Chapter Three (Nora)

Chapter Three (Nora)

When I opened my eyes, the sky was still gray. The wind sliced at my face like a blade. My hands were bound behind my back with a thick rope, and I was dangling in midair.

Beneath my feet was a lake the color of lead.

It was November in the Hudson Valley. A thin rim of ice had already formed around the edges of the lake. Only the middle still gleamed with dark, open water.

I knew this lake.

Julian had built it for me.

When I was sixteen, I told him I loved skating on frozen lakes in winter. So he bought this entire valley, dug a private lake, and built a glass studio on its shore. He said that every winter from then on, he would paint in the studio and watch me skate.

A crane stood on the bank. The steel cable holding me hung from its arm.

Julian stood on the shore, smoking and talking with one of his men.

I'd always had sharp ears. The wind carried every word to me.

"Boss, didn't Mr. Cole and Mr. Hayes already handle the poisoning? Your show in Paris isn't even over. Why fly back yourself?"

Julian ground out his cigarette.

"They're them. I'm me."

"I'm the one who loves Lacey most. Anyone who touches a hair on her head pays for it. Even if it's my own sister."

Hanging there in the air, I burst into tears. The cold wind made them sting.

When I crossed into this world, I was born into it as a baby.

From the day I was born, it was Julian who took care of me. Our parents were always abroad. He was the one who changed my diapers and walked the living room all night long with me crying in his arms.

When he was fourteen, he got into a fight in Brooklyn and was stabbed. He collapsed in an alley in the pouring rain. I was the one who found him. I carried him on my back through the mud for two whole blocks before I could flag down a cab.

He lived. I ended up with a fever of a hundred and four from the rain.

He sat by my bed for seven days and seven nights. When I finally woke up, he held me and cried like a child.

"I'll never fight again. I'm going to protect you for the rest of my life."

Two years ago, there was an accident at his studio. A steel plate fell and crushed both of his hands.

On the day the doctors amputated, he burned every painting in his studio. He said that without his hands and without his art, he was nothing.

I traded another ten years of my life to give him back his hands.

And his inspiration along with them.

The first painting he made after he left the hospital was called Nora. It could have sold at Christie's for nine figures, but he couldn't bear to part with it. In the end, it hung in my bedroom.

Before long, two more cars pulled up by the lake.

Adrian and Caleb got out. When they saw me hanging in the air, their faces visibly changed.

But Lacey climbed out right behind them, wrapped in a snow-white cashmere coat. She walked up to Julian, rose onto her toes, and murmured something in his ear.

The three men exchanged a look.

And then they simply stood there on the shore with their arms crossed, as if waiting for a show to begin.

The steel cable went slack.

I plunged into the lake.

The freezing water drove into my body like a thousand knives at once. The fresh wound from my kidney surgery, my broken left arm, my legs still full of glass, all of it exploded with pain in the same instant.

Before I could even surface, the rope jerked tight again.

A speedboat roared off across the water, dragging me behind it, back and forth across the lake.

Again and again I was pulled under, then hauled back up. Ice water flooded my nose and throat. My lungs felt packed with shards of ice.

"Julian!" I screamed into the spray, my voice shredded. "Have you all gone insane?! Is everything we had worth less than some woman who came out of nowhere?!"

For a moment, all three men on the shore looked shaken.

Lacey's eyes reddened at once. She opened her coat and lifted the hem of her sweater, revealing an ugly old scar along her side.

"Miss Sinclair, why would you say that?" Her voice was soft and trembling. "This lake isn't even frozen yet. What's a little soak to you?"

"But last winter, when you cut a hole in the ice and pushed me through it... I was under that ice for three whole minutes."

I stared at the scar, cold all over.

I had never even seen this woman before.

A year ago, she had suddenly appeared in our kitchen. No one knew where she came from. No one could find anything about her past. Yet less than a month after she arrived, the three men who loved me most fell for her one after another, as if they were under a spell.

The eyes of the three men on the shore went cold.

"Faster," Julian told the man on the speedboat. "Let her find out what it feels like to choke in ice water."

The engine roared.

I was dragged toward the deepest water at the center of the lake.

[Countdown: three minutes.]

Lake water poured into my mouth. I strained upward with everything I had, but my broken arm had no strength, and my bound hands wouldn't come free.

[Two minutes.]

I was dragged beneath the ice.

Above me was a pale white sheet. Through it, I could dimly make out the figures on the shore.

I rammed the ice with my forehead. Once. Twice.

It didn't budge.

[One minute.]

The last of the air in my lungs was gone.

I stopped struggling.

I remembered, years ago, Julian teaching me to skate on this lake. I fell, and he was the first one to reach me. He scooped me up off the ice, wrapped me in his own coat, and said:

"Don't be scared. Your big brother's here. There's nothing under the ice."

[Countdown complete.]

[Host exit sequence initiated.]

I floated up.

I hovered above the lake and looked down at the lead-gray water. Beneath the ice was a blurred shape that didn't move.

That was me.

On the shore, Lacey slipped her arm through Adrian's and laughed softly. "Look at her, putting on a show again. She's been playing the victim since she was a kid."

Adrian shouted toward the lake. "Nora, that's enough! Get out of there!"

Caleb frowned and lit a cigarette. "Let her soak another five minutes. Maybe she'll learn something."

Five minutes passed.

Nothing stirred on the surface of the lake.

The cigarette slipped from Julian's fingers.

He stared at the motionless shape beneath the ice, and the color drained from his face, little by little.

"Nora?"

"Nora!"

He was the first to run. He didn't even take off his coat before he plunged into the freezing water.

Adrian and Caleb froze for one second, then raced for the shore like madmen.

The three of them smashed through the ice and dragged me up from the bottom of the lake.

My lips were purple, my face was gray, and there was no warmth left anywhere in my body.

Adrian knelt in the snow and reached a shaking hand toward my nose to feel for breath.

Those hands had signed contracts worth tens of billions without ever trembling once. Now they couldn't stop shaking.

"She's not breathing..."

His voice was so quiet it didn't sound like his own.

And then I heard the voice.

Not inside my head.

It came from the sky above the entire valley.

[Bound targets: Adrian Cole, Caleb Hayes, Julian Sinclair.]

[Retrieval sequence officially initiated.]