27. Lena
LENA
The chemical taste came first. Bitter and sharp at the back of my throat, coating my tongue like poison. My head throbbed with a relentless ache that pulsed behind my eyes, and when I tried to lift my hand to press against my temples, I discovered I could not move my arms.
I was bound. My wrists were secured behind me, tied to the hard back of a wooden chair.
The zip ties bit into my skin when I tested them, plastic edges cutting into flesh already raw from struggling.
Cold seeped through my blouse from the hard wooden back of the chair, and my shoulders screamed from the unnatural angle of my arms.
I forced my eyes to focus through the haze.
A small living room materialized in fragments.
Floral wallpaper in faded pink and cream, the pattern so dated it belonged to another decade.
Doilies on every surface, yellowed with age and neglect.
Religious imagery covered the walls. A crucifix above the doorway, saint candles on the mantle with wax pooled at their bases, a framed picture of the Virgin Mary watching me with sorrowful eyes.
The air smelled like dust and old perfume, something floral and cheap that had seeped into the walls over years, and underneath that, the particular staleness of a house where no one had lived for months. Cold and empty and waiting.
Through the mark on my shoulder, I reached for Raphael.
Silence answered me. Not the complete absence of the bond, but the connection felt muted and distant, like hearing music through water.
The drugs were still clearing my system, clouding the awareness I had come to depend on.
I could feel him there, somewhere at the edges of my consciousness, but I could not grasp him clearly.
The bite throbbed against my shoulder, warm even in this cold house, a reminder that I was not alone even when the isolation pressed in.
Where am I?
The question floated through my aching head as I tried to piece together what had happened. The basement. The service stairwell. Michael’s face, wrong somehow, the professional mask slipping to reveal the stranger underneath. His voice, saying words that did not make sense.
We have the same father.
The memory hit like ice water. Michael pressing the chloroform-soaked cloth to my face.
The chemical burn in my lungs as I fought to hold my breath.
Raphael’s terror flooding through our connection before everything went dark.
His wolf howling through our connection, frantic and furious and too far away to save me.
I had passed out with his fear echoing in my skull.
A door opened somewhere behind me. The hinges creaked, and cold air rushed in from whatever room lay beyond.
I heard footsteps crossing hardwood, measured and unhurried.
The unhurried pace of someone who knew they had all the time in the world.
Then Michael appeared in my peripheral vision, moving around to face me.
He carried a glass of water in one hand, a bottle of aspirin in the other.
Still playing caretaker. Still pretending this was normal.
Still wearing that helpful expression I had trusted for years.
But his face was different.
The friendly general manager I had trusted was gone.
In his place was a stranger with hungry eyes and a jaw clenched too tight, like he was barely containing an emotion too large for his body.
The boyish charm had decayed into something feverish.
The professional smile had twisted into an expression I did not recognize and never wanted to see again.
His collar was askew, his usually neat hair disheveled, and there was a wildness in his eyes that made my stomach clench with fear.
“You’re awake.” He crouched in front of me, setting the water and aspirin on the floor between us.
Too close. His cologne, that familiar scent I had stopped noticing years ago, now made my stomach turn.
It smelled like lies. Like every moment he had stood beside me, pretending to be my ally while plotting my destruction. “How’s your head?”
“Where are we?”
“Somewhere safe.” He reached toward my face, and I flinched back as far as the chair would allow. His hand paused mid-air, hurt flickering across his features like I had wounded him. “I’m not going to hurt you, Lena. I would never hurt you. You know that.”
I don’t know anything anymore.
The words caught in my throat. I swallowed against the chemical taste and tried to think clearly through the fog still clouding my thoughts.
The house. The religious imagery. A woman’s touches everywhere, the doilies, the saint candles, the cheap perfume saturating the walls.
But no woman present. Photographs lined the mantle beside the candles, and from this angle I could see them properly now.
A dark-haired woman with kind eyes and a tired smile.
A young boy with Michael’s face, gap-toothed and innocent.
And in one frame, half-hidden behind a candle like someone had tried to make it less visible, a man I recognized.
It was my father.
Richard Hughes stood in the photograph, younger than I remembered him, his arm around the dark-haired woman. Smiling at the camera like a man with no secrets. Like a man who had not built his entire life on lies.
“My mother’s house.” Michael followed my gaze to the photographs.
His voice softened with a grief I almost believed was genuine.
“Maria Santos. She worked at the hotel when I was a child. Housekeeping.” He picked up one of the frames, studying it with an expression caught between love and bitterness.
His thumb traced the edge of the glass, reverent and angry at once.
“She died three years ago. Cancer. Richard didn’t even come to the funeral.
Didn’t send flowers. Didn’t acknowledge that she had ever existed, or that I had ever been born. ”
The bond stirred. Faint warmth bloomed in my chest, like a hearth fire struggling to catch after a long cold night. Raphael was there. Distant, but reaching for me through whatever haze the drugs had created between us. I could feel him straining against the muted connection, trying to find me.
I held onto that warmth and forced myself to focus on Michael.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to understand.” He set the photograph down with exaggerated care, positioning it precisely where it had been. “I want you to know the truth. The truth our father never told you.” His voice sharpened on the word. “He never told you about me, did he?”
Our father. The words landed like stones dropped into still water.
They should have been impossible. Should have been the ravings of a madman, a frantic lie to justify kidnapping me.
But I was looking at that photograph, at Richard’s arm around Maria Santos, at the way he smiled at her like she was the center of his world, and I remembered Maya’s revelations about the affairs.
The secrets my father had kept hidden in the shadows of his respectable life.
The hotel had been his hunting ground, and I had been too blind to see it.
“Tell me.” My voice came out steadier than the fear churning inside me.
Survival instinct taking over, the same instinct that had carried me through the contract with Raphael, through my father’s death, through every crisis of the past year.
Keep him talking. Buy time. Figure out how to escape. “Tell me everything.”
Michael’s expression shifted. Hopeful now, almost eager, like a child finally being asked about his favorite subject.
He pulled a chair closer and sat facing me, close enough that our knees almost touched.
Close enough that I could smell the sweat underneath his cologne, the sour stench of panic and sleepless nights.
“Richard Hughes and Maria Santos. They met in 1999. She was cleaning his suite after some corporate event, and he noticed her.” His voice took on a practiced quality, like he had rehearsed this story a thousand times in his head, waiting for someone to finally listen.
“She was beautiful. Young. Impressed by his wealth and his charm and his promises. He told her he was unhappy in his marriage. That his wife was cold, distant, too focused on her charity work and her social obligations. That Maria made him feel alive again.”
I said nothing. My father had been a lot of things, but I had never thought him capable of this particular cruelty. Of seducing a room cleaner with promises he never intended to keep. Of creating a child and then pretending that child did not exist.
“She got pregnant in 2000. Me.” Michael touched his own chest like he was confirming his existence, like he needed the physical proof that he was real.
“She told him, expecting him to leave his wife. To choose her. To acknowledge their child. To give me his name.” His jaw tightened until I could see the muscles jumping beneath his skin.
“He paid her off instead. Fifty thousand dollars to go away and never contact him again. Fifty thousand dollars for his own son. She took it because she had no other options. Single mother, no family support, working a job that barely covered rent in a city that didn’t care whether she lived or died. What choice did she have?”
Through the bond, Raphael’s presence grew stronger. I could feel his fury now, a distant storm building on the horizon, thunder rumbling across miles. He knew I was in danger. He knew I was afraid. And he was coming.
I just had to survive until he arrived.