Chapter 2

My apartment honestly wasn’t much of one. I could reach the kitchen counter from the bed. My three measly kitchen cabinets held more books than pans. On good nights, I read until I fell asleep, wrapping myself in fantasy worlds like they were blankets. Tonight, I fell back on an older habit instead. Ripping a blank page out of one of my clinicals notebooks, I folded the top right corner of the paper down—and then I just kept folding.

Growing up, there had been times when having my nose in a book would have made me a target. I’d had to find other ways of being elsewhere, tricks for daydreaming without ever losing track of the here and now. I’d taken to carrying scraps of paper in my pockets—a focus, something to occupy my hands.

Even now, alone in the apartment where I’d lived for the last two and a half years, there was something steadying to me about the familiar motion of folding a piece of paper in on itself again and again and again in different ways. The end result this time was an odd, jagged little shape.

I threw it away when I was done—and went to sleep.

In the dead of night, a voice jerked me back to consciousness like ice-cold water tossed over my prone form. “Get up.”

The voice was gravelly. This is not a dream. I had no recollection whatsoever of opening my eyes, but suddenly, they were open. My kitchen lights had been turned on. My mother was standing over me, and she wasn’t alone.

“You.” Her voice hardened. “Get up.” Eden Rooney wasn’t in the habit of asking anyone to do anything twice, so I took that as the warning it was and slipped out of bed, putting space between us and taking in the person standing in my mother’s shadow.

My cousin Rory was scowling—and bleeding.

“Fix him.” My mother didn’t make requests.

I eyed Rory’s injuries, but all I could think was that it had been two and a half years since I’d moved out. I hadn’t asked for my mother’s permission to leave. She hadn’t come after me. She’d let me get comfortable, and now…

Fix him. I kept my heart rate even and my face carefully blank. The worst of Rory’s injuries—that I could see—was a deep cut on his cheekbone, maybe two inches long. It wasn’t the type of injury that people in my mother’s line of work typically concerned themselves with. I’d seen one of my uncles dig a bullet out of a guy’s shoulder with a spoon.

This was clearly a test.

I was a nursing student, but I was deep into my clinical hours, and I’d buried myself in internships almost from the moment I’d started. What my mother wanted was within my capabilities, but the test wasn’t what I could do. The test was whether I would push back, and the one thing I knew for certain was that if I did, I’d never be invisible to Eden Rooney—or the Rooney family—again.

“Supplies?” My voice was muted, unemotional. I knew how to make myself disappear even when she was staring right at me. No weakness. No rebellion. No emotion at all.

Wordlessly, my mother dropped a black pouch on my bed. I unrolled it. Inside, there was a rudimentary surgery kit—scissors, scalpel, forceps, needle, suture thread.

“I suggest you make yourself useful, Hannah.”

I heard what my mother didn’t say: I let you go because it suited my purposes to do so, but you’re still mine, body and soul. You always were.

All I said out loud was: “There’s no anesthetic.”

“He doesn’t need it.” My mother’s diamond-hard gaze traveled from me to Rory. “Just like I didn’t need this little asshole getting himself injured in a bar fight tonight of all nights.”

Bar fight. My mind went immediately to a preppy boy with a dark aura, to green eyes and sharp cheekbones cast in shadow, to a glass placed precariously on a pool table’s edge.

“I need to wash my hands.” I bought myself some time going to the kitchen sink—but not much, just enough to focus on the fact that my mother apparently wasn’t doing this just to teach me a lesson. She was using me to teach Rory one.

He had five years and at least a hundred pounds on me, but he would sit there while I dug a needle into his face over and over again without anesthetic, because the alternative was doubtlessly worse.

I turned off the faucet and made my way back. I didn’t want to do this. If anyone found out, I’d get kicked out of my program. And, possibly worse, I would be complicit in whatever the family had going on right now that made Rory’s choice to get into a fight tonight of all nights that much more objectionable to my mother.

But if I didn’t do this, she might, and that would be so much worse for Rory. My cousin looked like he wanted to spit on me and vomit, in that order.

“Sit,” I told him. I had to hope that if I could do this without faltering, without showing a hint of weakness or rebellion, that might pacify her into forgetting me again—or, if not forgetting precisely, at least putting me on the back burner for a while.

Long enough for me to finish school. Long enough for me to find a way to get Kaylie out.

Rory sat. I tilted his chin back. Buying myself one last reprieve, I went into the bathroom and grabbed some antiseptic. I applied it, then opened the needle and the thread. At least they were pre-sterilized.

“Get on with it.” My mother took a single step toward me.

Do it, I told myself, but getting started was made harder by the lengths Rory was going to not to flinch. Lifting the needle, I didn’t bother telling him to relax and opted for distraction instead.

“Which one?” I said.

“Huh?” Rory was not, by any measure, the smartest of my cousins.

“The rich boys slumming it at the bar tonight,” I clarified. “Which of the three of them did this?” The question commandeered enough of his attention that I was able to start.

The needle was just a needle. Skin was just skin. My hands were steady.

“Doesn’t matter.” Rory spoke in a low voice, his face barely moving. “I’m gonna kill all three of the little bastards.”

In my family, statements like that weren’t always just for show.

“Hannah? Stop.” My mother’s voice ricocheted through the room like a bullet. But all I could think was: Do no harm. I finished the stitch, and then I stopped.

My mother bent until her eyes were even with Rory’s. She pressed her thumb into the flesh of his cheek, right below the partial line of stitches. “Do you have any idea who those boys are?” When Rory didn’t answer, my mother snorted. “Didn’t think so.”

She pressed her thumb into his face a little harder, then slid her gaze to mine.

“Let’s see if Hannah here can work it out. Rich boys in Rockaway Watch. Heads up their asses and looking to commission a boat in the morning. Who are they?” The last stitch I’d done popped, tearing through Rory’s skin.

I forced myself to focus. A boat. There was only one place close enough to serve as a destination from Rockaway Watch, a private island owned by a billionaire. Hawthorne Island.

Who are they? I answered my mother’s question. “Hawthornes.”

“At least she has a brain.” My mother swiveled her gaze back to Rory. “One Hawthorne, two friends, and the Hawthorne in question would be Tobias Hawthorne the Second. Toby. The only son of one of the country’s richest men. Little bastard might have a death wish, but we won’t be the ones granting it. Will we, Rory?”

“No,” Rory gritted out.

My mother dropped her hand from his face. “You’ll want to fix that last stitch,” she told me, her voice utterly devoid of feeling.

I swallowed back bile as I finished the job. To keep myself steady, I retreated elsewhere in my mind. Tobias Hawthorne the Second. Toby. I thought about the boy with the reddish-brown hair and his emperor-lounging-on-a-litter looseness. He was the Hawthorne of the group, I was sure of it, and apparently, I had his overprivileged, trouble-starting ass to thank for tonight, too.

I finished the last stitch. My mother didn’t linger. On her way out, Rory following like a dog on her heels, she paused in the doorway and looked back at me. “You have a steady hand,” she said.

That didn’t sound like a compliment. It sounded like a promise. She would be back.