.
I am trapped in a gilded cage.
My eyes drift to the door again. The handle-less slab of wood.
I’m not a guest. I’m a captive.
I wrap my arms around myself, shivering.
Annoyance flares. There’s no time for pouting.
I need to think. I need a plan. I need a weapon.
I scan the room again, looking for anything I missed.
The crystal lamp on the bedside table.
I rush over to it, grab the base, and pull.
It doesn’t budge.
I pull harder, my fingernails scraping against the wood of the table. It’s bolted down. A steel rod runs through the center of the lamp, anchoring it to the nightstand.
A raw sound of frustration tears out of my throat. He thought of everything.
The chair legs? Heavy, solid wood, but I can’t break them off without tools. The cords on the blinds? No, they are motorized, encased in the wall.
He’s about six-foot-three and kills people without his pulse rising, my brain reminds me. You arrange flowers. You worry about symmetrical arches. You are not equipped for this.
“I don’t care,” I hiss through my teeth. The sound is fierce in the quiet room. “I am not dying here.”
I run into the bathroom and scan the vanity.
The soap.
It’s an expensive Aesop bottle—heavy in the hand, amber, but not glass. Thick polymer made to look like it, the kind you can’t shatter into a blade. It fits in my palm like a stone.
It’s laughable. A plastic bottle against a living weapon. It won’t stop him, but it’s solid enough to hurt.
I march back into the room and sit in the velvet armchair facing the door, the bottle clutched in my lap.
I will wait.
Eventually, the monster has to come back. Eventually, he has to open that door. He has to bring me food, or water, or demand his ransom.
And when he does, I won’t be the frozen girl in the museum. I won’t be the perfect daughter, terrified of a wilted petal.
I will be the storm he didn’t see coming.