Chapter 1

The first person from my old life I ran into after prison was Marina Crowell.

I was crouched at the side of the road, wolfing down a few dollars' worth of takeout.

The woman who used to grovel to anyone who'd look at her was standing over me now in an immaculate designer suit.

The first thing out of her mouth was, "Adrian, you've lost weight."

I looked up at her and didn't say anything.

"Isn't there anything you want to ask me?" Marina said, an edge of impatience under her voice.

I gave a small shake of my head.

There were questions, back when she first put me in prison.

But five years went by, and everything I never got to say went with it.

So did everything I ever felt for her.

Chapter 1

Marina Crowell's face stiffened at my answer, though she recovered fast.

She held out a bottle of water she'd just bought. The gesture came out stiff.

"Don't choke."

It was free, so I took it and thanked her quietly.

I could tell Marina had something she wanted to say.

She didn't say it, and I didn't ask.

I finished the last few bites mechanically, climbed onto my beat-up delivery scooter, and picked up another order.

As I fastened my helmet, Marina called my name.

"Adrian!"

Habit turned me around. Her voice carried something close to desperation. "If you ever need help, call me."

I smiled. "Probably won't get the chance."

I ran deliveries until after midnight.

Back in the cramped little room I rented, I rolled up my pant leg and worked the ointment in without thinking about it.

My knee wasn't shaped like anyone else's.

Five years, and I could still feel exactly what it was like to have the bone shattered.

It came back on the rainy days, in the damp dark of a cell, and after too many hours on the road left the leg numb.

It would wake up without warning and go to work on me all over again.

It felt like the memory of the day six years ago, when I found out Marina had placed me on the board like a piece she'd been saving.

That knowledge had gone through me the same slow way, over and over.

Time dulls everything, though. Even the leg was getting better.

I woke before sunrise.

It was the anniversary of Grandma Ruth's death.

She'd been the only person in the world who wanted nothing from me except that I be all right.

I put in for the day off, pulled on the faded clothes I'd owned seven years ago, and went out to Meadowglass Cemetery.

I brought her roses still wet with morning dew.

Roses aren't what you bring to a grave, but this was my first visit. She would have liked them.

I knelt in front of her headstone and talked for a long time, and I only stopped when I heard footsteps behind me.

Some part of me had been expecting it.

Even so, when I turned and saw Marina, my breath stopped.

She'd left the designer suit behind for a plain white dress.

The plainness of it threw me.

For a second she wasn't the woman eaten alive by money and leverage.

She was the clean, quiet girl I used to know.

Chapter 2

Marina and I grew up together.

Before I was old enough to remember any of it, traffickers took me, and Grandma Ruth, who survived by picking through recycling, was the one who found me.

After that she kept me with her.

Raising two children was twice as hard for an old woman with almost nothing.

She never once made me the lesser one. Whatever Marina got, I got.

Marina's grades were better, so Grandma had her tutor me.

When Marina went out to play, Grandma told her to take me along and hold on tight to my hand.

When Marina got new clothes, Grandma found a matching set for me.

There were years of moments like that.

Marina and I were never apart.

The neighbors used to tease that Marina was going to marry me someday.

Marina never denied it. She'd rumple my hair and say softly, "Then marry me when you grow up."

That was when I started noticing how she felt.

I saw the love she kept tucked inside the things she did.

Only I was allowed to touch her things.

The second I needed her, Marina was there.

When I fell asleep, she'd kiss my forehead like I was something precious.

The year Marina and I finally let it happen and became a couple was the year everything started to come apart.

My biological family, the Hollowells, tracked me down, and Marina started building a tech company.

Her world got wide overnight, and I wasn't the only person in it anymore.

My younger brother, Derek Hollowell, was in it too.

Marina asked me once, carefully, "We don't get much time alone anymore. Does that make you... unhappy?"

I still remember the answer I spent years regretting.

"Of course not. I'm glad you and my brother get along."

The words turned into a curse.

Marina and Derek got close at a speed that frightened me.

They laughed, they fought, they sulked, and every time it fell to me, the older brother, to smooth it over.

The first thing that felt wrong was how precisely Marina remembered what Derek liked.

His peanut allergy. That he couldn't stand cilantro. That mushrooms were his favorite vegetable.

The first dish she ordered when the three of us went out was garlic butter mushrooms.

Marina had forgotten.

I'm allergic to garlic.

In the space of a month, Derek replaced the twenty years Marina and I had.

Chapter 3

Everything I'd swallowed, all the hurt and the panic, finally came up, and I confronted her.

Marina looked at me coldly and said it one word at a time.

"Adrian, do you have any idea how irrational you're being?"

It was the first time I'd seen Marina go cold on me.

Before that she'd have pulled me into her arms and said it over and over. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. I made you cry."

The tears came, and Marina didn't move.

She left me standing there, irritation on her face, and went upstairs alone.

I clamped a hand over my mouth to keep the sound in.

A moment later I heard someone on the stairs.

It threw me to see that it was Derek.

Then I caught the satisfaction in his eyes.

He stopped in front of me and wiped my face roughly. "Poor Adrian. Look at you crying. What a shame nobody cares.

"Whether you came back or not, Mom and Dad only ever wanted me. Now even Marina's on my side. What have you got left to fight me with?"

The shock made it hard to get words out.

"Derek, you..."

"Don't call me that. Every day I spent playing your brother made me sick." The obedient face broke apart in an instant.

"If Marina hadn't wanted you, do you think I'd ever have called you family? You idiot."

Derek turned and went back upstairs.

The same staircase. The same footsteps. Two different people.

Inside a single day I'd gone from the one they held in their hands to someone standing entirely outside it all.

The betrayal was so bare, and so deliberate, that it stunned me.

I couldn't take it, and I was more afraid of the next second, when Marina might be the one to say she was leaving.

So I started hiding from both of them.

Marina caught on and stood outside my door until I had nowhere left to run.

"Adrian, we need to talk."

I shook my head and backed up, and every step I took, she took one toward me.

My back hit the wall. There was nowhere else to go.

The moment she opened her mouth, I wanted to cover my ears.

But she got it out too fast for me to stop her.

"If I married you, would you finally stop thinking I'm going to leave?"

Chapter 4

Marina meant it. The next day she took me down to the Avenridge County clerk's office.

We signed what I believed were marriage papers, and then we moved into my little townhouse.

It was a gift from the Hollowells.

My biological parents felt nothing much for me and hadn't wanted me back.

They put the townhouse in my name so nobody could say they hadn't.

I brought up moving Grandma Ruth in with us once. Marina said no.

She didn't give a reason, and I let it go.

I trusted her, and I went back to see Grandma when I could find the time.

I thought that certificate was the last guarantee I'd ever need, that Marina would finally draw a line with Derek.

Instead they started seeing each other more than ever.

Often enough that I began questioning every sentence out of her mouth.

Before I could work out how badly I was coming apart, all of it went off at once.

Marina had promised she'd spend every birthday with me. That year she left me at home and went to a corporate gala with Derek.

The last thread of sense in me burned through.

I walked into the ballroom, ignored every startled face, and went straight at Derek.

"You know Marina and I are married. Why do you keep shoving yourself between us?

"She's your sister-in-law. How do you go after her again and again?"

Derek looked terrified. "Adrian, I don't know what you're talking about. You're scaring me."

"Stop it. You told me yourself. You got close to me to get to her."

The whispers started up around us, and Marina's hand across my face ended it.

"I signed those papers because I knew how paranoid you are. That doesn't give you the right to stand here and tear Derek apart.

"Security. Get him out of here."

They came fast, clamped a hand over my mouth, and hauled me toward the doors.

I fought them the whole way and it made no difference.

The closer we got to the exit, the clearer the voices behind me came through.

"God, what a lunatic."

"Worse than that. He's out of his mind. Whoever marries a man like that is finished, and Marina's been humiliated in front of every investor in the room.

"If she weren't this good at her job, the whole deal would be dead."

I was the man on Marina's marriage certificate. I was the one it had been done to.

So why did nobody believe me?

I shut my eyes, and the tears ran down anyway.

All at once I was tired, and there was nothing left in me to fight with.

Chapter 5

I went home.

For the first time, I didn't touch the glass of milk Marina had the housekeeper leave out.

I showered, then lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

I stared long enough that I started crying and couldn't stop.

I don't know how long it went on before exhaustion pulled me under.

Somewhere in the fog I felt a heavy body come down on top of mine.

Even after the fight, instinct had me responding like it was Marina.

Then my hand went searching and found a thick, soft waist that wasn't hers.

My heart dropped straight through me.

It wasn't Marina. Marina's waist was slim and soft under my hands.

The woman clearly hadn't expected me to wake. Her face was all shock and panic.

There was just enough light from the window for me to make out the body above me.

Heavy, thickset, soaked in a sweet perfume so strong I couldn't get air.

One look and my stomach turned over.

She grabbed her clothes and ran for the stairs, and then she went down them.

That was when it finally landed. I picked up the paring knife off the side table and went after her like something had snapped.

She saw the blade and started shaking her head, begging.

"I'm sorry. Please don't kill me. Please."

I was shaking everywhere and barely keeping the sickness down, and I laughed.

"So you can be scared too?

"What have you got to be scared of? You're not the one who's supposed to be scared."

I wasn't making sense. By the time I came back to myself, her face and her body were covered in cuts.

I dropped the knife and stumbled into the bathroom.

I scrubbed and scrubbed, trying to get every inch of skin she'd touched clean.

Marina got home and I was still standing under the water.

She went completely still. It was a long time before she moved, and then she put her arms around my waist, her voice in pieces.

"It's over, Adrian. It's over. I'm here."

It was the first time anyone had done that to me. I was terrified, and I felt filthy.

I wanted to push her off. Being held made it hard to breathe.

But apart from Grandma, she was the only person I'd ever trusted with nothing held back.

Chapter 6

For the next several days Marina didn't leave the house or contact Derek once.

She stayed with me every hour of it.

When the fever wouldn't break, she changed the cloth on my forehead more times than I could count.

When I came out of a nightmare, she talked me back down and back to sleep.

When I couldn't stand the idea of seeing anybody, she cut off every meeting and every business call she had.

I let myself believe, pathetically, that it was because she cared.

Then Derek showed up with a stack of contracts, and started laying out photographs of women I didn't know.

"You might not know these faces, but your body does.

"Thanks to you, every one of them signed off on a project for Marina."

He matched each photograph to an agreement, one after another, until there was a roaring in my head.

"What... what are you saying?"

Derek laughed under his breath, enjoying every second of it.

"Still not getting it, brother?

"Marina's been climbing over you this whole time. That marriage certificate is a fake. Do you have any idea how many people have been in your bed?"

Something came down inside me.

"You're lying," I screamed at him.

"Am I? Go and look for yourself."

Derek gave me one last look, half pity and half contempt, dropped a flash drive on the desk, and left.

I picked it up with shaking hands, put it in the computer, and opened the video files.

One woman after another, none of them familiar, came up on the screen.

They walked in like they'd done it a hundred times, keyed in the code, and went straight into my bedroom.

My skin was flushed a color it shouldn't have been, and then the picture started to move and I couldn't keep watching.

No. That wasn't how it happened.

I'd been with Marina. I knew I'd been with Marina.

My eyes swam past the empty milk glass on the nightstand and stopped there.

Every piece of it fell into place at once.

Every kind thing Marina had ever done turned into a blade and went straight into my chest.

The door opened right then, and all of it detonated.

I threw the computer at her and screamed, "Why? Why would you do this to me?"

Next to me coming apart, Marina was too calm. She stood there and didn't move.

Calm enough that I felt like I'd never known her at all.

Only once I'd gone quiet did she glance at me, frowning. Her voice was flat. "Adrian, don't look at me like that. I was only putting you to the best use you had.

"Once Crowell Dynamics is stable, I'll marry you properly."

"Marina, you're a monster."

It was the most absurd thing I'd ever heard. I ripped the drive out, shoved past her, and went for the door.

Her security stopped me without effort and took the evidence out of my hand.

They pinned both my arms behind my back.

Marina crouched down in front of me, wiped my face dry, and straightened my shirt.

The hands were gentle. What she said wasn't.

"It won't do you any good. Whatever you say, I can bury it.

"People without power get walked on. Adrian, have you forgotten? That's how the two of us grew up."

Marina proved again that she does exactly what she says she'll do.

Every move I made was watched.

The few times I got out of the townhouse, her people had me back inside ten minutes.

Then she locked me in a room with no windows.

She knew that after that night the thing I feared most was the dark.

That was the point. It was a punishment.

I curled up in the corner, lost track of day and night, and started seeing things that weren't there.

I didn't want to die. I didn't want to give up either.

So I stopped eating. The day I finally passed out, her men took me to Ravenport Medical Center.

That was where I got loose, and I made it to the public signing ceremony for one of her projects.

"Marina Crowell has no conscience left..."

I never finished it. Someone dragged me off.

In a back alley where nobody could see, they shattered my knee.

Through the edges of it, I saw Marina appear at the mouth of the alley.

She took hold of my chin. "Adrian, all I wanted was a better life for us. Why can't you ever just listen?"

What I got for not listening was prison.

A homicide conviction. Five years, just like that.

"Adrian."

Marina's voice pulled me back out of it.

She came toward me a step at a time, and only then did I notice the agreement in her hand.

She stopped in front of me and held it out.

"What I did back then was wrong..."