Chapter 6

A maid practically dragged Catherine back to the guest room.

The moment the door locked behind her, the pathetic, shivering expression vanished from Catherine's face. Her eyes went cold and sharp.

She walked to the window. The Manhattan thunderstorm battered the glass. Arjun's net was closing in fast. She had to cut the strings.

She unzipped the hidden lining of her backpack and pulled out the burner phone she had stolen from Arjun's nightstand. She popped the back casing off, unzipped a hidden pocket in her backpack to reveal a micro-toolkit, and with a pair of precision tweezers, plucked the GPS tracking chip from the motherboard, crushing it under her heel.

She booted the phone and routed the signal through a triple-encrypted proxy server on the dark web, bypassing the Hughes family's massive Wi-Fi firewall.

She dialed a thirteen-digit number. It rang three times.

"Speak," a lazy male voice answered.

It was Silas Vane, her underground information broker, currently sitting in his illegal gallery in Brooklyn.

Catherine held a small voice-modulator device to the microphone. "Status on The Elysium Club," she ordered. The modulator warped her voice into the deep, metallic rasp of her hacker alias, Nyx.

Silas whistled over the line. "Servers are scorched earth, Nyx. Military-grade wipe."

Catherine nodded to herself. Arjun's enemies had covered their tracks.

"But," Silas added, his voice dropping, "there's a massive bounty on the dark net right now. Someone is throwing millions to find the owner of a broken St. Christopher medal."

"Drop fake chatter," Catherine commanded. "Flood the boards. Make it look like the medal was pawned in a market in Prague."

"No way," Silas scoffed. "That bounty has Hughes money written all over it. I'm not crossing that psycho. Besides, what could you possibly offer me? Unless you think you can fix that Dutch landscape I told you about? The one that idiot ruined with bleach?"

Catherine's eyes narrowed. "Do it, and I will restore the 17th-century Dutch landscape you're hiding in your vault. Free of charge."

Silence hung on the line. Silas gasped. "You're pulling the Blank Canvas card? You swear you'll fix it?"

"Get the fake intel out tonight," Catherine said, and hung up.

She shoved the phone into a hollow space inside the air conditioning vent and went to sleep.

The next morning, the storm had cleared. A loud, sharp knock rattled her door.

Arthur stood in the hallway. "The master requires your presence in the living room immediately, madam. We have a guest."

Catherine pulled on a drab, shapeless gray skirt and a faded sweater. She followed Arthur into the sunlit, sprawling living room.

Sitting on the white leather sofa was a woman dripping in diamonds. Cassandra Leigh-Wentworth. She was a top-tier New York socialite and Arjun's most aggressive pursuer.

Cassandra took one look at Catherine's cheap clothes and sneered. The heavy scent of her floral perfume filled the room.

Arjun sat in his wheelchair near the window, sipping black coffee. His face was a mask of indifference.

Catherine realized instantly: Arjun had summoned her to act as a human shield to disgust and drive away this annoying woman.

Cassandra stood up. Her six-inch heels clicked sharply against the floor. She walked right up to Catherine and pointed a manicured finger at her.

"You," Cassandra snapped, treating the legal wife of the house like a scullery maid. "Go to the kitchen and fetch me a fresh cappuccino. Skim milk. Now."

The maids standing by the walls held their breath.

Catherine did not flinch. She did not cry. She slowly raised her chin and looked directly into Cassandra's eyes.

The timid, hunched posture evaporated. Catherine's spine straightened. A terrifying, icy aura radiated from her body.

Catherine parted her lips. A cold smile touched the corners of her mouth.