in in pieces—the oil-black shoes, the expensively tailored suit pants, the way a strip of crisp white shirt emerged from each sleeve of his jacket. His suit was the sharp, thousand-dollar sort she had seen on models in magazines and on businessmen who dealt in money and gambling and sex with their secretaries. He was tall. One of his hands was visible. Strong knuckles. His hair, the colour of sand after the tide’s been in; his precise profile and square-sharp jaw; his mouth. In his right earlobe he wore a flat black stud, which was ill-matched with the attire and spoke of something exotic.
The man regarded her directly and with a gaze that was bluer than the colour itself, light blue of a kind that seemed artificial. She saw his top lip was scarred, a jagged groove that ran like lightning, almost ugly, through his philtrum.
‘You got no business comin’ round here,’ warned one of Diego’s gang. They were hesitant with the stranger—they outnumbered him and yet they did not make a move. ‘Walk away now an’ no one gets hurt.’
The man reached down to Lori and held out his hand. With the gesture, his sleeve lifted a fraction and she saw a thin band of leather encircling his wrist.
‘Get up,’ he told her.
Diego was quick but the stranger was quicker, bringing Lori to her feet as if she weighed nothing at all. Smoothly, swiftly, he positioned his body in front of hers, simultaneously catching Diego’s punch in one of his fists.
‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’
Diego’s eyes flashed a caution. One of his guys freed a gun. The weapon was raised.
‘We ain’t gonna tell you again,’ growled Diego. ‘Walk away. ’
One of the crew lunged but the man seized the strike, twisting the elbow back at such an angle that the body crumpled to the floor.
‘My arm!’ the guy howled. ‘My fuckin’ arm, you’ve broken it, you sonofabitch!’
A second swing; the audible rush of swiped air as he evaded the blow, landing his own fist squarely in the throat of his assailant, who performed a sickening pirouette and was slammed back against the wall with a force that made something crack.
The next she knew, they had the gun. The last of Diego’s crew still standing was making a run for it. ‘Fuckin’ get outta here, man!’ he urged his chief. ‘Fuckin’ let’s go!’
Diego stared down his own weapon. ‘You don’t know who I am,’ he said. ‘Do you?’
The gun didn’t waver.
Lori saw Diego hesitate, a ripple of fear behind his eyes.
‘Take your men away from here,’ the stranger said, in an accent she could not place. ‘And don’t ever come back. If you come back, you will disappear. Nobody will know what happened to you. Your wives will not know. Your friends will not know. Your brothers will not know. Your children will not know. Your lovers will wait for you in a cold room in a cold bed but you will never come. Do not doubt this will happen. If you come here again, it will happen to every last one of you.’
And in a rush that felt like flying, the stranger had taken her hand, she was with him, next to him, and they were moving, out of the door and into the blazing sun. She saw his car, a gleaming, purring Mercedes, black and silver, opened to an interior of plush, heavy-scented leather, a secret world. She hadn’t time to question her actions. They were inside, the door slammed shut; he was pushing a button and giving instructions to someone up front, concealed behind a screen of dark glass, to drive. He turned to her, eyes so blue, so blue.
‘I won’t let you go until I know it is over. I’m not going to hurt you. You’re safe with me.’
She found her voice, only it sounded like someone else’s. ‘Do I know you?’
‘No.’
The car was moving at speed. ‘Who are you?’
‘I am no one.’
Lori wanted to touch him. She wanted to touch him in a way she had never before encountered—raw, necessary, primal. The stranger was facing away, his profile still, his mouth set in a line of grim determination, as though he were trying to resist unseen temptation.
And then, she didn’t know how it happened, they were kissing each other, their bodies apart one second and together the next. His lips, his tongue, that scar she had noticed that felt, beneath her mouth, like danger. The smell of leather and the smell of him: his neck, his skin, the softness of his mouth and eyelashes. His hands held her face, one thumb on her chin where it was cut, the fingers behind her jaw, beneath her earlobes. She had never been kissed like that. She could kiss him for ever. She could kiss him till her mouth bled.
Not once did his hands move lower, though she ached for them to. She wanted him to touch her in all the places she had refused her boyfriend: all the emotions she was meant to feel with Rico but hadn’t, imagining something must be the matter with her. His fingers reached round and pressed the very top of her spine, his touch so deft, electricity, the heat of his body and the soft insistency of his mouth, and she felt the blood rush like fever, trembling, to between her legs. For the first time in her life, Lori experienced desire. Prolonged, exquisite, concentrated desire that entered her like a knife and twisted her heart, sliding its smooth blade down her stomach, opening her up to that place whose existence she had always denied.
The car stopped. The man pulled away, his expression closed, but angry, like an argument happening behind a shut door.
The only sound was their breathing, painfully intimate in the silence.
Lori sensed the certainty of their parting and grasped for more, abandoning restraint because that was what he had done to her.
‘I have to find a way to thank you—’
Sunlight flooded in, hurting her eyes. They were back outside Tres Hermanas. His driver stood on the sidewalk.
The man took her hand. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he told her, in that soft, strange accent. ‘I’ll make sure of it. I always will.’
Lori was helped on to the street, the light blinding: a new world. She was shaking.
His arm reached to close the door.
‘Wait! Will I see you again? What’s your name? You have to tell me. I have to know.’
The man lifted his mouth slightly, the corners, not much, like a cat that wakes from a deep sleep and raises his head once to look around before settling again. It wasn’t a smile. It didn’t come close to the eyes, whose look of benevolence had hardened like a frozen lake.
‘It does not matter who I am.’
And with a last, lingering stare, as quick as he’d come, he was gone.
14
Present Day
Island of Cacatra, Indian Ocean
Four hours to departure
Reuben van der Meyde was a self-made industrial entrepreneur with
