Janeal was pretty sure she slept off and on, though she couldn’t say for sure without a clearer indication of the time. For a while she didn’t dare open her eyes to look at the clock, or swivel her head, or move her big toe. But the pulsating agony seemed to have lessened. She tested this impression. She moved her arm and it did not hurt; then she moved her legs; then she turned her neck one inch and did not get the sensation of a knife being run through it.
After a few minutes—or it might have been an hour—she opened her eyes as well.
They couldn’t penetrate the pitch blackness of the room. The heavy air pressed down on her as if the darkness had weight, and she didn’t fight it.
The wet cloth had slid off her face and now lay in a damp heap against her cheek. She reached up to move it away, taking deep breaths. So far so good. Janeal considered opening a window but hesitated for a reason she could not place.
It was the smell of the air, which she couldn’t name.
An undercurrent of sound that she couldn’t identify.
She shivered although she was warm, and her palms turned clammy. Her head was clear now, but she willed herself to a new level of stillness—opossum-like, near-death stillness.
Breathe. Smell. Listen.
Janeal broke out in an involuntary sweat. Another person sat in the room with her.
She swallowed.
“I can outlast you at this contest, if you’re wondering,” a man whispered.
Sanso.
She opted not to respond, not sure if fear or thrill was responsible for kicking her heart into her throat.
Fear, most definitely.
And some thrill.
During her visit to his hospital room, she had the upper hand of surprise and the security of a guard within range of her voice. But now she was an injured bird knocked out of her nest to be stalked by a snake. How had he gotten past the locked door? She shuddered to imagine.
“Hungry?” he asked. He taunted her. “I can call room service.”
“I’m not well.” Her throat felt dry and scratchy and swollen.
“Sometimes food helps. Eat with me. We’ve never shared a meal. Not really.”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“Why? Because I’m an international fugitive or because you don’t want to be perceived as harboring an international fugitive?”
“Because you should never enter a woman’s room uninvited.”
“I didn’t.”
She didn’t have strength to argue.
Sanso must have dragged the chair he sat in close to the bed, because she heard him shift and place a foot on the ground, and when he spoke again his hot breath caressed her forehead.
“Your deal—our deal, my beautiful child—gives me an all-access pass to you. Fifteen years ago you surrendered your right to restrict me. You sold yourself to me.”
“I don’t remember it quite the same way.”
“Doesn’t really matter, does it?” His fingers pushed her hair off her forehead and painted her skin with dread. Her clammy perspiration chilled her.
“I never sold any part of myself,” she tried to argue, not entirely convinced it was true. “Especially not to you. You stole my father from me, my very life. You paid me back. Our accounts were settled.”
The remark struck something in Sanso that caused him to stand abruptly, shoving his chair out of the way with a noisy thunk. “Let’s get straight who is the thief.” Scorn replaced the seduction that had underscored his words. “You seem to have forgotten who you are, Janeal Mikkado. And who I am.”
“You’re a bully who frightens young women—no, you’re worse than that. You’re a killer who values life less than your own sense of entitlement.” Her head felt painless enough that she pushed herself up onto her elbows. The clarity of mind emboldened her and gave her anger a chance to blossom fresh. “What’s a million dollars to you? Nothing. It’s your pride that you can’t seem to put a price on.”
She heard him drawing deep, measured breaths in through his nose.
“It’s true,” he eventually murmured. “Everything you say is true. And I will tell you something truer.”
He moved around the bed. Though Janeal’s eyes should have adjusted to the darkness quite awhile ago, she still could make out only dim shapes. She sensed him standing in front of her.
Sanso struck a match so close to her face that she felt a spark from the strike hit her nose. She cried out as the flame flared between her eyes and Sanso’s. The blaze dancing in the reflection of his glistening irises demonized him.
“You admire me,” he said. The stench of the initial burn coated the inside of her nose. She turned away, fearing she’d be overcome by panic.
“You admire my willfulness and my confidence and my ability to seize exactly what I want out of this life.” He waved the match in front of her eyes. She snapped her head the other direction, needing distance from the flickering light.
“You have spent every day of the last fifteen years trying to be like me. And that is as selfish as a woman can get.”
The flame came to the end of the little wood matchstick, and Sanso dropped it over Janeal’s chest. She shrieked. The light petered out before it hit the skin at her throat, but she felt its stinging heat.
Tears escaped her pinched eyelids then, a mercy that they finally surged when Sanso couldn’t see them. She controlled her voice. “What do you want?”
Sanso placed a fist in the bed on each side of Janeal’s shoulders and hovered over her form.
“I want Robert Lukin.”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“You know where he was. That works for me.”
Janeal’s ears filled with her salty tears. Her throat throbbed and snagged her words. “I c-can’t. He was my friend.”
“Present trumps past, child. He is my enemy. He will not rest until he succeeds in throwing me into a pit to rot. Ergo, I must take a similar approach with him.”
“Why would I do this? Why would I help you?”
Sanso’s laughter rang loud in her head and threatened to shake loose another mind-splitting episode. “See there! You want to know what’s in this for you? It is true how much you have made yourself like me. Ah! This is beautiful, exactly as I had hoped!”
“Stop!” Janeal reflexively braced her wrists to shove him away. Her palms met his chest, a concrete wall.
“What’s in it for you is the continuation of a nice little undisrupted life. Another decade and a half, if you’re a good girl, of my silence and your pitifully false sense of security—which I can turn into a reality for you.” His voice dropped so that she could barely hear him. “For you, there is nothing I wouldn’t do.”
He pushed himself off the bed and she took a deep breath—to fill her lungs, to settle her heart, to focus her mind. The close flame of that burning match was seared into the back of her mind. It had taken her several years of therapy to overcome her pyrophobia, and it would take days to put that tiny flaming stick into its proper perspective.
“If you were the sole person responsible for my security, I’d weigh your offer seriously,” she said.
His delayed reply told her she’d caught him off guard. “And who else, pray tell, can possibly hold as much power over you as I do?” The center of the rope in this tug-of-war shifted an inch in her direction.
“Give me twenty-four hours to consider your . . . proposal. And then I might tell you.”
In this blackness where she could see neither body language nor facial expression, his silence concerned her more than his verbal threats. She hoped he would play along. The smoke from the extinguished match was still strong in her nose.
She heard the metal grating of the doorknob turning, the latch sliding back against the strike plate. A beam of yellow light sliced through the room and across the bed, not quite touching her.
“Twenty-four hours,” he said. “This is far more exciting than I had thought you capable of, my dear.” Then he stepped out of the room and let the door float shut. Janeal rolled onto her side to see the tall red numbers of the hotel clock— 9:47 p.m.
She looked down the throat of another sleepless night.