CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE
As kidnaps went , Irinka Scott-Day thought hers was rather civilized.
The London weather was hideous, which was to say, typical for an April morning. Irinka had left her sweetheart of a house in Notting Hill in a rush that morning. Normally she liked to stop and admire the eclectic bright colors of the houses and doors along the Portobello Road where she lived—guaranteed to lift the spirits even in the midst of the worst of Britain’s gray doldrums—but not today. She was not a person who was easily frazzled, and would not describe herself that way even now, but she had been out entirely too late the night before.
On the job, naturally. Irinka had given up dating sometime during her university years—
Well.
She had never dated , exactly. And she knew precisely when and why she’d given it up after that summer that she would also not describe as dating —because what an insipid word that was and how little it applied to those hot, breathless months—but there was no point thinking about the epic mistakes of the past.
Forget the past and lose an eye, but dwell on the past and lose both eyes, as her mother liked to say, claiming it was a Russian proverb though, possibly, it was her own bloodthirstiness.
But Irinka did not want to think about her mother. She loved Roksana dearly, but her mother was not what anyone would call a soothing influence .
When Irinka dashed outside, doing a great impression of frazzled , she’d expected the typical sullen clouds and grim drizzle and had dressed accordingly. She was not prepared for the rain to be heaving it down, bucketing into the streets so that the tired old roads were almost immediately swamped.
It was the bloody great puddles that did it, in the end.
Because she rushed outside expecting to make her way to Notting Hill Gate to either hail a black cab—because she was supernaturally capable of summoning cabs at will, an unimaginable feat in the press and clamor of Central London, especially when it was pissing it down—or take her chances on the Tube. But it was so wet that she paused at the curb outside her own brightly painted door, debating whether or not she ought to go and change the exquisite leather boots she was wearing, produced by the finest Italian craftsmen in a little-known Milanese shop because she liked an artisan, for her proper wellies.
She didn’t notice the gleaming black SUV until it was right there in front of her. Maybe it had been there all along, idling and waiting for her to emerge. It was hard to tell in the downpour and in any case, what she was focused on was the fact she was soaked where she stood.
“You look like you need a ride, ma’am,” came a solicitous female voice, and the truth was that Irinka did need a ride.
All she saw was the black vehicle, and perhaps her need of it, and so she gratefully climbed inside, expecting it to be a minicab or an Uber or the like. It didn’t surprise her at all that one should simply appear because she needed it. It was her single magical trick, after all. She settled back, sighing a little at the inescapable fact that magic or no magic, she was sopping wet after standing outside all of ten seconds.
Then the SUV started moving. And the locks engaged, a soft but insistent click .
Her intuition kicked in, sending a little jolt down her spine.
There were no licenses on display on the console and as she looked for them, an interior window went up and created a barrier between her and the driver. She had the urge to try the door handle nearest her, but restrained herself.
Because if Irinka knew one thing in this life, it was that the appearance of unconcern and ease—or of sheer indifference, whatever worked—was often the only weapon required in most situations.
So she folded her hands, gazed serenely out the window, and made herself wait as the vehicle that was very obviously not a taxi of any kind made its way out of Central London and was soon enough on a motorway, heading away from the city.
That was worrisome.
This was when she decided that she was, in fact, being kidnapped.
Irinka considered pulling out her mobile and texting an SOS to her best friends, who also happened to be her business partners. But what could they do other than make calls that might or might not help when she had no identifying features of the vehicle to share and didn’t know where they were headed? Together, she and her friends ran His Girl Friday, an agency of requirement, as Irinka liked to call it. They catered toward unconventional solutions to certain problems for the very wealthy. A niche market, perhaps. Luckily enough, there was no shortage of wealthy people with entirely too much money on their hands, happy to outsource whenever possible.
Irinka and her friends had found an opportunity, gone after it, and made it theirs.
They had all gone to university together. Lynna cooked for tremendously wealthy people who liked to have gourmet meals on call. Auggie was the queen of PR, rescuing the reputations of those who probably didn’t deserve it, but could certainly afford it. Maude was something of a forest creature, which was helpful as she did groundskeeping on grand old estates and made the ancient gardens she found there nothing short of enchanted.
Irinka’s contribution was the one they never advertised. What she did was only whispered about in certain exalted circles. Word of mouth was the only way that a particular sort of wealthy man with a specific, thorny problem knew to reach out to her—or would consider doing so in the first place. Because otherwise, she simply looked like the typical bored heiress like so many of the girls she’d known her whole life, made up of pedigrees and impressive parentage, some fame and some notoriety. All of them kicking around the Big Smoke, marking time while they waited for the various trust funds and inheritances to kick in.
To the outside world, Irinka was merely the secretary of His Girl Friday, general dogsbody, and office manager. And she wasn’t half bad at those things—she considered herself a dab hand at a spreadsheet, as it happened—but the truth was that really, the office didn’t need much managing or secretarial support. The four of them did more work in their group chat than many of the billionaires Irinka had spent time with did in the course of their endless board meetings and tedious rolling phone calls.
The truth was, first, that she had no trust funds or incoming grand inheritances. She was not an heiress, not in the way that people assumed she was. She was, through no fault of her own, the infamous illegitimate daughter of an extremely high-in-the-instep duke, however. That was a fact. And it was true that he had settled something of a fortune upon her in the hopes that she would go away.
There are fortunes and then there are dukedoms, Roksana had said dismissively when the papers had all screeched to the world the settlement details she’d won for her daughter in court. Trust a duke to throw a few crumbs and pretend it’s a castle.
That was what happened when a stodgy old duke had an illicit affair with an extremely spiteful Russian supermodel—the mononymous Roksana, beloved in all fashion circles as much for her cutting remarks as for the vicious blades of her cheekbones—and then imagined that he could walk away from her and face no repercussions.
It had taken a great deal of tabloid attention and several court cases to not only prove Irinka’s paternity beyond any legal or biological doubt, but to force the Duke to provide for her in a comparable fashion to the way he provided for the children he’d had with his long-suffering blue-blooded wife. Irinka had thus learned early on that the best way to get men to do what she wanted was to smile prettily, threaten vaguely, and invoke her mother’s name whenever necessary.
She had been a fixture of the society pages since she was a teenager, sometimes because she sought attention and sometimes because she couldn’t escape it. That was when she’d learned that people—sometimes a whole lot of people—preferred the idea of her to the reality of her, at least according to the sneering press. Irinka had adjusted accordingly, and had become mysterious. This was useful when she was at the same absurd functions that her legitimate half siblings attended, where they could all bare their teeth at each other and try to outdo one another’s level of icy, vicious courtesy—and then Irinka would disappear.
It was one of Irinka’s favorite games, if she was honest. They were mean, she was mysterious, and this was how her reputation was built.
And it was important that she kept it up even now that she was older and supposedly wiser on this side of her university days, because it was important that most of the largely inbred European society viewed her with the same vague mix of distaste and weaponized pity that her half siblings did. Oh, sure, it was buried under jolly laughter and endless invitations to this party or that. But at the end of the day they would all whisper behind their hands that it was lucky Irinka was so pretty, because there was certain to be someone blue-blooded and broke—or cluelessly American—who would be more than happy to take her on.
Eventually.
But it would never make her anything but the discarded by-blow of a duke. In those circles, that was still a stain.
And the sort of pitiable, socially questionable creature Irinka was widely held to be by a certain strata of high society could be expected to do no better than to maintain a pointless secretarial job with her university mates, waiting for her pedigreed prince—or some nouveau riche Wall Street banker, the more likely bet—to arrive.
The reality was that Irinka had learned early in life that it was best to hide in plain sight. In fact, she’d become an expert at it.
And that was why some of the wealthiest men in the world hired her. They could count on her discretion, because she was excellent at disguises. Not only her appearance, but her voice, adopting any accent she pleased. She could change her mannerisms and even how she held her body, so that even people who knew her would not recognize her if she didn’t want them to.
She had become the most sought-after breakup artist in Europe.
Irinka was the one who appeared when a man needed to end a relationship and needed to make certain that there would be no attempts on the part of the woman that he was scraping off to chase after him, begging for second thoughts and third chances. She had played wounded wives and furious girlfriends, as well as slinky other women, too many times to count.
Sometimes she was the woman at the bar who the man in question couldn’t seem to look away from, infuriating his date into losing his number. Sometimes she walked into hotel rooms, “surprising” an intimate scene. Sometimes she arranged herself in a bed in the same hotel rooms, claiming to be the significant other who’d come as a surprise and who, pray, was the woman on her man’s arm?
Being so good at these performances of hers was a great way to drum up business.
What it was not, she reflected as the SUV drove on, taking her farther and farther away from London, was a decent way to make sure she had no enemies.
All the ways and whys a person might take against a woman who did the job she did clattered about in her head as she sat there, locked up tight in the back seat. She kept gazing out the window, looking as if, perhaps, she might have lapsed off into a spot of meditation. Or so she hoped.
But she was not entirely surprised to find that when the SUV turned off the motorway, it was to head toward a private airfield.
Truthfully, it was not completely unexpected that someone might wish to kidnap her. It did not beggar belief that she might have upset a person to this degree.
Irinka supposed that meant she lived a life of drama, the very sort Roksana had lived, still lived, and always warned her daughter to avoid. In dark and dramatic tones. But it was significantly less dramatic than her childhood, which had involved being chased by paparazzi and fielding abuse hurled at her on the streets by those who took umbrage against her mother’s tactics and temerity.
Really, a pleasant ride in the back of a lovely vehicle and the prospect of a plane ride was a bit of a holiday compared to all that.
But in an abundance of caution, she took her mobile and stuffed it into her boot, where it pressed against her shin and was not exactly comfortable—but was less likely to be confiscated straight off. Then she waited as serenely as possible as the SUV drove straight out onto the tarmac and pulled up next to a waiting jet.
The window went down between her and her driver and the woman looked back through the rearview mirror with a particular, assessing sort of look that told Irinka many things. Most importantly, that this woman worked for someone else. She had that look of smooth, hired muscle. There was that blankness around the eyes.
Not, in other words, the person she really had to worry about. Not the person engineering this. So there was really no point attempting to extricate herself, because a look at the woman made it clear that she would suppress all such efforts. And quickly.
“Are you going to walk onto that plane or am I going to have to carry you?” the woman asked.
A glance at her biceps made Irinka believed that she could do this. And without much difficulty.
“Are those my only options?” Irinka asked, languidly. “Because I was headed to the spa. This does seem like rather an interruption.”
The woman didn’t laugh. She didn’t really respond at all. She just continued to stare, dead-eyed, through the rearview mirror and it occurred to Irinka that perhaps she should be slightly more concerned than she was. That this was becoming less of a lark and more of a problem by the moment.
She wasn’t sure that hysterics would work, however, which was a pity. She was excellent at hysterics. She could turn them on and off, complete with tears, at will and often did. “May I ask where I’m going?” she asked brightly. “I do hope it’s a holiday. It’s exhausting to be kidnapped. I’m afraid I’m going to need quite a bit of recovery.”
“My employer will explain everything to you when you arrive in Italy,” the woman told her.
“Amo l’Italia!” Irinka cried. Theatrically. “How I long to gaze upon the waters of Lake Como. Or wander the ruins of so many centuries of civilization in the Eternal City, la bella Roma . Or immerse myself in the grandeur of Firenze’s art and culture—”
“You are going to Venice,” the driver said curtly.
Venice.
Irinka felt the usual deep lurch inside of her that she always did when she heard the name of that city, but she shoved it aside. She inclined her head in acquiescence and the woman got out of the vehicle, then opened her door. Irinka climbed out, not sure if she was happy or offended that the rain had settled down to a faint mist. Sheets of rain might have helped now. At least, where her mood was concerned.
As she stood there, contemplating the vagaries of the weather, the woman held out her hand. It was not an encouraging sort of gesture. Not from this tall, muscled woman who looked like she ate CrossFit gyms for breakfast.
“Your bag, please,” the woman said.
“A girl doesn’t simply hand over her purse to any passing ruffian.” Irinka laughed as if this was a cocktail party, not a kidnapping. “Have you done this before? I think if you had, you would know that.”
She stared back, impassive. “Your bag, please.”
“Are you going to hurt me?” she asked.
The woman frowned, but only slightly. “My orders are to deliver you safely to your final destination. But I will do what is necessary to achieve my objectives.”
“Noted.” Irinka handed over her bag. And was immediately glad that she’d moved her mobile when she rifled through it, then handed it back.
“Empty your pockets,” the woman said.
Irinka made a show of producing her empty coat pockets for review, but shrunk back when she moved too close. “This is a Burberry,” she said with a bit of a shriek, as if the other woman’s proximity was an assault. “It is to be gently handled with respect and reverence .”
At that, the woman actually sighed in exasperation and Irinka felt a bit of relief wash right through her.
Because exasperation was a human reaction. An assassin wouldn’t crack, but someone’s security detail might. Only a little, sure. But it made Irinka significantly more convinced that violence wasn’t the objective here.
Before the woman could ask, she unzipped her coat and patted each of her pockets on the skinny jeans she wore tucked into her poor, sodden boots.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for, but I am not packing explosives on my person. Isn’t that what airport security is worried about?”
“Let’s go,” muttered her captor, and then Irinka was being escorted up the steps and onto the waiting jet.
Once inside, she took a look around, noting all the details and flourishes that indicated that this was a high-end jet. And not the sort that was normally rented out. There were personal touches here. She had flown all over the world on private jets, for work and pleasure. She could tell the difference.
The moment she boarded, she shared a bright, fake smile with a waiting flight attendant, and asked for the bathroom. Once inside, she pulled out her mobile and typed a quick text to her friends.
Looks like I’m going on a bit of an unexpected holiday, she told them. If you don’t hear from me in three days, initiate the emergency protocol.
I’m sorry, “the emergency protocol?” Auggie replied almost at once. That’s all you’re going to say? No details? You must be joking.
There is a bit of a time crunch, Irinka typed back. Just track my mobile. You know you do anyway.
I thought you said that no one would dare do anything to you any longer, Lynna responded. That your reputation precedes you and even the billionaire class is helpless before your power, or something.
This might be a case of my reputation preceding me, now that you mention it, Irinka replied. I don’t feel that I’m in danger. Not yet.
Thank you, replied Maude. That’s not at all concerning.
But Irinka didn’t dare take any more time in the bathroom. She didn’t want to invite anyone to come crashing back in. She slid her mobile back into her boot, wiggling her leg so that it went down and rested snugly against one calf. She eyed the boot critically, now that she wasn’t being observed. The leather was supple but had its own structural integrity, so the fact that she’d chucked something down there wasn’t obvious.
You must spoil before you spin, Roksana always muttered. Practice might not make perfect here, but it was working.
Irinka flushed so that her captors would hear it, then washed her hands and checked her appearance automatically. That was what her mother had always taught her to do.
Beauty is a commodity, Roksana had always told her, with the intensity she reserved for life lessons. That makes it a weapon. And you must always make certain your blade is sharp.
Irinka smoothed her hair slightly and fixed what she could of her face with only a bit of water in the mirror.
Then she sailed back out to find the flight attendant waiting for her, beckoning her to a seat. Of course, they took her coat, politely. And, of course, she saw Ms. Thug herself sitting opposite her seat, and tracked the way she swept her gaze all over Irinka now that there was no coat to block the view.
Irinka was braced for the woman to call out the mobile in her boot, but she didn’t. So Irinka sat down in the seat they’d designated, buckled herself in, and smiled widely as the plane began to taxi.
“This is very exciting,” she said. “I do love surprises. Will there be snacks?”
Once again, she saw exasperation move all over the woman’s face, mixed with the slightest bit of something almost dazed. As if she couldn’t believe that Irinka was reacting this way and didn’t quite know what to do about it.
Excellent, Irinka thought.
Because she’d made quite a study of reading people in her lifetime. Initially because it was necessary. There were her mother’s many lovers, a fact of life Irinka supposed she’d gotten used to before she’d even entered the world. Since Roksana had married pretty quickly after her relationship with the Duke deteriorated, to great tabloid furor. Whether her temporary husband had at any point believed that the baby Roksana carried was his was unknown. Either way, Roksana had wasted no time divorcing him after Irinka was born.
Roksana had bestowed the Duke’s surname upon their daughter as a shot across the bow. A warning and a proclamation, despite his rages. And Irinka had kept the name all this time, long after Roksana had decided that the Duke—having paid up—was beneath her notice, out of spite.
Later she’d learned how to read the Duke himself, her ever-indignant biological father, on the few-and-far-between occasions she’d met with him, providing him a receptacle for his enduring outrage that his actions had indeed had consequences. She could read her unfriendly siblings, two half brothers and one half sister, from across ballrooms and knew without ever having to discuss it that they were all filled with umbrage over the fact that Irinka got all the attention.
Later, this ability of hers had become the foundation of her job.
Because, of course, there were her clients. She could read them easily. The bulk of them were repeat customers because they much preferred it when she handled the unpleasantness of the end of their love affairs. So she knew things about them that perhaps only their ex-lovers did.
It was almost intimate.
A lot like being kidnapped, it turned out. Irinka felt confident now that Ms. Thug wasn’t going to hurt her. Or really do anything but deliver her, like a parcel.
That was comforting enough as long as Irinka stayed in the moment and didn’t think too much about the future.
The plane took off. Snacks were, in fact, provided.
And as the plane rose into the air, leaving the thick, dark clouds of England behind, she tried to think of who she knew in Venice.
It was difficult, as the sort of men she worked for had properties everywhere. Any one of them could have a property in Venice. Many of them were unaware of how many properties they actually had, as that was the province of the money people they employed, who talked endlessly about portfolios and were absentee landlords.
Irinka began to wonder how much of her bravado was actually shock as it began to wear off.
The truth was, civil or not, she’d been flown off to God knows where and although no one had hurt her, she thought it had been very clear that if necessary, the blank-eyed woman across from her would have manhandled her onto this plane.
Woman-handled, she corrected herself.
And it was a lot like how she operated in the world, now that she thought about it. The threat was always implied. It didn’t have to be explicit.
It turned out it was far more unpleasant than she realized. She would have to make a mental note.
Then again, maybe the threat was Venice. Maybe that was the only threat that worked.
Soon enough the plane began its descent. Once they landed into the blues and deep greens of Italy, Irinka was gently encouraged to get into yet another car. This one drove her to a dock, where it was suggested that she get into a boat.
By this point, the only languid thing about her was the smile she kept on her face the whole time, because she knew that people who wanted her intimidated found it irritating. She’d been told so often enough.
She made herself sit bonelessly. She fairly lounged on her seat in the little jet boat as it chugged along, took a turn, and then there they were. On the Grand Canal in Venice, the city of mystery.
And memory.
Irinka had only been here once before. That summer directly after university when she had discovered, once and for all, that recklessness and heedlessness—and being seen and known —were not for her.
She was not nostalgic. She refused to let those memories pull at her. But she felt tendrils all the same—whispers in the dark that she’d thought she’d extinguished. Scraps of touch, of heat—
Nothing that needed to be dug up again, she told herself briskly. No one liked the dead coming back to life.
And so she was already feeling something like bittersweet, and something a good deal darker than nostalgia, when the boat began to slow. She looked up and it took considerable effort to school her expression.
Because she knew the house they were approaching. Not that it was a house .
It was one of Venice’s oldest palazzos, set back from the Grand Canal with a garden in between, thanks to a fire in some bygone century that had turned its fifteenth-century facade to ash. What remained was a lovely old house that managed to convey the same air of genteel exhaustion as the rest of the city, having long since been repaired and renovated.
Her heart picked up in her chest. She could feel the effect of this place, everywhere, and the thudding of the blood in her veins made it remarkably difficult to smile serenely at her captors as they docked the boat and then waited for her to climb out.
But she did it.
No matter what dead things were rising here, most notably inside her.
And she could pretend that she’d heard dire things about the brackish water in Venetian canals. She could pretend that she was worried about all the other boats and how easy it would be to be swept up and run down while splashing around out there.
But that wasn’t why she didn’t turn and run, then swim for it.
It was the same thing it had always been. That deep and unfortunate pull that dragged her here whether she wanted to come or not.
That madness she had only ever experienced once before.
She told herself that this time it was nothing but curiosity.
It was warmer in Venice. Brighter, though still the skies were a touch moody. She followed where she was led—because she had to know, now—marching up the central pathway that led to the grand front entrance of the palazzo.
With every step, it wasn’t just her heart that reacted but every other part of her. She could feel a tightness in her throat as if there were still words unsaid when she knew better. She could feel her chest constrict as if she would finally let herself sob, but she refused.
She still refused.
And then it all seemed to be happening too quickly. She was marched inside, into dim, grand rooms. She was ushered through the palazzo’s high-ceilinged, exquisitely wrought spaces that flowed one into another, up the stairs from the water line, and then into what she knew too well was the main living area on the second floor.
She was delivered inside, the door was closed behind her, and then…
There he was.
He stood out on one of the balconies, a study in male elegance. He did not turn to look at her, but Irinka had no doubt whatsoever that he knew she was there.
She supposed that he was probably drawing out the tension of this moment, but she was grateful for it.
Because she had never intended to lay eyes on him again. And she wasn’t prepared now.
He was looking out toward the canal and she understood with a sort of winnowing sensation inside her that he’d watched her approach.
Irinka tried to make sense of what was happening instead of simply reacting to it. Why, years later, would he go to the trouble of having her picked up off the London street and transported across Europe? Why now? What could he want?
But she refused to ask.
And her brain refused to cooperate, anyway. All it wanted to do was dig up old graves and let the ghosts dance free.
He took his time straightening. And, for a moment, she was staring at the long, finely molded line of his back. His shoulders were wide, his waist narrow. Everything he wore was exquisite, tailored specifically to his body and his preferences. And so while all he appeared to be wearing was a shirt and trousers, the effect was mouthwatering.
It turned out she was still susceptible to him. This was not information she’d wanted to learn.
Even with his back to her, everything about him was ferociously masculine and astonishingly sophisticated. She had seen so many men who should have been like him in the years since. All of these wealthy, powerful men, who were somehow incapable of sorting out their own relationships.
It only occurred to her now that perhaps her excellence in her profession had been her way of trying to convince herself that he was just like all of them.
But he wasn’t.
He turned, then, and it was as if he’d thrown open windows in a dark room and let the morning light in.
Because there was no one like this man.
There never had been. They never would be.
His back was poetry rendered in finely muscled male flesh. She knew that already. But looking at him, face-to-face after all this time, she found herself unprepared for the impact of him. Memory had dulled the sheer brutal thrust of his beauty.
Or perhaps time had honed it.
If Irinka’s beauty was a weapon she’d been taught to wield, his was something else entirely. Looking at him was like stepping into an ancient cathedral, like the very famous one not far from his palazzo. It was an experience of soaring, everything drawn up into the force of him by something outside human comprehension.
His hair was dark and close-cropped. His eyes looked black. He was sculpted to perfection, formed by generations of beautiful Venetian men, tall and dark-haired and with flashing eyes, and the stunning women they had married as if it was no more than their due.
She had studied all of them in the portraits that hung on the walls in this place, sitting cheek by jowl with Picassos, Caravaggios, and Titians.
Irinka told herself that she was deliberately standing still, her head up and her eyes on him. But the truth was that she felt frozen into place.
She felt his eyes all over her the way his hands had been, once. The way his mouth had followed, teaching her complicated lessons about immolation.
And she didn’t know why he had brought her here. But that hardly mattered. Because she wasn’t the girl she’d been that summer. She never had been before, and never had been since. That was the important thing.
So she smiled her patented languid smile, the one she hadn’t perfected yet when she’d been here last. And she tilted her head to the side as she regarded him, as if he was the captured animal in the zoo here, not her.
“Hello, Zago,” she said, and she hadn’t said his name in so long that she could taste it on her tongue, rich and decadent. “What an extraordinary invitation. I’ve never received one quite like it. Your standards must be slipping.”
But Zago Baldissera only smiled, sending a dark shiver down the length of her spine.
“It was not an invitation,” he replied, in that voice that she understood, now, had haunted her all these years. In her dreams, just out of reach. “That time is long past. What you are here for is a reckoning.”