His for a Price

“I don’t understand why we lied about being there,” she whispered, because she couldn’t seem to stop now that she’d started. “What was the point of that?”

“You were eight years old,” Chase said succinctly. “I was thirteen. I don’t think we remember the same things. We did her a kindness. As well as us.”

“I’m not eight anymore, Chase. Tell me what you remember.”

“Our mother died in front of us,” he said, and she couldn’t identify what she heard in his voice then. Pain, yes. That same horror she still felt herself. Grief and fury and then something so much darker beneath it. “On the side of a road. But you and I are safe. I don’t know what else you want.”

“I want the truth,” she said, and maybe it shouldn’t have surprised her that her legs were too shaky, that she had to sit down. That the world felt as if it was breaking apart all around her, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know why.

Or maybe she was afraid she already did.

“Leave it, Mattie,” Chase told her, his voice hard again. He sounded like a different man entirely today, raw and grim, and it changed everything. It changed her. Or maybe it was Nicodemus who had done that. “There are some stones it isn’t worth turning over.”

And she wasn’t surprised when he claimed he had another call and disconnected moments later. She sat where she was for a long time.

Mattie had been protecting something she didn’t fully understand since she was eight years old. She’d been held hostage to those memories. And the only way she’d figured out how to do that and carry on living was to hold herself at a distance from anyone and everything that ventured near. Let nothing and no one close, she’d reasoned, and they couldn’t know her. Or hurt her, the way she’d been hurt the day they’d lost her mother.

Or learn things they shouldn’t. Things so terrible that her relationship with her father and with Chase had never recovered after that awful day.

But Nicodemus had never been one for distance, until now. She shook her head slightly, as if trying to clear it, and understood that was part of what was happening to her. Why she felt like an empty echo chamber. Why she was so miserable.

He wasn’t there.

For ten years, Nicodemus had always been there. If not right in front of her, then nearby. She’d known it. She’d expected it—perhaps even come to depend on it. He’d made certain she did. He’d been a fact of her life, like the weather, like the inevitability of fall into winter. He’d been relentless. He’d been Nicodemus.

He’d pushed and pushed, and he’d made it so very easy to push back—

Mattie didn’t know what to do with herself now. Not when she’d given him everything, more than she’d ever given anyone, and it still wasn’t enough. Not when she’d pushed back the way she’d always done and he’d walked away instead, leaving her with no choice but fall forward on her face. Leaving her where she landed on the ground.

Leaving her, at last, the way she’d always claimed she’d wanted him to do.

After everything, it shouldn’t have surprised her so much that he was right. She really was a liar.

Glass, she told herself frantically as she felt all of this surge inside her, so close to bursting out. She was smooth and she was hard all the way through and she was glass—

But what she felt was broken.

* * *

Mattie waited for him in the decidedly sleek and modern waiting room of his Manhattan office, high in one of those Midtown buildings that housed everything from doctors to lawyers to international multimillionaires like Nicodemus in varying shades of lush, dark wood and understated gilt edges.

“Mr. Stathis may be some time,” the gatekeeping receptionist said pleasantly enough from behind her fortress of a high, curved desk, if not for the first time. “He doesn’t encourage walk-ins.”

“Mr. Stathis will see me,” Mattie assured her with a grand sort of bravado that she did not feel at all. Also not for the first time.

“I really do need your name, ma’am,” the woman replied, her professional smile showing signs of strain.

“I’ll say it once more.” Mattie raised her voice so that all the people around her pretending not to listen to this interchange—business associates of Nicodemus’s, she could only hope, waiting for their meetings with his various staff members and capable of all kinds of gossip should he ignore her for too long—could hear her. And recognize her, she had no doubt. And wonder. “Just tell him there are consequences to his behavior, and they are sitting in his lobby.”