eyes boring into the face of the woman opposite her, long fingernails tapping on the polished wood of the boardroom table to emphasise the point she was making.
‘We can’t let things go on any longer as they are.’
‘We?’ Penny questioned, determined not to let Zarek’s stepmother run this meeting, have things all her own way.
There was no escaping the decision that she had known she had to face some time. The decision everyone had been demanding she make for a year or more now. And deep down she knew she’d already made it. But it didn’t mean that she was happy about it.
‘We are all shareholders,’ her mother-in-law pointed out, the bite of acid on the words making Penny flinch inwardly.
‘Minority shareholders,’ she flashed back, determined not to show how her stomach was tying itself in knots; the fight she was having to keep at least some degree of composure in the face of the bitterness of the inevitable.
‘But nevertheless Odysseus Shipping is a family concern.’
It was Petros, Hermione’s second son and Jason’s younger brother who spoke, shifting his bulky form on his chair in a movement that echoed the impatience in his voice.
‘And you are blocking us from playing a part in running the company,’ he tossed over the table at her. ‘We all need to put our expertise to work to keep it running—and growing. Without Zarek it has become a rudderless ship.’
His stiff tone and totally focused expression gave no sign at all of even noticing the pun.
‘It needs someone in charge.’
‘I am in charge,’ Penny declared, stiffening in her seat.
This was how it had been from the moment that Zarek had first been declared missing. The rest of the family had barely given her time to register the loss of her husband, let alone grieve for him, before they had been putting pressure on her to find a new head of the family firm, and at least once every month they had dragged the subject of his successor up again. She’d tried to hold it together, she really had. But she’d had enough.
‘It’s a shipping empire,’ Petros dismissed her protest with a contemptuous wave of his hand. ‘A man should be in charge because we all know Zarek isn’t coming home. And until things are made official then the company will always be in a shaky state. A prey for rumour and scandal in the papers. An insecure bet for investors.’
‘You know what has to be done.’ Jason leaned forward now to distract her attention. Obviously he had seen the way her jaw had tightened, her breath hissing in between clenched teeth, and he was clearly worried that she was going to go back on what she’d told him last night. ‘Penny, it’s over two years since Zarek went missing. There has been no sign of him, no word in all that time. It’s time we accepted what we all know as the truth and had him officially declared dead.’
There. It was out. The words seemed to land on the table with a deafening thud, lying there in front of her in an almost solid form. Too real to reject or deny. But now when it came to it she didn’t know if she could go through with this.
‘It takes seven years to have someone who’s missing officially declared dead.’
‘Not in a case like this,’ Jason reminded her. ‘Not when there is so much evidence as to what really happened and that you can file a petition to have him legally declared dead. You know that everything points to the assumption that Zarek died that day on the boat. Even the pirate chief himself said…’
‘I know what he said!’ Penny’s tone was sharp as much from the knowledge that she really didn’t have a leg to stand on as from the fear of hearing those words spoken aloud again.
‘That’s him,’ the leader of the pirates who had boarded the Troy, the boat that Zarek had been on on the very last day he had been seen, had said when they had shown him a photograph of Zarek during the investigation into what had happened. ‘That’s the one. And, yes, he’s dead. I put a bullet in his head myself.’
He had been so openly defiant, so proud at the thought that he had killed one of the hated Westerners, the rich who had so much more than he and his band had ever had, that he hadn’t even cared that he had convicted himself of murder with his own words.
‘And then I watched him fall overboard into the ocean…He’s shark food by now for sure.’
Penny shivered in spite of the sun beating through the window at her back. She had had nightmares about those words for months, could still wake up in a cold sweat with them pounding at her head, making her heart race in panic. In her nightmares she had seen Zarek’s face as he had walked away from her, his expression cold and hard, eyes dark and shuttered. The knowledge that she had lashed out in her own pain, using the words that were guaranteed to drive him from her, still haunted her with the thought that they had been the last words he had heard from her. And now, when she saw him again, in her dreams, she knew that the glaze on his eyes was put there not by anger but something far more devastating.
‘Then you know that the lawyers told us that someone who had been exposed to “imminent peril” like that and failed to return can be declared dead well before the legal time limit is up.’
‘I know…’
She knew but she didn’t want to face it. Making that decision would mean admitting that Hermione and her sons had finally dragged her down.
Suddenly in the distance there was a faint scream and a crash that brought her head swinging round, eyes going to the door from behind which the sound had come.
‘What…?’
‘One of the stupid maids being clumsy, I suspect,’ Jason commented dryly, shrugging off the interruption. ‘I suspect that means that our coffees will now be delayed. Penny…’
‘And the girl will have to replace the broken crockery out of her wages,’ Hermione added snappishly, frustration at the fact that things were not going her way obviously showing in her voice.
Pushing back her chair, she got to her feet and headed for the door, obviously determined to reprimand the poor girl severely at the very least. And it was that small action that pushed Penny out of her inertia, reminding her forcefully of just why she had made her decision last night. Why she so wanted to get out of here.
‘You’re so right, Jason,’ she declared with force. ‘Zarek’s gone and Odysseus Shipping is all mine to do with as I please. So once the formalities are over—if we can work out terms— then the company is yours, Jason.’
And she would be free to live her own life.
Reaching for the glass of water in front of her, she lifted it, tilting it in Jason’s direction in mockery of a toast, not daring to lift it to her lips for fear that her throat had closed up so badly that the water would choke her.
‘The king is dead,’ she proclaimed, making her voice sound as light and careless as she possibly could. ‘Long live the king.’
Her words fell into a strange and disturbing silence. A silence that seemed to reach out and enclose her, tangling round her throat and making it impossible to breathe.
Suddenly Jason wasn’t looking at her. He had turned away and was staring in the opposite
