I guess that is what road rage is. Someone cuts you up and you react as if someone has raped your daughter. I throw the musical box against the wall. The sound of it shattering is almost a profanity.

For a moment I don’t move. I listen. No one comes. I walk toward the box. The drawer is open. I reach into it and take out the small, folded document inside.

I open it out and look at it in the light of the torch.

For a moment I remember, tangled with him, bonded skin to skin, sharing breath. The way Blake had felt deep inside me. Then I remember—that was not him. That was some other random man that crawled into my life at three a.m. Forget that.

This, this tiny piece of paper in my hand is my ticket out of here.

Blake Law Barrington, you’re about to get the shock of your life. You shouldn’t have double-crossed me.

Thirteen

Lana Barrington

It is during the end of the second act, when the Prince sings to Turandot, ‘You do not know my name. Tell me my name before sunrise, and at dawn, I will die.’

I turn away from the stage and look at Blake. His phone must have vibrated in his pocket, because he is checking the lighted screen. He smiles at me and leaves the box to take the call. It could have been anyone, calling about any number of urgent matters, but it is as if my heart already knows: the unthinkable has happened. For a moment I do nothing, simply sit terrified where I am, and listen to the cruel Turandot accept the Prince’s challenge.

By dawn he will be dead.

Then I stand and follow Blake out. As I open the door I see him terminating his call. His body is stiff and tense. When he looks up at me he looks ashen. I see his hands tremble as he puts his phone away. I stare at him aghast. I was right. The unthinkable has happened.

‘What’s happened? What is it?’ My voice sounds hollow and scared.

He starts walking toward me. ‘I’ve called Tom to pick us up. We have to go home now.’

Fear. Fear. Fear like I have never known coils around me, crushing me so hard, I can hardly take my next breath. I know what he is going to say. I know exactly what he is going to say. I realize I don’t want him to say the words. My head is shaking.

‘No, no,’ I whisper, and start backing away from him.

The second act is over, and all around us people in their finery are streaming out of their boxes, heading toward the restrooms and the bars. I take another backward step and collide with a man in a black suit. He steadies me with his hands. He has dirty blond eyebrows and concerned, muddy brown eyes.

‘Are you all right?’ he asks.

I gaze stupidly at him with my mouth hanging open.

Before my confused, frightened brain can even formulate a reply, Blake appears at my side and takes my arm. The other man drops his hands. He smiles oddly at me and with a nod to Blake leads the woman with him away. My mind reels and incongruously notes that her velvet dress has a tiny stain on the right sleeve. And yet she seems happy. She doesn’t have bad news waiting for her at home. Suddenly I feel nauseated. My fingers shake as they rush to cover my mouth.

‘We have to get home,’ Blake mutters. He leads me through the throng of people. The bar is crowded and the foyer seems suddenly very noisy. We get outside. I take a gulp of cool evening air and shiver. My shoulder curls up around my ears and my ribcage tightens to avoid breathing in the cold air.

‘You’re cold,’ Blake says.

‘I left my wrap in the box,’ I reply in a daze. As if it matters.

He takes off his jacket and wraps it around my shoulders.

I snuggle into the living warmth of his body heat and put off for another second hearing what he has to say to me.

‘Sorab’s missing. Looks like he’s been taken.’

I nod. As if he had said to me, ‘Let’s have a drink before dinner.’ Fighting a sense of disbelief, I clutch his jacket lapels close together and glance away from him. There’s a beggar sitting on the theater steps. He has a mangy dog. It looks mournfully at me. Poor thing. Living on the streets, eating scraps. Someone’s taken my baby. I turn back to Blake.

‘How?’ My voice is surprisingly flat. Almost uninterested. I am conscious that my reaction is strange, to say the least. Perhaps I am in shock.

‘That’s what I intend to find out. Brian thinks it’s Ben.’

‘Ben?’ I repeat. My hands drop to my sides.

Blake nods. ‘He’s gone AWOL.’

‘He’s one of the new guys, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

I force the words out of my throat. ‘One of the men you hired because I asked you to,’ I whisper. My teeth have started chattering.

He pulls his jacket tightly around me and holds me close to his body. I register the heat instantly. He radiates it like a hot water bottle.

‘Stop it. It’s not your fault,’ he says into my hair. ‘Come. Tom’s here. We have to go.’

I turn in the direction he is looking in and see Tom stop the car. Tom doesn’t smile. He looks pale. Blake opens the door and I enter and sit down huddled inside his jacket. I can’t feel anything, but a numbing cold. I clasp my fingers together in my lap to stop them from shaking. Nothing feels real.

I try to remember Ben. Dark hair, generally unsmiling with caramel eyes, suspicious caramel eyes. But that means nothing. They are all like that.

‘Is it possible that Ben might have taken Sorab for a ride in his car…and just not told anyone?’ Even as I say it I know it could never have transpired like that.

Blake shakes his head slowly and squeezes my icy hands.

His thigh is close but not touching mine. I shift so it is touching me and that thin stretch of contact comforts me. I stare silently out of the window, not seeing a thing, and listen to him making phone calls.

‘Get the word out. I want to know who has my son.’

I place my palm on the cold glass pane. I’m so numb. Some of the one-sided conversation slips through the cold fog I am in: Something about seizing Ben’s phone records. Somebody has been to his place. Looking for clues. The phones are already tapped. A police inspector has been discreetly and unofficially contacted. Feelers are already out in the street. The disjointed thought in my numb brain: how fast these men move. As if they were expecting such a scenario. An ambulance, its siren turned off, but its lights flashing, passes us on its way to another tragedy.

I think of Sorab’s little face and a shudder goes through me. Where is he? He is not familiar with Ben. He will be so frightened. He will have to go to sleep without his favorite toy. He has never been to bed without clutching Sleepy Teddy. I think of him blinking up at me from my lap. The image is oddly painful.

And then a clear thought, so comforting: They will not hurt him. They just want money. Blake will give them whatever they ask. I know Blake has ties with the underworld and the mafia. Obviously, we will get our son back. Some part of me knows, of course, that I am probably deceiving myself, but at that moment that baseless belief comforts me tremendously. I lie back and close my eyes and don’t allow myself to think further than that. I just listen to the blood pounding steadily in my ears and concentrate on the feel of Blake’s thigh pressed into mine.

When I get home the nightmare becomes real. The dining room looks like a war office with listening equipment and gadgets I cannot recognize, and Geraldine looks at me with huge, frightened eyes.

‘I’m so sorry, Lana. I was only in the toilet for a minute,’ she says in a trembling voice.

Fourteen

Blake Law Barrington

Brian walks into the room and lowers himself into a chair and sits forward. He is sporting bronze stubble and looks uneasy. My senses flash a warning and adrenalin starts frothing into my veins. His eyes, always deliberately expressionless anyway, are flat and dead. I’ve known him a long time.