The Shadow's Vow: My Husband, The Enemy

Money was not smellable in the vault of the Thorne estate. The odor was of ozone and old parchment, and the chilly sterile odor of death. Ava frozen, her heart beating out a desperate rate against her ribs, which seemed loud enough to set off the acoustic sensors. She didn't look like a thief. She wore a costly backless spilled Burgundy silk dress worth $5,000, and had pinned back her hair in a false chignon, and she looked precisely as she was faking, a tedious socialite who had lost her way to the powder room. However, bypass chips were not carried by socialites in dresses. Come on, she whispered her fingers very still as she came up to the glass-thin device and touched its side to the biometric scanner. The light was played by a hostile crimson to a gentle, enticing green. Click. With a hissing sound the great steel door opened. Ava crept in her heels in the reinforced floor being quiet. She was aiming at a black obsidian pedestal in the middle of the room: an obsidian drive the place of the Scattered List-the names of all politicians currently paid by the Thorne Empire. Grasping picked her fingers, their gloved length ten centimeters distant, as the chilliness in the room appeared to increase by a full ten degrees. You know I didn't think you should be so much overdressed to have burglarized, Miss Sterling. It sounded as though released torture on the tightness of silk, on the civilized, and dreadfully silent. Ava froze. She did not at once turn about. She calculated. The exit was behind her. It was a voice in her left side which was in shadow. She began to put her hand into her clutch, and pick up the little canister of neuro-sedative, when her hands sank in a light. Cyrus Thorne was sitting in a smooth carbon-fiber wheelchair close to the door. The Broken King of Oakhaven was a more impressive sight with the naked eye rather than the paparazzi images, which were unclear. His features were a genius of hard lines and coldness. His legs were covered with a heavy knitted blanket, and his shoulders were broad, and stuffed into the tailored tuxedo frame. Ava relaxed her face into that of a practiced innocence and said, "Mr. Thorne," She turned and smiled at him a brilliant, counterfeit smiling. I think there must have been a wrong turn. This is something of a maze, a house, is it? Cyrus didn't smile back. He didn't even blink. He just stared at her, with eye-colours like a tempest-cloud. The powder rooms, Ava, are in the East Wing. This is below the basement of a half-inch pressurized door. A single strand of raven hair fell down over his forehead and he tilted his head. And your name is not Ava Sterling. It's Ava Valois. The past three years you have been spending fixing the messes of the elite. You're quite good. But you've grown arrogant." The air left Ava's lungs. Not only was her cover blown, it was burnt. Which is why you knew who I was, and you already called the police. Why am I not in handcuffs?" The motor was almost silent, and Cyrus rolled forward in his chair. He had come near within a few inches of her, very close enough to scent his cologne-sandalwood, and something metallic, such as rain on hot asphalt. Owing to the fact that police would take you off, he said, and his voice was low and close and vibrative. And I could use better a woman who could lie as well as you could. He touched her, and his fingers surprisingly warm brushed the pulse point on her neck. He was aware of her heart beating. He knew she was afraid. My board of directors believe I am a dead man waiting to be buried, Cyrus further added. They desire some cause to take away my titles. They believe that a man cannot be a leader with broken parts. But a man who has a wife, dedicated and brilliant and beautiful...that is man that the people trust. Ava narrowed her eyes. "You want a puppet bride." It is an actress that I desire, I want, Cyrus corrected. "One year. You will live here. You shall go with me to all the gala-days. Thou shalt be the ideal Thorne Queen. I will then in return erase security footage of you breaking into this vault. And I will give you your debt to the Board -The debt thou now dost put thy life to pay. Ava stiffened. He knew about her debt. He knew everything. "And if I refuse?" This made Cyrus stiffen up and turn his face stone-cold. "Then I press a button. The silent alarm clears. The police arrive. And your younger brother, Leo, is deprived of his so-called anonymous donor to his medical treatments. As dead thieves cannot pay in hospital bills. Ava felt the world tilt. He had discovered her one infirmity. She gazed at the man in the wheelchair--the man that was pitied by the world--and knew that the world was not right. Cyrus Thorne wasn't broken. He was by far the worst man she had ever encountered. One year, she spat the words, bad as poison. "One year," Cyrus agreed. Into his jacket he thrust his hand and drew a diamond ring the size of the egg of a bird, cold and shiny. "Don't look so miserable, Ava. It's a wedding, not a funeral." Ava peeped in as he slipped the heavy band of gold on to her finger. His hand was firm, strong, and completely unyielding, to a man who was to have been paralyzed. She looked up at him, peering into his eyes, and caught a glimpse of something- not pity, but black, savage contentment. Then Ava knew that she did not only sign a contract. She had just entered into a cage with a lion who was posing as a lamb.