Chapter Seven
Teresa
I stand at the edge of the water a few seconds longer, letting the warm waves slide around my feet and pull back again.
The ocean is still wrong.
Beautiful, yes. Clear and blue and soft in a way that would make me want to stand here and stare at it for hours under any other circumstance.
But wrong. Wrong water, wrong air, wrong heat, wrong horizon. Wrong life. Everything about it keeps pressing that truth deeper under my skin.
I should do something.
That thought feels stupidly obvious, but for the last several minutes, all I’ve really done is stand here trying to force my mind around the idea of what has happened.
I am not in New Jersey. I am not even on the mainland, I don’t think. I woke up in a beautiful room in a beautiful house on what I am now almost certain is an island, with clothes that are mine and clearly not mine—but intended for me?—filling the drawers and closet.
And no one has stopped me.
No one has spoken to me.
No one has even shown themselves.
That, somehow, is starting to feel stranger than the fear.
I look back toward the house again. It rises from the edge of the sand in all those warm tropical tones—stone and glass and green. It should look welcoming. It should look like a place people come to relax. Instead, it feels like a puzzle I’ve become a part of.
I guess I should go back into the house.
The thought comes with a quiet surprise, because a little while ago I wanted nothing more than to get as far from it as possible.
But curiosity has started to push its way up through the fear.
Not replacing it. Not even close. The fear is still there, sitting sharp and cold beneath everything else.
But now I want answers more than I want distance.
What is going on?
Who brought me here?
Why this place?
I turn toward the house and start walking back across the sand.
The evening air is warm on my exposed skin, which I’m thankful for.
My dress shifts around my legs in the breeze, the hem brushing my thighs as I move.
My feet sink lightly into the sand with each step, and I keep looking around as I walk, scanning automatically even though there is still no one in sight.
I step onto the deck and turn to look around again, utterly confused.
I’m about to turn around and walk into the house when a man steps off a side path directly in front of me.
The fear comes back so fast it nearly strangles me.
Everything in me seizes at once.
For half a second, I think I might actually stop breathing. My body goes cold and hot at the same time, every nerve suddenly alive with a kind of terror that feels cleaner and sharper than anything I’ve felt since waking up. Because now the facelessness is gone. The confusion has a body. A face.
Vito Conti’s face.
The sight of him drags memory up in a brutal rush—my bedroom, the brutal force from behind, the total helplessness of it.
One second, I was armed and alert and moving through my own house, and the next I was nothing but panic and useless limbs and blackness closing over everything. All those years of self-defense. All that training. My weapon in my hand. And he had taken me out quickly.
So damn quickly.
That part hits me the worst.
It makes him more dangerous than I ever realized.
Not just dangerous. Skilled.
The distinction matters.
I know dangerous men. I have spent my career around them. Rage is common. Violence is common. Reputation is common.
But skill is something else. Precision is something else. Skill means planning. It means experience. It means a person who doesn’t just lash out blindly, but knows exactly what he’s doing while he’s doing it.
And I’ve figured something else out since waking up as well.
Whatever he put over my mouth in my bedroom could not possibly have kept me out long enough to get me here. Not to a tropical island. Not unless this island somehow exists an hour outside Atlantic City, which it obviously does not.
So he must have drugged me, too. It would explain the slight itch on my inner elbow. More than once, maybe. Who knows how long I’ve been out? Who knows what he may have done to me while I was out?
That thought is so ugly it makes my stomach twist hard.
I back up instinctively, fast enough that I hit the edge of the patio table behind me.
The contact jolts through me. My hands fly out blindly and close around the first thing I can grab.
I yank it up and swing it between us before I even register what it is.
A pillar candle.
I am standing there on the deck in a black dress with a broken strap, barefoot, holding a long pillar candle out in front of me like it’s a knife.
And in the kitchen I was in a little while ago are actual knives. Why didn’t I grab one when I had the chance?
Vito stops where he is.
His eyes drop to the candle in my hand, then lift back to my face.
And I can see the amusement in them.
It makes something furious flash through me, hot enough to briefly cut through the fear.
“You might want to set that down before you hurt yourself,” he says.
His voice is even. Calm. Almost dry.
As if this is absurd.
As if I’m absurd.
Of course, I’m absurd. He disarmed me in mere seconds while I was carrying a gun. What the hell is a candle going to do?
He takes a step closer.
I tighten my grip immediately, both hands on the candle now, holding it harder even though I know this is ridiculous. It’s wax. Decorative wax. Not a weapon. Not really. But it’s what I have, and I am ready to use it and my self-defense if I need to.
He takes another step toward me, and I raise it.
But all he does is step around me.
No sudden move. No grab. No threat. He passes close enough that I catch the clean masculine scent of him and the heat of his body in the warm evening air, and then he walks through the open doors and back into the house, leaving me out on the deck still holding the candle in the air.
I stay frozen there for a second, breathing hard.
Then another.
Feeling stupid and even more confused than before.
What the hell is this?
If he wanted to hurt me, wouldn’t he have done it already? If he wanted to overpower me again, he clearly could.
None of it makes sense.
And that somehow keeps making it worse.
Very cautiously, I follow him into the house.
Still holding the candle.
Maybe it is not a good weapon, but it’s better than nothing.
I move through the living room and into the kitchen, my bare feet silent on the stone floor, my heart still banging hard against my ribs.
The kitchen is washed now in the warm glow of interior lights and a faint blue-gold glow from the garden outside the windows. For one disorienting second, it looks almost normal. Domestic. Beautiful kitchen in a beautiful house, late evening, a man standing at the refrigerator.
Then reality snaps back into place.
The man is Vito Conti.
And I am here against my will.
He has the fridge open and is searching through it like this is totally normal, like I didn’t just wake up in this place after being taken from my own home. He pulls something out—a casserole dish covered in foil—then turns toward the oven, which he must’ve turned on before I walked in.
He opens it and slides the dish inside.
This situation is getting weirder and weirder, and I’m not quite sure if I should be scared or not.
Well, of course I should be scared.
Vito Conti kidnapped me, drugged me, and brought me to an island.
So yes. Fear is the correct response.
But fear has never prepared me for this kind of wrongness. Not this polished, surreal domestic version of it, where the man who abducted me is now apparently heating up dinner.
He closes the oven and glances at me.
At the candle.
Then back at me.
“Hungry?” he asks.
The question is so ordinary, so bizarrely calm, that for one stupid second I nearly answer it honestly.
Because yes.
Oddly enough, I am.
My stomach feels hollow and sour at the same time, and I have no idea how long it has been since I actually ate anything
Dinner with Nina and Camille seems both recent and impossibly far away. But the fact that I’m hungry does not matter. The fact that he’s asking as if this is normal matters even less.
I clutch the candle tighter and demand, “What’s going on?”
He doesn’t answer, just turns to the fridge and digs through it again.
“What am I doing here?” I ask, louder.
He pulls out a wooden bowl with something green in it and a small glass bowl.
“Let me go,” I demand.
He ignores all of it.
Completely.
Instead, he says, “You like lasagna, right? Just has to warm up.” He sets the two bowls on the counter. “Should I put the dressing on the salad or leave it on the side?”
For a second, I can only stare at him.
Then my skin goes cold.
His eyes roam over me as he says it.
Not in a rushed or overtly filthy way. That almost makes it worse.
It’s slow. Deliberate. From my face down the length of me and back again, taking in the dress still clinging to my body, the broken strap that leaves a piece of fabric hanging uselessly, my dirty bare feet, my hair wild from sleep and wind and fear.
I cross my arms over my chest immediately, the candle awkwardly trapped in one hand now as I do it.
A fresh wave of dread rolls through me.
Is that what I’m here for?
Is he going to—
“Aren’t you uncomfortable in that?” he asks. “You have clothes in the room. Do you want to shower first?”
My cheeks heat instantly.
Mortifyingly.
Because, yes, I do need a shower. I woke up drugged and disoriented, in the same dress for who knows how long, walked barefoot through a strange house, and onto a beach.
My hair probably looks wrecked. My makeup—if there’s any left at all—must be a disaster by now.
But hey, I’m the one who’s been kidnapped.
So embarrassment should not be the dominant feeling here, and yet somehow he has managed to drag it out of me anyway.
Out loud, I say again, “What am I doing here?”
My voice sounds stronger that time. Sharper.
He looks at me from across the kitchen and drums his fingers lightly against the counter.
He says, “I was going to let you get settled in first. Change, eat. But if you want to dive right in, we can.”
I stare at him.
More confused than ever.
“Dive right into what?”
He doesn’t answer quickly enough, and something in me snaps.
“Why am I here?” I yell, my voice breaking.
My voice bounces off the high ceilings, and suddenly the whole gorgeous kitchen feels too bright, too open, too unreal.
I’m standing here with a pillar candle as my only weapon, demanding answers from a mafia heir on a tropical island while he warms up lasagna in the oven and prepares a mixed greens salad.
This cannot possibly be real.
And yet it is.
He looks at me.
All trace of amusement is gone.
When he answers, his voice is completely serious.
“You’re here to fix me.”