Victoria Fox - Power Games

One is trapped beneath something solid. He doesn’t know if he is alive or dead. He must be dead, he thinks, because everything is dark.

One is the first to move. She gropes into the black and detects the outline of her hand, tentative and ghostly, and knows in that moment she has made it.

Half a mile behind, the remainder of the cabin is suspended in a tree seventy metres from the ground. It hangs between moss-covered creepers and is tilted on one side, caught in a nest of fronds. The ribbons strain: they cannot hold it.

Inside, a woman opens her eyes. She can hear her breathing, fast and short, and the furious blood in her veins.

There is a final, desperate moment before somebody screams. The animal cry flies into the jungle like spitting fire, a red warning: there are survivors.

Szolsvár Castle, Gemenc Forest, Hungary

The same day

Nine thousand miles away, in an ancient fortress buried deep in the woodland, the telephone rings. Its chime echoes through sprawling gothic caverns, lonely and stark.

Billionaire Voldan Cane receives it.

Anticipation climbs in his throat. ‘Is it done?’ he rasps.

The voice makes him wait. Eventually, it comes.

‘Yes. It is done.’

Voldan exhales. A wheezing moan escapes where the skin between his top lip and his nose has ruptured. His bruised heart burns.

It is done.

The call is terminated. Voldan tries to smile but it is hard. The movement tugs at his ruined features, his sallow skin pitted as fruit peel. Normally he avoids his tortured image—mirrors have long been banished from these rooms—but here, in the high, arched windows of Szolsvár’s Great Hall, he catches a flash of the man he used to be: handsome, wealthy, coveted … happy.

One out of four isn’t bad.

The panes are faded and cobwebbed with age. Only Voldan’s eyes betray the depths of his satisfaction. It is done.

He backs away from his reflection and the shadows swallow him whole.

Six months earlier

New York

Angela Silvers was being fucked from here to infinity.

At least, that was how it looked. In the mirrored dressing room of Fit for NYC, the bijou latest addition to her chain of sought-after fashion boutiques, her image was fractured and repeated, chasing replicas of her naked body to vanishing point. Angela was flung against the sweat-slicked glass, her arms wide and her blood racing.

The man between her thighs was forbidden.

Noah Lawson.

Movie star, heart-throb, teenage crush—the man she wasn’t allowed to have.

Noah’s tongue circled with exquisite precision, tracing around, between and beneath, everywhere but the place she knew would ignite her like dynamite.

She grabbed his hair, tilting her hips, and gasped as fireflies swarmed in her belly, rising and rising until the world and everything in it diminished to the pure, clear pleasure of her approaching climax. Oh, how she had tried to forget him. Noah was her lover, her best friend and her constant: he was the magic in her heart.

She couldn’t help the rebellion. It had been in her since she was fifteen.

‘Keep going!’ she begged. ‘Don’t stop!’

Drawing her to him, Noah plunged deep, finally giving her what she wanted where she wanted it, and in a delicious, delirious flash she was there, slave to the surge, electric ripples tearing her apart. He kissed her lips, her neck, her collarbone, and whispered in her ear those three sweet words he saved just for her.

If only she believed them.

‘Ms Silvers?’ There was a knock at the door: a female voice, summoning her for the launch. ‘They’re ready for you. Is everything all right?’

Angela closed her eyes, throwing her head back to gasp her admission: ‘I’m coming!’

Fit for NYC was a walk-in wow-fest of everything retail could and should be.

The gallery was spectacular. Silhouetted mannequins were draped in lace and crepe. Champagne glittered on diamond plinths, embossed with the golden FNYC logo. The air was spritzed with an aroma of privacy, of secrecy, even of conspiracy. Couches sat plump as raspberries, their Milanese fabrics shimmering with hand-gilded leaf, and goblets of fizz drifted along with zingy morsels of antipasto: juicy baby figs, Parma ham as light as silk, salty pepperoncini and fleshy artichoke. The pieces were one-offs, painstakingly selected from the fiercest new collections; if not by Angela then by her trusted clique of buyers. Personal assistants were on hand to advise. Designers were commissioned for bespoke tailoring. Caskets housed the chicest of gems. Fit for NYC was set to become the shopping mecca of the super-rich.

Heads turned as Angela moved across the floor. Hers was a potent sensuality that combined feisty Italian beauty with the self-assurance and class of an elite Bostonian heritage. In a tailored trouser suit with deep V neckline and heels that put her at a fraction under six feet, Angela Silvers was bracingly attractive.

She smoothed her curls. Sex hair. Her cheeks were still flushed, her knees weak.

Already she ached for Noah, her skin dancing from his touch and his kiss still alive on her lips. Why did they have to hide? Why couldn’t he be here, at her side?

Some days Angela convinced herself to throw it all to hell and stand in defiance of her father; others, it was career suicide. Donald Silvers was a powerful, domineering man, and he would not be moved when it came to his precious only daughter: if he found out she and Noah were together, he would take from Angela the one thing she had always craved—that one day, the family business would be hers.

Her heart or her ambition … Why did she have to choose?

According to her father, despite Noah’s fame and riches, he wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t from her stock. Girls in Angela’s position were expected to see and be seen with the right sort of man, to date wisely, to marry correctly.

She ignored the sliver of doubt that told her that wasn’t the only reason. Doubt that looped through a hole in her heart; a hole Noah himself had made years before.

The thing was, no one else matched up. No one looked at her in the way Noah did. No one listened, and cared, and made her laugh. No one held her hand and kissed her like it was the last kiss on earth. No one made love to her like he did.

‘ I’ll call you ,’ she had told him, as he’d slipped through the doors and into the night. His strong arms around her, his voice in her ear: ‘ Not if I call you first … ’

‘Where’ve you been?’

Orlando, the elder of her two brothers, swiped a chalice of Louis Roederer and drank lustily from it. At thirty Orlando was a polished, complacent kind of handsome, as if his looks and status were assets he had won on merit, not by chance.

‘Shouldn’t you slow down?’ Angela commented. Unable to resist stoking the fire of sibling rivalry, she added wickedly: ‘Anyone would think you were jealous.’

‘Jealous?’ He snorted. ‘Hardly.’

But she didn’t believe it. Orlando and Luca existed on the soft plush pillow of their father’s wealth like cats in the sun, safe in the assurance that they had to do very little to merit his attention. Angela, on the other hand, had had a fight on her hands since day one—and it had forced her to succeed. As the only girl and third in line to the Silvers throne, she was long accustomed to a role in the shadows. Why should a world-famous heiress to immeasurable fortune be getting involved in the tough stuff when there were more frivolous things to be doing, like getting her nails done, or partying, or visiting their private Hawaiian retreat for a week of sun and spa?