Chapter 1 Behind the Mask

The first gunshot ripped through the quiet night, dragging Indigo awake so violently that for one terrifying second she forgot how to breathe. She lay frozen beneath her blanket, staring into the darkness while her heartbeat pounded against her ribs, and she told herself the sound had come from somewhere outside the estate. A tire bursts. Fireworks. Anything but what her body already understood.

Another gunshot cracked through the silence, and a scream followed it this time, short and raw, and the blood drained from her face because there was no more room for doubt.

Someone was inside the house.

She pushed off the blanket and tried to stand, but her legs buckled under her, so she dropped instead to the floor and pressed herself against the cold tiles as another scream tore down the hallway.

Her mother's voice rose up in memory, steady the way it had always been.

"If danger ever finds you," Sable used to say, "don't let panic think for you. Look. Listen. Breathe. Then decide."

Indigo had laughed at those words once. Now they were the only thing keeping her from screaming.

She made herself listen. Heavy footsteps below. Voices she didn't recognize. More gunshots, and something heavy crashing downstairs hard enough that she felt it through her palms on the floor.

"What's happening?" she whispered, and no one answered, only another cry that ended too suddenly.

"Mom," she breathed, the word slipping out before she could stop it.

Every instinct told her not to open the door. She searched the room instead for somewhere to hide, but nothing offered real safety. Under the bed was too obvious. The wardrobe would be the first place searched. The window sat too high to jump from.

Then footsteps stopped just outside her door, and her heart seemed to stop with them. She pressed both hands over her mouth as they drew closer, bracing for the door to burst open.

Instead, a whisper.

"Baby... baby..."

Her eyes snapped open. "Mummy!"

Sable crawled into the room and shut the door behind her at once. She looked nothing like the composed woman Indigo had always known, her hair loose, her breath uneven, fear trembling behind a smile she was fighting to hold.

"Don't cry," she whispered, reaching for her daughter. "Come here."

Indigo threw herself into her mother's arms, and for the first time since the gunshots began, she managed to breathe. Gunfire continued somewhere below them, but inside those arms she found the smallest piece of safety, even as her mother's racing heartbeat betrayed every calm word she said.

After her father died, Sable had become everything, mother and father and protector at once. Whenever Indigo had asked about her father's past, Sable answered with a smile, but a burst of tears reached her eyes before changing the subject. As Indigo grew older, she'd noticed other things too. A suitcase packed and hidden. Documents locked away. The way her mother checked every window before bed, the way she froze at an unfamiliar car outside the gate. Indigo had told herself it was grief. Now she wondered if it had always been fear.

"Mummy. Tell me what's happening."

Sable looked at her for a long moment, then cupped her daughter's face in both hands.

"Listen carefully. If anything happens tonight—"

"No." Indigo shook her head immediately.

"Listen to me." The firmness in her mother's voice silenced her. "You must survive. If anyone asks you about your father—"

"My father?"

"—tell them you know nothing."

"What are you talking about?"

"And if anyone asks about the documents—"

"What documents?"

Sable closed her eyes, and pain crossed her face before she spoke again. "I should have told you sooner."

"Mummy, you're scaring me."

An explosion shook the house before Sable could answer, dust sifting down from the ceiling as she pulled Indigo into another embrace.

"In a few days, you turn eighteen," Sable said, and Indigo thought of the trip her mother had promised, the bags packed in secret, the smiles that had felt like excitement and were, she understood now, something closer to fear.

They had not been planning a trip. They had been planning to run.

"Mummy, I love you."

Sable kissed her forehead. "I love you more than my own life."

The door exploded inward.

A masked man in black filled the doorway with a gun already raised, and everything after that happened too fast to follow. Sable shoved Indigo behind her. The man crossed the room and closed a hand around Indigo's wrist.

"No!"

She fought him with everything she had, kicking, twisting, clawing at his arm.

"Leave her alone!" Sable screamed, throwing herself toward them. "Take everything, money, the house, just don't hurt my daughter!"

The masked man looked at her, and his voice came out colder than anything Indigo had heard in her life.

"Tell that to your husband when you get to hell."

The shot echoed through the room. Sable collapsed, and blood spread beneath her while Indigo stared, unable to make her body move. For one heartbeat, the world simply stopped. Then instinct took over, and she sank her teeth into the man's hand hard enough to taste copper. He cursed and let go, and she ran to her mother, dropping to her knees, pressing both hands over the wound, though some part of her already understood it wouldn't matter.

"Mummy. Please stay with me. Please."

Sable's breathing grew weaker under her hands. She reached up with trembling fingers and touched her daughter's cheek one last time.

"I'm... sorry."

Her hand slipped away. The light went out of her eyes.

"No," Indigo said, shaking her gently, refusing it. "No, Mummy, you promised. You promised we'd leave together." The words broke apart into sobs just as hands seized her from behind.

She fought without thinking, reaching for a broken lamp by the bed, but he dragged her clear before her fingers closed around it. Even as he pulled her, some cold, useful part of her mind kept working, memorizing his height, the roughness of his grip, the shape of his voice. If she lived through this, she would not forget him.

"Please," she cried. "She's still alive, help her, I'll do anything—"

"Shut up." His palm crashed across her face and sent her stumbling to the floor. In the ringing silence that followed, something in his voice snagged at her memory. Not a stranger's voice. A voice from birthdays. From dinners. From a hundred ordinary evenings, she would now have to look back on them differently.

She lifted her head slowly.

He pointed the gun at her. "One more word and I'll kill you too."

Fear still had her by the throat, but something else was rising above it now, quiet and sharp. Recognition.

"Stand up." He hauled her upright by the hair, and she let herself cry out louder than the pain required, if only to buy a half second of him thinking her broken. Then she twisted, caught the edge of the mask, and pulled.

It came away in her hand.

Time seemed to stop. Every sound in the room fell away as she stared at the face in front of her, her breath catching, her eyes going wide with a horror that had nothing to do with the gun.

"No," she whispered. "It can't be."

It was her uncle Dominic.

Her father's brother. The man who had come to their house so many times after her father died, the man her mother had trusted, the man Indigo had once believed was family.

"Shit," Dominic muttered. "No point hiding my face now."

He struck her again before she could speak, and her head snapped to the side, but the wound in her chest hurt worse than her cheek.

"Uncle Dominic, why?" Her voice shook with everything at once, grief and rage and disbelief. "Why would you do this to us?"

He looked at her as though she were the one at fault. "If your mother had signed the house over to me after your father died, none of this would have happened."

"Where would we have gone?" she demanded through her tears. "What could you possibly gain from this?"

"Wealth," he said, eyes hard with something ugly. "Money. Power. Everything that comes with it."

She stared at him, and the man in front of her stopped being her uncle at all. He was a stranger wearing a familiar face.

"You're a disgrace," she said, and her voice, for once, didn't shake. "I curse the day I called you family."

Anger flared across his features, and before she could brace for it, he pressed a cloth over her nose and mouth. She fought against the sharp chemical smell, pushing at his chest, but her body betrayed her, going heavy and slow until the room folded into darkness.

Dominic carried her out to a waiting car and dropped her inside like cargo. His phone rang before he'd even shut the door.

"Done, Caspian," he said. "I've got the girl. I hope you've got the money."

He ended the call, started the engine, and drove into the dark.

Indigo surfaced slowly, her mouth bitter, her head pounding, her mother's name still on her lips from somewhere inside sleep. She blinked against unfamiliar walls, an unfamiliar bed, cold air that didn't belong to her.

"Where am I?"

She tried to sit up and found her wrists bound to the frame. The memories came back all at once, cruel and complete. The gunshots. Her mother's scream. Dominic's face beneath the mask. Blood on the floor of her own bedroom.

"She's gone," Indigo whispered. "He killed her."

Grief closed around her chest until breathing hurt, but underneath it, quietly, she made herself do the one thing she still could. She looked. She listened. The room was large, expensively furnished, the kind of place built to keep a person comfortable and contained at the same time. She noted the window, the door, the absence of anything sharp within reach. If there was ever a way out, she intended to know where it was.

The door opened, and Dominic stepped in with another man beside him, tall, composed, carrying an authority that filled the room before he'd said a word.

"Here she is, Caspian," Dominic said, almost cheerful. "Now do we have a deal?"

Caspian said nothing at first. He drew out his phone, tapped at the screen, and returned it to his pocket. A moment later, Dominic's eyes went wide with something close to joy.

"Six million dollars," he said, half to himself.

Indigo's stomach dropped. Six million dollars. That was what her life had been priced at, by the same man who had once held her at family dinners and called her his brother's girl.

"You can go now," Caspian said. His voice was quiet, but it carried the kind of certainty that didn't need volume.

"Of course." Dominic smiled, and it was an uglier thing than his mask had ever been. "She'll make you good money one way or another. She's still my brother's blood, though, so try not to break her too fast."

Something passed over Caspian's face at that, brief and unreadable, gone before Indigo could name it. He didn't answer. He only watched Dominic leave the way a man watches something he has already decided he despises.

"Uncle Dominic!" Indigo pulled hard against the ropes, some old instinct still hoping he might turn back. "Please, don't leave me here!"

He didn't look back. The door shut behind him, and she stared at it, her lips trembling, until she made herself stop calling for a man who had already sold her.

Caspian crossed the room, and every step of his made her pulse climb. He stopped at the edge of the bed and looked down at her with an expression that held nothing warm in it at all.

"Your uncle isn't coming back," he said. "And no one else is coming either, no matter how loud you scream."

She said nothing. Fear had her voice by the throat, but she made herself hold his gaze anyway, some stubborn, unbroken part of her refusing to look away first.

"You want to know why," he said. It wasn't a question.

She didn't answer, only watched him, cataloguing him the way she'd catalogued Dominic's voice in the dark, height and stillness and the particular chill in his eyes, because information was the only weapon she had left.

He studied her a moment longer, something almost like curiosity behind the coldness, as if her silence had surprised him.

"You'll learn soon enough," he said, and turned to go.

The door closed, and the lock clicked into place, and Indigo lay alone in the dark, grieving her mother and already, quietly, beginning to plan.