The Billionaires’ Death Oracle

CHAPTER FIVE — STATIC:

The yacht was called Persephone, which struck Sophia, standing on its lower deck three weeks later with a glass of champagne she had no intention of drinking, as either a very good joke or a very bad omen. Monaco's harbor glittered beyond the railing, Grand Prix week turning the whole coastline into a single unbroken wall of white hulls and money, and somewhere above her, on the yacht's top deck, Dimitri Aleksandrov and Prince Faisal were circling each other over cocktails with the careful, smiling hostility of men negotiating for something neither would name aloud.

They were negotiating for her. She had stopped pretending otherwise days ago, somewhere between the fourth toast to her "gift" and the sixth man who'd asked, with varying degrees of subtlety, what she would cost to keep permanently.

She had been introduced, over the course of the crossing from Nice, to more billionaires than she could keep straight, a Greek shipping heir with cold, assessing eyes and a habit of standing too close; a hedge fund manager who'd asked, without any apparent shame, what it would cost to retain her exclusively, as though she were a consultant with a day rate; a woman, one of the only women in the whole glittering procession, silk and diamonds and a smile that never once reached her eyes, who'd studied Sophia like a specimen under glass and asked, conversationally, over dessert, if the gift could be inherited, bred, passed down through a bloodline the way good cheekbones were. Sophia had learned, in three long weeks of this, to keep her hands folded, her gloves on even in the Mediterranean heat, her body angled always toward the nearest exit, the nearest stretch of open deck where no one could corner her against a railing.

She noticed him before she understood why she'd noticed him at all.

He was standing apart from the cluster of men near the bar, one shoulder against a support post, watching the party with the flat, unhurried attention of someone cataloguing exits rather than enjoying himself, the same instinct she recognized in her own body without knowing yet that it was the same. He wasn't drinking. He wasn't performing the particular loose, expensive ease that every other man on this boat wore like a second suit, practiced since childhood, worn without ever once noticing the weight of it. When Dimitri's assistant introduced him, "Julian Voss, security consultant" he inclined his head exactly enough to be polite and not one degree further.

"Miss Reyes." His voice was low, unhurried, entirely without the practiced warmth she'd already learned, painfully, to brace herself against. "I hear you're the reason half this boat can't sleep at night."

"Is that a compliment, exactly?"

"It's an observation." Something moved at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile. "I don't have an opinion on it yet."

She offered her hand out of pure habit, the automatic performance she gave to everyone new, already braced for the too-eager grip, the lingering three seconds too long. Julian looked at her outstretched hand for a moment that stretched just slightly past comfortable, and then, deliberately, put his own hand in his pocket.

"I'll pass," he said.

Sophia blinked. No one passed. In three weeks she had shaken a dozen hands from men who wanted, desperately, to know if she'd seen anything when their skin touched hers, who watched her face afterward for any flicker of reaction the way gamblers watch a dealer's hands. No one had ever simply declined.

"You don't believe in it at all," she said.

"I didn't quite say that." He turned his attention back to the party, scanning the deck with the same flat, methodical patience. "I said I'll pass. Different thing."

She found herself furious, and then, disorientingly, curious, and then unable to stop finding reasons to be near the support post where he stood for the rest of the evening, trading clipped, careful sentences that gave away nothing and somehow felt more honest than every warm, generous word Dimitri had ever spoken to her.

The storm came up fast off the coast near midnight, the way storms do in that part of the Mediterranean, turning a calm sea into something with teeth in the space of twenty minutes. The crew moved the party belowdecks in a scramble of silk dresses and shouted instructions, and Sophia, lingering too long at the railing to watch lightning fork over the black water, felt the deck tilt hard beneath her feet and lost her balance entirely.

A hand closed around her wrist.

She knew, even as she fell into him, even as his other arm came around her back to keep her from going over the railing into the black, churning water below, exactly what should happen next. Nineteen years of instinct told her body to brace for it, the drop, the vision, the date and place and cause already assembling behind her eyes the way they always did, the way they had for every hand that had ever touched hers, every single time, without exception, for as long as she could remember.

Nothing came.

No boardroom, blood, careful countdown ticking toward some fixed and terrible hour. Just a strange, staticky blankness, gray and formless, like a television tuned between stations, humming with a kind of silence she had never once felt in nineteen years of touching the dying, a silence that should have felt like relief and instead felt like standing at the edge of something with no bottom at all.

Sophia went very still in his arms, rain plastering her hair flat to her face, the storm around them entirely forgotten.

"Sophia." Julian's voice, close to her ear, urgent with something that wasn't quite concern. "What did you see?"

She looked up at him, lightning throwing his face into sharp, momentary relief, and for the first time since a marble staircase and a stranger's wrist had rearranged the entire shape of her life, she didn't know how to answer the question at all.

"Nothing," she said. "I saw nothing."

And she understood, even as she said it, that nothing had never once frightened her before in her entire life and that it was about to change everything she thought she knew.