Sloane's POV

Was he one of my father's men?

I studied him more closely - a handsome, unfamiliar face. His suit, soaked as it was, was clearly expensive, tailored. The watch on his wrist was a limited edition.

I knew my father. He never spent that kind of money on anyone who worked for him.

"Who are you?" I gritted out, and the moment his attention flickered, I struck - the scalpel aimed at the side of his throat.

I wasn't trying to kill him. Just to buy myself a window to run.

Everything blurred. His hand closed around my wrist before I even saw it move. I drove a knee toward his ribs; he caught it against his thigh and shoved it back, and my knee buckled under the force, nearly folding.

Every technique I'd ever prided myself on meant nothing against him.

He held my wrist and, almost lazily, guided the blade closer to his own throat - close enough to graze his collar.

"You-" My eyes went wide.

"Not really a girl's toy," he said, twisting my wrist until the scalpel clattered to the floor, "especially not in front of me."

"Who the hell are you?" I demanded, and in the next breath my arm was wrenched behind my back and I was pinned face-down over the desk, the edge biting into my hip hard enough to knock a groan out of me.

He leaned down, his body large over mine, his breath hot against my ear, and gooseflesh rose along my neck. I braced my forearms and tried to push up; he pressed me flat again. This time harder - my shoulder slammed into a file folder, and I gasped.

"Care to try a different move?" he murmured, looking down at me like I was some minor entertainment. "Let's see what the Morettis actually taught you."

Inwardly, I scoffed. This wasn't one of my father's men. My father would have killed me outright - he wouldn't have the patience for this cat-and-mouse routine.

"Killian O'Connor." He spared me the trouble of guessing. "Perhaps you've heard the name."

Cold sweat beaded on my forehead. Of course I'd heard it. Heir to the O'Connor family. Five years ago, his sister had died at my father's hands, and from that day on, the blood feud between our families had been carved in stone - nothing left to bridge it.

"I'm not a Moretti anymore. Let go of me." I struggled against the desk. "Taking me does nothing to them."

"Sure it doesn't," Killian said with a cold laugh. "Though that old bastard would probably rather carve you up himself - considering five years ago, thanks to you, he spent a week in the hospital before he crawled back from the edge of dead."

"Then why me?" I was still struggling.

The weight on my back pressed down harder, his patience visibly thinning. "Keep moving, and I can't promise they'll keep smiling like this."

A Polaroid dropped in front of my face.

I looked down, and my mind went white with static.

My mother, at the stove. Mia beside her, grinning ear to ear. The photograph had gone soft and wrinkled from the rain, the edges blurred - but I recognized the apartment instantly. Ours.

I stopped fighting.

He could have pressed that scalpel to my throat right then, and I wouldn't have dared resist.

...

The blindfold was torn off without ceremony. The light was blinding.

I raised a hand against the glare, and it took a few seconds before the room came into focus. Small. Bulletproof glass sealed every wall, reflecting nothing back at me but my own blurred outline - no trace of what lay beyond.

Killian had changed out of his soaked suit and now sat across from me on the sofa, a glass of whiskey turning slowly in his hand. His shirtsleeves were rolled up carelessly, veins standing out along his forearm.

I glanced down at the iron shackles around my ankles. Pointless, really. Even without them, there was nowhere for me to run.

He took a sip. "Welcome," he said, "to being my guest."

I bit my lip and said nothing, my mind racing through everything I knew about this man.

Five years ago, my father had dismissed him as some "reckless kid," even as he'd already begun gnawing away at Moretti territory. Three years ago, at twenty-four, he'd made his name in a single night - dropping his own traitor uncle, along with a few hundred of the man's men, straight into the ocean. After that, no one inside the O'Connor family dared to challenge him again. Seven ports along the southeast coast, and every ounce of the black-market trade that ran through them, belonged to him alone.

Four of those seven ports had once flown Moretti colors.

The one thing he never touched was drugs. Any man under him caught so much as sampling it lost a hand, or a foot. In this world, that rule made him something close to an anomaly. Rumor had it, it had something to do with his dead sister.

I understood the blood feud between him and my family - his sister had died by my father's hand. But if he wanted vengeance, my father was the one to bleed for it. Why me? I was the daughter who'd fled the family. My own father would be thrilled to hear I'd died out here.

"You're useful to me," he said, as if he'd read the question straight off my face.

"Useful how?"

"I don't like wasting time," he said, tapping a finger against the rim of his glass. "The Morettis have connections buried in the government, in every other family in this business. I imagine you know quite a few names."

I drew a slow breath, forcing myself to think past the fear. He wasn't wrong. Those names - I'd grown up hearing them, knew them better than I knew my own.

"Give me the list." He raised his glass toward me, almost a toast. "You managed to disappear from your father's manhunt for five years. You clearly know what serves you best."

I thought of a headline from last month's Financial Times - federal regulators freezing three of O'Connor's offshore accounts, launching a full audit. That kind of investigation could drag on for as long as the government wanted it to, and it was more than enough to choke his cash flow dry.

I'd suspected it the moment I read it: my father's fingerprints, all over it. He couldn't take back his territory, so he'd make sure his enemy couldn't enjoy the spoils either.

"You understand now, why I came for you."

His gaze slid from my face down to the shackles at my ankles.

"And frankly, I'm curious. If Carmine found out the daughter he beat half to death five years ago wasn't just alive, but had sold out every card he was holding to the man who wants him dead - I wonder what his face would look like."

I forced my voice level, already calculating what this bargaining chip might be worth.

"If I hand you a network the Morettis spent half a lifetime building - what do I get in return?"

He set the glass down, and his eyes cut into me like a blade. "Sweetheart, do you honestly think you're in a position to negotiate?"

"I do." I clenched my fists and laid out my terms. "I'll give you the list - more than you asked for, even. But I have conditions. Conditions that cost you nothing."

He tipped his chin up slightly, a signal to continue.

"You guarantee my mother's and my sister's safety. Don't drag them into any of this." I held out one hand, palm up. "And give me a phone. I need to tell them I'm alive."

Killian rose, crossed the room, and tipped my chin up with two fingers, forcing my head back.

He was too tall, too close. My neck strained to its limit.

Our eyes locked. A faint smile touched his mouth, and his thumb brushed over my bottom lip. "Direct. I like that. But the O'Connor family doesn't deal in verbal agreements. As of now, you're my hostage. Your freedom - your body - all of it belongs to me."

He let go, pulled a phone from his pocket, and dropped it in my lap. "Speaker."

I grabbed it and dialed home.

"Hello?" My mother's voice, and behind it, Mia's chatter.

"It's me, Mom." My eyes stung. I forced the tremor out of my throat.

"Sloane? Why aren't you home yet?" A pause. "Whose number is this?"

"My phone died. I borrowed a coworker's. Mom, the clinic's sending me to a conference last-minute - I'm leaving tonight, might be gone a few days." It was a lie I'd used twice before this year; convincing enough.

"So sudden?" A pause on the other end. "Sweetheart, is this about your father-"

"No, of course not." I cut her off, softening my voice. "He can't find us. Anyway - Mia's headphones, I'll bring them home with me. The color she wanted."

A muffled cheer came through the line.

That was when Killian leaned in without warning. His hand slid beneath my shirt, and with a sharp snap, my bra clasp gave way. I went rigid, breath catching in my throat, my fingers tightening around the phone as I forced the gasp back down.

I looked down and watched his hands - two hot, coiling things - slide from my back to the front, closing over my breasts, kneading without rhythm or mercy. Every inch of my skin broke out in a shiver.

His mouth found my ear. "Don't move," he murmured. "Or your mother will hear."

On the other end, my mother kept talking - some last piece of advice. My ears burned, my mind went blank, and I bit down hard on my tongue, using the pain to hold on to whatever control I had left.

"Mom, I have to pack."

"Sis-!" Mia's voice cut in, like she had something to say.

Right as her voice came through the speaker, Killian's fingers pinched the peak of my breast, deliberate, precise.

I sucked in a breath and forced the words out fast: "Mia... mm... I'll see you when I'm home, okay - bye!"

I nearly slammed my thumb down on the call-end button - one more second and I had no idea what sound would have come out of me instead.

That devil leaned in close again, his voice thick with amusement. "I told you. Your body belongs to me too. And this - this is only the beginning."

Sloane's POV

"Don't drag them into this." I pressed my hand over his, stilling it where it still moved beneath my shirt, and forced a breath into my lungs. "I thought you meant to keep your word."

"That depends on how well you behave." Killian didn't stop.

Two knocks broke the moment. I nearly sagged with relief.

"Come in." Killian withdrew his hand from beneath my shirt, lingering a moment longer at my waist, thumb and forefinger giving one last, deliberate pinch.

Only once his warmth had fully left my skin did I dare breathe again.

A woman in a dark uniform entered, head bowed, shoulders drawn in on themselves. "Don, the room's ready. I'll take Miss Sloane there now."

"Go." Killian walked back to the sofa and sat.

The maid knelt and unlocked the shackles at my ankles, then gestured toward the door.

I forced myself upright and reached to straighten my soaked shirt - the bra clasp was beyond repair, the fabric bunched uselessly against my chest, impossible to smooth into any kind of dignity. I made myself walk to the door anyway. I would not let him see anything more than what he'd already taken.

The moment I stepped through the doorway, I understood exactly where I was.

An alloy corridor stretched out ahead, no end in sight, sterile as an operating room. Along both sides ran a row of one-way glass cells. I glanced back once - Killian was still seated where I'd left him, glass in hand, lost in some thought of his own.

The maid led the way, her pace unhurried enough that I couldn't help but see everything on either side of me.

In the cell to my left, a man in port-worker's overalls hung suspended by chains, his toes barely grazing the floor, his face swollen a deep, bruised purple.

Across from him, another man - reduced to nothing but skin over bone - huddled in a corner, staring at the floor with hollow, unseeing eyes.

Further on, a cell that had just finished its work: blood sprayed across the inside of the glass, a body slumped over a steel stool, flayed raw. A guard hosed the floor down, rinsing the blood away in thin red streams.

Nearly every room staged its own horror.

"You're the first one to walk out of a 'Box' without a mark on you," the maid said, a quick glance flicking toward me before dropping away again.

"Box?" I repeated the word. "You call these - these chambers of hell - boxes?"

"Yes, miss." Her voice dropped even lower. "It's the Don's word for them."

I walked on in silence.

I'd seen how my father punished his enemies and his traitors - pure savagery, violence with no shape to it, nothing but rage looking for a place to land. This was different. The clean corridor, the deliberate order of it all - this felt less like punishment and more like specimens laid out behind glass. That kind of clean, methodical cruelty chilled me far more than anything my father had ever done.

My steps faltered.

"How could she-" My hand flew to my mouth before I even registered the thought.

Through the glass, I recognized the woman inside - a federal prosecutor I'd seen countless times on the evening news, always composed, always sharp, carrying an authority that brooked no argument.

Yet here she was inside the interrogation room, her tailored suit cast aside, wearing nothing but a torn white shirt with lace panties hanging from one ankle. Several naked men were gang-raping her. One forced her head down, thrusting himself fully into her mouth as her saliva spilled onto the floor. Another held her by the waist, sneering as he drove brutally into her lower body. The others crowded around her, hands roaming freely, relentlessly tearing through her sensitive spots.

Multiple cameras and studio lights were set up nearby, recording every angle of the nightmare in agonizing clarity.

What unsettled me most wasn't the violence itself. It was her eyes. There was no fight left in them - only a kind of hollowed-out compliance, as if whatever had made her her had already been methodically taken apart.

I'd watched her on television just two days ago, delivering a verdict with absolute conviction.

The maid saw me stop and offered a quiet explanation. "Anyone who crosses the Don - death is the mercy. The Don says stripping someone like her of her pride is worth a thousand times more than simply killing her."

"He's insane." My stomach lurched violently. "An absolute monster."

I didn't look toward either side again. I kept my head down and followed the maid until we reached a door at the top floor.

It was a cage - an obscenely beautiful one. A massive, antique four-poster bed dominated the center of the room. Electric flames flickered in a fireplace nearby. Deep crimson drapes hung from the canopy all the way to the carpet. Four narrow, Gothic-arched windows had been sealed shut with steel plating - no sunlight would ever reach this room. Not even a breath of wind.

I turned to the maid. "I'm nobody. Why would he need a cage this reinforced just to hold me? Not even special forces could get out of a room like this."

She hesitated, her gaze sweeping the dim, opulent room before finally landing on my soaked shirt. She didn't answer my question - only said, quietly, "Miss Sloane, the door won't be locked. But I wouldn't recommend stepping outside it. This place is dangerous."

There was something like pity in her eyes. It was the only warmth I'd felt since walking into this hell.

Instinct made the decision for me before I could think it through.

I dropped to my knees on the heavy carpet and seized her hand. "Please. Help me."

"My mother is sick. My sister has no one else. I can't die here." I clung to her, begging.

Fear and something like anguish crossed her face. She tried to pull away; I held on tighter.

"Please. I'm only twenty. I've never hurt anyone."

Her eyes darted around the room, as if the walls themselves might be watching. Then she leaned in close and murmured, so quietly I almost missed it: "Tonight, three a.m. Wait here."

The instant the words left her mouth, she shoved me away, her voice rising sharply: "You'd best behave and give up on that idea."

She turned and walked out. The heavy wooden door swung shut behind her.

I sank to the carpet, the strength that had held me upright all night finally giving out. The electric fire cast a trembling orange light across the drapes - flickering, flickering.

If I could get out of here, I would take my mother and Mia and run to the ends of the earth.

If I could just get out.