The study door was yanked open from the inside. Alex stood there, glaring at Catherine under the harsh hallway lights.

Arjun's wheelchair stopped right in the doorway. His blind eyes stared straight ahead, but his head tilted slightly, locking onto her exact position.

Catherine forced her body to tremble. She took a jerky step backward.

"I-I'm sorry!" she stammered in her thick, nasal country accent. "I was just looking for the kitchen to get some water. This place is so big, I got lost."

Alex frowned, looking at her cheap cotton sweatpants and her hunched posture. He looked unconvinced.

Arjun let out a harsh, mocking breath. "Pathetic," he spat. "Get her out of my sight."

Catherine kept her head down and hurried past the doorway to escape.

As she walked past Arjun's wheelchair, the motion of her body pushed a small wave of air directly across his face.

Arjun's nostrils flared. His head snapped toward her.

He smelled the faint, crisp scent of rain mixed with the sharp, sterile bite of medical alcohol. It was the exact same scent that had clung to the skin of the woman in the safe room.

His brain flashed with the memory of the dark. His hand shot out.

His fingers clamped around Catherine's wrist like a steel trap.

Catherine stumbled, crying out as the brutal force nearly pulled her down onto his lap. Her heart slammed against her sternum.

Arjun yanked her arm, pulling her body flush against the side of his chair. He buried his face near the crook of her neck, inhaling deeply like a starving animal.

"What are you doing?!" Catherine shrieked, struggling against his grip, keeping her accent thick and panicked.

Alex stepped forward. "Sir, maybe we should-"

Arjun threw up his free hand, silencing Alex instantly.

"Why do you smell like that?" Arjun demanded, his voice a lethal whisper. "Who the hell are you?"

Catherine's mind raced. She needed a flawless lie.

"I spilled the first-aid alcohol!" she cried, tears of fake panic welling in her eyes. "I was cleaning the bathroom in the guest room and knocked the bottle over! And I left the window open, the rain blew in on the rug! I'm sorry!"

Arjun's jaw tightened. The logic was sound. A thunderstorm was currently raging outside over Manhattan.

But his paranoia was deep. He didn't let go. Instead, his large hand slid up her arm, moving toward her waist.

He was looking for the deep, jagged scar on her hip. He had felt it in the dark last night. If his fingers touched that scar, she was dead.

His hand brushed the hem of her shirt.

Catherine gasped loudly. She violently doubled over, clutching her stomach, and dropped to her knees on the carpet. She ripped her arm out of his loosened grip.

Arjun froze, his hand hovering in the empty air. "What kind of trick is this?" he snarled.

Catherine curled into a tight ball on the floor, shivering. She bit her lip and let out a pathetic whimper.

"It's my time of the month," she sobbed, her voice thick with fake humiliation and pain. "The cramps are killing me. Please, just let me go to bed."

The words hit Arjun like a physical blow. His face went completely rigid.

His mind calculated the biology. The woman from last night was a wildfire of heat and slick readiness. She was absolutely, biologically not experiencing a severe menstrual cycle today.

The excuse was biologically plausible, yet utterly repulsive. It didn't erase his suspicion, but it muddled the scent trail. He filed the data point away, a dissonant note in a growing symphony of questions about her. A wave of intense disgust washed over his features. He wiped his hand on his trousers as if he had touched garbage.

"Call a maid," Arjun ordered Alex, his voice dripping with revulsion. "Get this mess out of my hallway."

He spun his wheelchair around and rolled back into the study, slamming the door behind him.

A maid practically dragged Catherine back to the guest room.

The moment the door locked behind her, the pathetic, shivering expression vanished from Catherine's face. Her eyes went cold and sharp.

She walked to the window. The Manhattan thunderstorm battered the glass. Arjun's net was closing in fast. She had to cut the strings.

She unzipped the hidden lining of her backpack and pulled out the burner phone she had stolen from Arjun's nightstand. She popped the back casing off, unzipped a hidden pocket in her backpack to reveal a micro-toolkit, and with a pair of precision tweezers, plucked the GPS tracking chip from the motherboard, crushing it under her heel.

She booted the phone and routed the signal through a triple-encrypted proxy server on the dark web, bypassing the Hughes family's massive Wi-Fi firewall.

She dialed a thirteen-digit number. It rang three times.

"Speak," a lazy male voice answered.

It was Silas Vane, her underground information broker, currently sitting in his illegal gallery in Brooklyn.

Catherine held a small voice-modulator device to the microphone. "Status on The Elysium Club," she ordered. The modulator warped her voice into the deep, metallic rasp of her hacker alias, Nyx.

Silas whistled over the line. "Servers are scorched earth, Nyx. Military-grade wipe."

Catherine nodded to herself. Arjun's enemies had covered their tracks.

"But," Silas added, his voice dropping, "there's a massive bounty on the dark net right now. Someone is throwing millions to find the owner of a broken St. Christopher medal."

"Drop fake chatter," Catherine commanded. "Flood the boards. Make it look like the medal was pawned in a market in Prague."

"No way," Silas scoffed. "That bounty has Hughes money written all over it. I'm not crossing that psycho. Besides, what could you possibly offer me? Unless you think you can fix that Dutch landscape I told you about? The one that idiot ruined with bleach?"

Catherine's eyes narrowed. "Do it, and I will restore the 17th-century Dutch landscape you're hiding in your vault. Free of charge."

Silence hung on the line. Silas gasped. "You're pulling the Blank Canvas card? You swear you'll fix it?"

"Get the fake intel out tonight," Catherine said, and hung up.

She shoved the phone into a hollow space inside the air conditioning vent and went to sleep.

The next morning, the storm had cleared. A loud, sharp knock rattled her door.

Arthur stood in the hallway. "The master requires your presence in the living room immediately, madam. We have a guest."

Catherine pulled on a drab, shapeless gray skirt and a faded sweater. She followed Arthur into the sunlit, sprawling living room.

Sitting on the white leather sofa was a woman dripping in diamonds. Cassandra Leigh-Wentworth. She was a top-tier New York socialite and Arjun's most aggressive pursuer.

Cassandra took one look at Catherine's cheap clothes and sneered. The heavy scent of her floral perfume filled the room.

Arjun sat in his wheelchair near the window, sipping black coffee. His face was a mask of indifference.

Catherine realized instantly: Arjun had summoned her to act as a human shield to disgust and drive away this annoying woman.

Cassandra stood up. Her six-inch heels clicked sharply against the floor. She walked right up to Catherine and pointed a manicured finger at her.

"You," Cassandra snapped, treating the legal wife of the house like a scullery maid. "Go to the kitchen and fetch me a fresh cappuccino. Skim milk. Now."

The maids standing by the walls held their breath.

Catherine did not flinch. She did not cry. She slowly raised her chin and looked directly into Cassandra's eyes.

The timid, hunched posture evaporated. Catherine's spine straightened. A terrifying, icy aura radiated from her body.

Catherine parted her lips. A cold smile touched the corners of her mouth.

Catherine did not move toward the kitchen. She stared at Cassandra's pointing finger.

"I would," Catherine said. Her voice was still thick with that nasal country twang, yet her delivery was razor-sharp and unyielding. "But I am afraid the heat of the coffee might further activate the cheap, synthetic base notes of your perfume. Smells exactly like the discount air freshener in my uncle's rusted pickup truck. Gives me a terrible headache."

Cassandra's jaw dropped.

Catherine took a slow step forward, her eyes locked on the socialite. "You are wearing a discontinued batch. The top notes of bergamot have already oxidized, leaving only the chemical binder. It smells exactly like a discount taxi air freshener."

Cassandra's face flushed a violent, ugly red. Her pride was shredded in front of the entire staff.

"You trailer-trash bitch!" Cassandra shrieked. She raised her hand high, aiming a vicious slap right at Catherine's face.

Catherine's eyes flashed. She raised her left arm in a lazy, sweeping block. As Cassandra's arm came down, Catherine's knuckles struck the exact ulnar nerve cluster on Cassandra's forearm.

Cassandra screamed. Her entire arm went instantly numb. She lost her balance on her stilettos and crashed hard onto the expensive Persian rug.

Arjun's hand paused in mid-air, his coffee cup hovering near his lips. His head turned sharply toward the sound of the heavy thud.

Cassandra clutched her dead arm, tears streaming down her face. "Arjun! She assaulted me! Throw this animal out!"

Arjun slowly lowered his cup to the saucer. A dark, cruel smirk played on his lips.

"Since my wife finds your scent offensive," Arjun said, his voice dropping to a freezing register, "you can leave my house. Now."

Cassandra gasped, humiliated and horrified. She scrambled off the floor and ran for the elevator, sobbing.

The heavy doors slammed shut. The living room fell into a dead, terrified silence.

Catherine immediately dropped her shoulders. She hunched her back and looked at the floor, waiting to be dismissed.

"That was quite the bold observation for a country girl," Arjun said. His voice cut through the silence like a blade.

Catherine's heart skipped a beat. She pinched her throat. "I-I watch a lot of perfume commercials on the TV, sir," she stammered in her country drawl. "I just repeated what the lady on the show said."

Arjun let out a low scoff. He didn't believe her, but he didn't care enough to press it.

"Push my chair," Arjun commanded. "Take me to the greenhouse. I need to get that cheap floral stench out of my lungs."

Catherine walked behind him. She gripped the cold metal handles of the wheelchair and pushed him down the hall into the massive, glass-enclosed botanical conservatory on the roof.

The humid, heavy air of the greenhouse wrapped around them.

"Stop," Arjun ordered.

Catherine stopped the chair. Before she could step back, Arjun reached back and grabbed her wrist. His grip was punishing.

"Do not think that because you chased away an idiot, you have any power here," Arjun whispered. "This marriage is a piece of paper. Cross my boundaries, and I will break you."

Catherine stared down at his knuckles. "If I am so useless," she asked quietly, "why didn't you throw me out with her?"

Arjun's jaw clenched. He didn't know the answer. He didn't know why the faint smell of her skin made his chest tight.

He shoved her arm away violently. "Because you are too stupid to be a threat."

Before Catherine could reply, the glass doors of the greenhouse burst open. Arthur ran in, his usual calm completely shattered.

"Sir," Arthur gasped. "The Nexus Dynamics medical database. We are under a massive cyber attack. The firewalls are failing."