Power Games

A hundred yards or so from where she hid, armed guards in military dress were pacing a mesh-wire blockade. Clumpy boots crunched on the wet ground. Every so often their radios crackled and a response was uttered. At each end of the barrier was a makeshift hut, housing further lookouts. The track continued beyond.

What was this place? No signposts off the road, no risk of pedestrians taking a stroll out in the middle of nowhere and stumbling across a hidden garrison.

And even if they did …

It was clear that nobody was getting past this—unless they had been invited.

Senator Mitch Corrigan had been invited.

Eve spent all afternoon trying to locate the building at Veroli. She scoped Google Maps, her own GPS, hunted any scrap that might get thrown up via a search, but according to the web the house did not exist. The only clue she hit on was a record, infuriatingly brief, connecting the Veroli Estate to the Casa Rocca in Rome. Eve knew of the auction house, had once met its famous jeweller Celeste Cavalieri, and she made a note to renew the contact. Her memory of Cavalieri was of a quiet, uncertain woman, a thousand miles from herself, and she was confident she could bleed enough from her to get her story off the blocks. What had Mitch Corrigan been doing there?

Lying back on her hotel bed, Eve tapped a pen against her teeth.

She was onto something big, she was sure of it.

Her BlackBerry beeped. She reached for it, taking news from her assistant of Kevin Chase’s forthcoming trip to London, and stifled a ripple of disappointment that the email wasn’t from Orlando. Why would it be? They never exchanged messages unless it was to plot their next encounter—and that had been her decision, remember?

Eve didn’t admit the anticlimax, even to herself.

The first time they’d fucked she had been strict on the rules: it was physical, nothing more, and she wasn’t getting into it for a boatload of emotional mush or sentimental phone calls. Orlando had laughed. Told her she was a tough cookie.

Eve allowed herself a rare moment of reflection and smiled, thinking of him. Normally she kept Orlando in his Orlando-shaped box, there when his body was joined with hers and gone when it wasn’t. But sometimes, just sometimes …

They had met at an industry party three years ago. The attraction had been immediate, the kind of magnetism that Eve, a born cynic, had dismissed as Hollywood garbage. She hadn’t known who he was, this arrogant man in Versace pinstripe and expensive aftershave, but it soon became apparent. He was the Orlando Silvers, successor to the empire: son and grandson to a legendary man, brother to heiress Angela. He was at the helm of one of the most powerful families in America.

After that first time, she hadn’t expected to see him again. She had been taken aback when, a week later, he had got in touch to say he was in London, and did she want to meet? Orlando travelled as much as she did, and when they crossed cities it made sense to hook up, no strings, no commitment, just straight-up sex.

Before long they were exchanging more than sweat and kisses. He was useful to her, accessing as he did circles she could never hope to penetrate, and she useful to him, a muscle in the UK media that could change perceptions overnight. Never did they discuss anything deeper—Eve knew little about Orlando’s life and he even less about hers. If they took other lovers it was never mentioned, if they made the mistake of falling asleep in each other’s arms it went unsaid, and they never had a dialogue that began with anything like the words, ‘So where do you see this thing going?’

It was the perfect arrangement.

Orlando Silvers was a stellar fuck and that was all there was to it.

What did it matter that he hadn’t been in contact? Eve knew the clan was in Vegas; she had seen Angela pictured there at the weekend with her father. Orlando would be with them. She would ask him when they next met, and depending on Orlando’s mood he would either elaborate or tell her gruffly, ‘Business.’ After three years she had learned to read him directly, knew when to push and when to leave alone. Maybe it wasn’t so far from a real relationship after all.

Eve swung her legs out of bed and padded to the bathroom. She stopped at the door. Just do it, she told herself. Then you’ll know. You’ll know it’s a stupid idea.

Her eyes fell to the rim of the bath, where the little white stick stared back at her, frank and unapologetic.

She did what she had to do, left it and returned to the bedroom.

Crazy girl. You’ve always been careful. It isn’t anything, you’ll see.

At the window, Eve parted the blinds. From high above the city she could see across the spires and rooftops and make out the bitten-down curves of the ancient Colosseum. The rain had cleared and tentative sunlight filtered through the clouds, soaking the amphitheatre in tender light. The bulbs in its arches were starting to come on, glowing hubs that grew against the stone with quiet, timeless dignity. In the violet sky, the evening’s first stars were beginning to appear.

She returned to the bathroom and checked the result.

It didn’t surprise her.

Fishing her phone from her bag, she dialled a number.

He picked up on the fourth ring, brusque voice announcing his name.

Eve took a breath. ‘Hi. We need to meet.’

9

Szolsvár Castle, Gemenc Forest, Hungary

The attic was exactly as his son had left it. A narrow bed was pushed into the corner, the walls cobwebbed and stained with damp. A wooden table housed a heap of dusty books. Words were crudely scratched into its surface—terrible, heartbreaking words.

Voldan Cane read them. Misery swam in his throat.

He had not meant to come into the attic. The space had been out of bounds since Grigori’s violent death, and Voldan knew to access it again would only spell fresh angst. Regret swilled in his stomach, bitter and black. He felt so alone.

Grigori, my darling son … Why did you do it?

‘Mr Cane?’ came a fearful enquiry from the bottom of the attic stairs. Janika. Her English was poor and so they conversed in Hungarian. ‘Are you all right?’

Voldan cawed his response, a monotone bleat: ‘Leave me alone.’

Unfortunate that it should come out that way, like a robot, with no more or less feeling than if he were reciting a shopping list—but the point was made. Voldan no longer bothered with pleasantries. Janika got paid, didn’t she? And if she ever decided she’d had enough and went to tip him down the staircase, well fine, he would welcome it. Things could get no worse.

He heard her scurry off down the hallway.

Oh, my son … Voldan wheeled himself across the desolate attic room. He hadn’t counted on this compulsion to revisit Grigori’s bedroom. It was a need to be close to his boy again, to inhabit the air he had breathed, to embrace the view he had seen, and always, above all, to seek the reasons behind the tragedy.

The reasons …

Grigori Cane had been a sweet failure, a weakling and a misfit from the day he was born. They had known it when they’d first held Grigori away from the womb, a screaming, wrinkled infant not two minutes old, and his dark eyes portals to a soul far older than they knew. Voldan had done everything in his power to integrate his child with normal youngsters, to give him a normal life. But Grigori had not been normal. He had been special. Shy and reclusive, with a debilitating allergy to sunlight and a stammer that made him a mockery, he had been helpless against a lifetime of taunts and rejections. The son of a tycoon, he should have had everything. He should have flourished. Instead he had carried the weight of his battered soul like a cross.

Perhaps his demise had been imminent.

Perhaps nothing could have stopped it.

It had been no easy feat getting up to the attic, in Voldan’s decrepit state. Janika had lifted him, her solid Hungarian haunches straining under his load. The castle was vast, Voldan and his faithful maid the only inhabitants, and his recent consignment to a wheelchair worsened matters. Janika had deposited him on Grigori’s bed while she brought the chair up—frailty an unwelcome admission for a man who had once been head of a worldwide banking corporation. Once, Janika had suggested he sell and move to a more manageable place. Unimaginable. Leave Szolsvár Castle, the home that had been in his family for generations? Leave the place where his wife had given him his only son, and in doing so had perished in childbirth? Leave the place where, twenty years later, Grigori had flung himself from the Great Hall mezzanine and splatted to his death? The ghosts here needed him. He needed them.

They were all he had left. His family.

After all, it was Voldan’s own fault he was in this state. After Grigori died, there had been nothing to live for. His purpose had evaporated. His heart had ripped. He had attempted to follow in his son’s footsteps and the results had been disastrous.

Deformed like a monster. Paralysed like a corpse.

And now he was trapped in this devil-sent machine, left with the use of only the thumb on his right hand. He was unable to speak save for a croaking voice box.

From the turret Voldan could see woodland, a blanket of green that stretched to the horizon. Grigori had returned here during the last few months of his life, scarcely leaving his room, refusing to eat or drink or accept visitors.

‘I am a failure, Father,’ was all he would say. ‘I do not deserve to live.’

Voldan’s thumb twitched on the arm of his wheelchair. When he thought of his son he was filled to the brim with a restless injustice. He had been robbed.

Turning to go, he almost didn’t see it. From darkness, a glimmer of light …

Voldan looked, and looked again.

If the wheelchair hadn’t become stuck in the groove between two floorboards, he might never have found it. ‘Janika!’ he yelled—at least it felt like a yell, even if it did come out in that wretched, miserable, bionic drone. ‘Janika!’

‘I am here, Mr Cane!’ The maid came rushing up the stairs. She was middle-aged, with a frizz of mouse-brown hair, a flaccid chin and a sagging bosom. Seeing him stranded lopsided in the furrow, she hurried over, flapping her arms like the wings on a nesting turkey. ‘Oh, Mr Cane,’ she cooed, righting him. ‘What happened?’

The floorboard was loose. Voldan felt it give beneath the wheel. That was what had caught him. The monotone was back:

‘There is something under the floor,’ he said, the words betraying none of his excitement. He had thought he knew every inch of his son’s domain, but no, here was more. Something Grigori had tucked away, kept to himself, a parting secret.

Something he had wished his father to find.

Janika removed the floorboard with a sturdy grunt. Inside was a wooden box.

‘Lift it,’ Voldan demanded. Janika did as she was told. ‘Open it.’

Darkness fell across the turret window. Clouds brooded and in the distance came the first rumble of thunder. The lid prised open.

Janika tilted the box so that Voldan could see its contents.

He didn’t understand. ‘Who are they?’

Janika removed one of the photographs. It was a picture of a woman. Across her face was streaked a giant red cross. The red was smeared, turning to brown.

Blood?

The maid extracted another. This one was a boy. It bore the same red mark.

Angela Silvers and Kevin Chase. What had they to do with his son?

‘The rest,’ instructed Voldan electronically. ‘Empty the rest.’

There were five more: seven in total.

Journalist Eve Harley … Model Tawny Lascelles … Investor Jacob Lyle … Senator Mitch Corrigan … and Celeste Cavalieri, the jeweller.

All defaced by that same blood cross: the mark of Grigori’s plague.

‘What is this, Mr Cane?’ Janika whispered.

Voldan’s eyes hardened. On the back of each photograph was scrawled a single word. BITCH. LIAR. THIEF. FRAUD.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, already tasting on the tip of his tongue the sweet, sticky nectar of revenge. ‘But I intend to find out.’

10

Las Vegas

‘Angela Silvers! Just as pretty as I remember, hey, Don?’

Carmine Zenetti, casino boss and hotel magnate extraordinaire, greeted them in his palatial office above the Parisian. Angela remembered him from her childhood—a squat, stout man with a black monobrow and hands like bear paws. She knew her father hated being called Don. Her father knew she hated every minute of being here.

‘No need to remind me,’ Donald said amiably, as he accepted a cognac and they were encouraged to sit. The panorama looked out on the dazzling Strip, where in the spring sunshine tourists milled amid the peaks and spires of the replica city. Giant billboards screamed news of the hottest show in town while glittering hotels ushered through the next bout of spenders. The air was charged with the sharp tang of money.

Angela refused her drink. She had no appetite. Since her father’s revelation in Boston, she had barely let a thing pass her lips.

‘I gotta say, I’m glad you finally came around.’ Carmine smiled fatly. ‘All these years there I was thinkin’ we were meant to be, but you had me wondering there for a time …’ Carmine waggled a heavily jewelled finger at her father, one of a handful of people in the world who was permitted to do so, and chuckled. ‘But now you see it makes the best kind of sense. Zenetti and Silvers, united for the future.’

Angela clenched her fists in her lap.

‘But hey,’ went on Carmine, eagerly rubbing his palms, ‘what are we waiting for? I know the guy you’ve really come to see.’

Another, younger, man stepped into the room.

‘Meet Dino, my eldest.’ Carmine clapped him on the back. ‘Dino, you remember Don Silvers … and this, of course, is the gorgeous Angela.’

There was a long silence.

Dino was like something out of a catalogue—coffee hair, twinkling eyes, and a stacked body that was suited to perfection. He was an ad for mob fashion, gold rings glinting on his fingers, collar crisp, jacket pressed. Angela guessed he was in his thirties, indisputably handsome but so far from her type that even in a radically different context she could never have considered him a match.

It didn’t matter who Dino Zenetti was. He wasn’t Noah.

Her heart sank. How am I going to tell him?

She played out her defence, each claim more ridiculous than the last.

We can still see each other; it won’t change a thing. Dino means nothing to me. I’m doing it for the business, a transaction, no emotions, I swear …

Even Noah Lawson’s boundless patience wouldn’t stretch that far.

‘Aren’t you kids gonna say hello?’ Carmine boomed, breaking the tension with a guffaw. ‘I tell ya, Donnie, this is like being back in the sixth grade!’

‘Good to meet you,’ said Dino, in a gravelly husk. He put out his hand. Angela shook it. She said nothing. Every instinct recoiled. It wasn’t too late, she could still back out of this; she could still change her mind.

‘I guess you two’re gonna want to get t’know each other, huh?’ Carmine thrust a glass into his son’s hand and supplied a wink. Their conspiracy filled her with horror. She wanted to run, never stop and never look back, until she reached his arms.

If only that was all there was to it …

‘I want you to listen carefully,’ her father had said that night in his office, ‘for if you choose to accept, our empire is yours. Everything. You take over.’

The words Angela had waited her whole life to hear.

Her father’s confidence, his respect, his finally recognising what she was capable of, a bond between them of trust and belief, nothing to do with her brothers.

But she could never have guessed at what cost.

‘The business is dying,’ Donald had explained. ‘I’ve been shielding you from it. I haven’t told Orlando, or Luca, or any of the board. I haven’t even told your mother. I’m telling you, Angela, because you’re the one I am counting on to help. We’re in bad shape. Real bad shape.’ He had wiped a hand across his face and she’d heard him swallow, a dry, sickening sound, coarse with regret. ‘Twelve months ago I put money into a sideline I believed was a dead cert. I was wrong.’

Donald Silvers was never wrong. He had made a fortune on those grounds.

‘But—’

‘Let me finish. That’s only the start.’

And then he had confessed the awful truth.

Her father had been diagnosed weeks ago. The doctors had given him mere months to live. Isabella had been protected from that blow as well.

‘No,’ Angela had spoken with someone else’s voice, tinny and strange in an upturned world, ‘you won’t,’ she fumbled for sense, ‘you can’t—’

‘I am.’

‘They’re wrong. You’ll get through it—’

‘The Zenettis can pull us out,’ said Donald, matter-of-fact, no time for weakness. ‘They’re our last hope. They can give us back our future. Your future, Angela, should you decide to commit.’

Her chest tightened. ‘Commit to what?’

He had laid it out in basic terms. The proposed marriage to Dino, the combined fortunes bailing them out of debt, the mutual interests to both parties as they embarked on a super-empire merging the last word in leisure and retail.

The Silvers would take a cut, thirty per cent against the Zenettis’ seventy, but the brand would survive. Given time, it might even grow.

And she would be there to rebuild it. Her business. Her chance.

Her chance.

Carmine Zenetti wanted to make it official, cement the allegiance via a union with his son. Angela was the key. Donald hadn’t been in a position to negotiate.

Her heart in exchange for her family—not just the dying wish of her father but her own wish, too: to step out from the wings and inherit the trophy.

She couldn’t. She must. She wouldn’t. She had to …

‘Wanna take a walk?’

Dino lifted an eyebrow. Everything about him was suggestive. His knuckles were peppered with hair and he wore a signet on his pinkie. His nails were clean, his hands smooth, as if he had done nothing more in his life than to change a light bulb.

Angela stood. She could feel her father’s gaze drilling into her but she could not return it. She could not look at him. Any other disclosure she would have welcomed, but not this. Never this. She was running on autopilot, ignoring Noah’s attempts to make contact, cancelling his calls for fear she would lose control as soon as she heard his voice, trying to find some space while she figured out what on earth she was going to do. Every way she looked at it, there was an impossible penalty to pay. Refusing her father was unthinkable.

So was sacrificing Noah.

Selfish as it was, it came to this: Angela did want the title. She did want the job. She did want to claim what was hers because she had earned it.

‘C’mon,’ encouraged Dino. ‘Let me give you a tour of our little hotel,’ he put the emphasis on our, ‘see if you like it.’

Angela followed. She could hear Carmine preparing to pop the champagne, the murmur of approval that passed between him and her father. She felt trapped in a nineteenth-century drawing room; engaged to be married against every belief her heart held true. Her head told her different. Her head told her this was a done deal.

Perhaps Noah would understand. Perhaps he would let her explain and then he would see that this was the only way. They could still be together—they were already forced to meet in secret, what real difference would it make?

One promise she could make him utterly: that she would never be with Dino Zenetti in the proper way. Their partnership was for show; that was all.

Noah would understand. She would make him.

Dino led the way. It reminded Angela of a walk she had taken a long time ago.

A boy she had fallen for, and nine years later still unable to set him free.

Boston 2005

‘ Noah, oh yes, right there, that’s it! ’

Noah Lawson obliged, driving deep into the woman who was lying spread-eagled across her expensively upholstered sunlounger. He was sixteen, nailing his boss’s wife in the pool house he was meant to be cleaning, and what’s more he was getting paid for it. Getting paid for getting laid … What boy wouldn’t?

Mrs Mason wasn’t bad either, tall and buxom with the greatest pair of tits this side of Vermont. Noah dipped his head to them, licking and grazing as she arched beneath him, grabbing tufts of his corn-blond hair and raking her scarlet manicure down his back. He tucked one hand behind her knee, pushing his cock harder and harder until she screamed. Mrs Mason’s lipstick was smudged, her mouth parted in ecstasy.

‘You make me so hot,’ she moaned. ‘Where’d you learn how to do this stuff?’

As if to reinforce the point, Noah drew out, hovering his dick millimetres from Mrs Mason’s sweet spot. She groaned, thrashing her head from side to side.

‘Now! Take me now!’

He rested his thumb on her swollen clitoris, wondering when Mr Mason with his bald head and stuffy suits and perspiring brow had last done this, and began to tease, dipping his thumb inside her, drawing out her wetness.

‘Noah! Please! Take me!’ She was delirious, her hands reaching up to maul his chest before sliding down to clasp his proud, rock-solid erection. Noah rode through her fingers, his balls ready to burst. Mrs Mason’s pussy was pink and glistening, her dark bush trimmed in anticipation of their weekly meetings.

Noah Lawson looked older than sixteen. Mrs Mason would have a heart attack if she knew. Truth was, he had bedded dozens of women and none of them had a clue. He had lost his virginity to a friend’s older sister when he was twelve, a quick and strange fumble in the back seat of a vintage Cadillac, where he had panicked and pulled out and spunked all over her hand. He had come a long way since then.

‘You asked for it,’ he breathed, and in a single stroke he plunged into her, collapsing onto her tits. Mrs Mason was yelping, rocking so hard beneath him that he had to grab her wrists to hold her down and she was pulsing and writhing and biting his neck and only then did he let himself come, a series of white-hot electric spasms.

Noah rolled off, panting hard, his bronzed stomach rising and falling. He gazed up at the whirring ceiling fan. Mr Mason would be back soon.

‘I gotta split.’

‘Don’t—’ She sat up, starry-eyed. ‘When can I see you again?’

‘Soon.’

‘When?’

‘Keep this place dirty.’ He grinned. ‘Gives me more to do.’

As he exited the Masons’ estate, summer sun shining on his back, it was panning out like any ordinary Friday: a couple hours at the Masons’ and then on to Hank’s Hardware for the rest of the day. Noah had quit school the year before—more accurately, he’d been expelled—and there was no one at home who gave enough of a shit to place him elsewhere: his mom was a waster and his dad had walked out on them years ago. Life was down to him. There was only one way to escape this neighbourhood and that was with a shedload of cash in his back pocket.

Soon as he could, he was getting as far from this town as possible.

He grabbed a hot dog, ravenous after the morning’s exertions. Mrs Mason had slipped him an extra fifty bucks, which he could have taken offence at but didn’t. There was enough money floating about this joint and since he hadn’t seen a dime of it since the day he was born, it was high time he cut a piece. The Lawsons were the embarrassment of Bourton. Everyone knew they had nothing. Everyone knew his mom was a bum and his dad had drunk himself to death in a ditch somewhere.