Chapter 5 - THE NAME SHE CHOSE
Isa was at the stove.
She was heating soup from a can — the kind of thing you do when you’re injured and hungry and haven’t had the energy to think about food seriously. She was standing with her weight on one hip, slightly favoring the right side, stirring slowly. Not because the soup required slow stirring. Because her ribs required her to move carefully in all directions.
She heard him come in and looked over her shoulder. Whatever she saw in his face made her turn around fully, which cost her something — he could see it in the slight tightening around her eyes.
“What happened?” she said.
He pulled out the chair at the kitchen island and sat down. He looked at her steadily.
“Victor Draven called my personal number forty minutes ago.”
The spoon in her hand went still.
“He told me you’re his sister. That your name is Isla Draven. That he’s been looking for you.” He paused. “I’m giving you the opportunity to tell me your version before I decide what to do with mine.”
She turned back to the stove, turned off the burner, and set the spoon down on the counter beside it with a careful, deliberate precision that was doing a lot of work — keeping her hands occupied, buying herself seconds, managing something he couldn’t see from where he was sitting.
“How long have you known?” she said. Her voice was level. The throat was still damaged; he could hear it.
“Forty-one minutes.”
She turned around and leaned back against the counter and looked at him. Her arms crossed over her chest, carefully, for the ribs. Her chin came up slightly — a defensive gesture from someone who had decided that the best defense available to her was to look like she wasn’t defending anything.
“I left when I was twenty-one,” she said. “Victor had just taken over from my father. I’d spent my entire life watching what that family was, what it did, what it cost the people inside it and outside it. And I decided I was done.”
She held his gaze.
“I changed my name. I built a life. I was very careful about not being found. For seven years.”
“For seven years,” Rhett said. “And then you took a job working for the rival organization of the family you were hiding from.”
Something moved through her expression. Not guilt, exactly. But an acknowledgment of how that sounded.
“I didn’t know who you were when I applied. I knew you ran a large operation. The nature of it wasn’t advertised in the job posting.” A pause. “When I figured it out, I’d already been here three months, and I needed the work, and I told myself it didn’t matter, because Victor didn’t know where I was.”
“He knows now.”
“He knows now,” she agreed.
Rhett looked at her for a long moment. He was running through the geometry of the situation — what it meant for his organization, what it meant for the territory war that had been simmering with Draven for three years, what leverage it created and what vulnerabilities. These were the calculations he ran automatically, the way other men breathed.
He was also running through something else entirely. Something that had nothing to do with leverage.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said.
She blinked. Whatever question she’d been bracing for, it wasn’t that one.
“Tell you what?”
“Who you were. What you were running from. Any of it.”
“Because you’re my employer,” she said. “Not my—”
“You said that yesterday,” he said. “It didn’t hold then. It doesn’t hold now.” He leaned forward slightly, elbows on the island. “We’ve been in the same house for three years. You know how I take my coffee. You know I read two newspapers on Tuesday and none on Wednesday. You know I don’t eat breakfast after six in the morning because of my workouts. I know you cry at foreign films and pretend you have allergies. I know you leave a light on in the kitchen when you’re the last one out.” He paused. “We’re not strangers, Isa. Whatever else we are, we’re not that.”
She looked at him for a long time. The kitchen was very quiet. The soup was going cold in the pan behind her.
“I was afraid,” she said finally.
Her voice went flat when she said it — not emotionless, but the flatness of someone saying something they’ve been holding for a long time and have finally decided to set down.
“Not of you. Of what knowing would change. About whether you’d keep me on. About whether I’d become a problem.”
“You’re not a problem.”
“I’m Victor Draven’s estranged sister sitting in the house of Victor Draven’s primary rival.” She said it evenly. “I’m exactly a problem.”
He looked at her. “Are you a threat?”
“No.”
“Are you working for him?”
“No.”
“Have you told him anything about my operation?”
“Never. I didn’t even tell him where I was.”
“I believe you,” he said.
She stopped. Processed that. “You believe me?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve known me for forty-one minutes as someone who withheld something significant,” she said. “And you believe me?”
“I’ve known you for three years,” he said. “The last forty-one minutes is a footnote.”
She looked away first. He watched her look away — the line of her jaw, the way she breathed through whatever the moment was doing to her, the careful management of it. She reached behind her and picked up the pan and carried it to the sink and stood there for a moment with her back to him.
“He’s going to come for me,” she said.
“I know.”
“Not because he loves me. Because I’m his. That’s how he thinks about people.” She set the pan down. “He spent five years looking for me. That’s not love. That’s ownership.”
“I know what it is,” Rhett said. “I’ve been dealing with him for three years.”
She turned around. “What are you going to do?”
He looked at her steadily. “Keep you safe.”
“That’s not a plan.”
“It’s the beginning of one.”
She held his gaze, and in her eyes he could see the specific tiredness of a woman who had been running for seven years and had just discovered that the place she’d stopped running to had its own set of wolves. He recognized that tiredness. He’d seen it in the mirror, in other contexts.
“Okay,” she said quietly.
Not surrender. Something more like a decision.
He was about to answer when his phone buzzed on the island — a message from Marcus, short, the kind of message Marcus only sent when something had gone wrong that could not wait for the morning.
Sir. You need to see the gate camera. Now.
Rhett read it twice. Then he looked up at Isa, who had gone very still, watching his face.
“What is it?” she said.
He didn’t answer. He walked to the study, pulled up the security feed on the monitor, and looked at the gate.
A car was parked just outside it. Not moving. Just sitting there in the dark, headlights off, engine running. He couldn’t see the driver. He couldn’t see anyone.
But he knew who it was. He had known, the moment Garrett said the hospital registration had been compromised, that the courtesy call was only the beginning.
May you like
Victor Draven had not called to negotiate.
He had called to announce that he already knew where she was.
