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."

Arjun's face turned to stone. He slammed his hand onto the joystick of his wheelchair.

"Get me to the underground server room. Now," Arjun ordered Arthur.

He spun the chair around, completely ignoring Catherine, and sped out of the greenhouse.

Catherine watched them leave. A satisfied smirk touched her lips. Silas had done his job perfectly. The network was distracted.

She walked quickly back to her room. She stripped off the ugly skirt and pulled on a pair of black tactical pants, a black hoodie, and a dark baseball cap. She strapped a medical-grade folding knife to her ankle.

She slipped out the service elevator, avoiding the main lobby cameras, and stepped out into the chaotic streets of Manhattan.

She blended into the dense crowd walking down Fifth Avenue, heading toward the subway to Brooklyn.

Suddenly, a woman screamed.

Catherine stopped. Ten yards ahead, outside a luxury café, a crowd was forming in a circle.

She pushed through the wall of bodies.

An elderly man in a bespoke tweed suit was thrashing on the concrete pavement. His face was turning a deep, horrifying shade of purple. His hands clawed desperately at his own throat.

A burly man in a chauffeur's uniform knelt beside him, screaming into a cell phone. "911! He's not breathing! He's choking!"

Catherine's eyes scanned the old man's swollen neck and the lack of chest movement. It wasn't a heart attack. It was acute epiglottitis. His airway was completely sealed shut.

He had less than two minutes before brain death.

Catherine dropped to her knees. She shoved the chauffeur hard in the chest. "Move!"

"Get off him!" the driver yelled, grabbing her shoulder.

Catherine shot him a glare so lethal it froze the man in place. "He is dying. Hold his head still."

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a cheap plastic ballpoint pen. She bit the end off and spat the ink cartridge onto the street, leaving a hollow plastic tube.

She drew the folding knife from her ankle. With her free hand, she cleanly tore open an alcohol wipe she kept in a sealed pouch, ensuring her fingers never touched the sterile pad itself as she meticulously disinfected the blade.

The crowd gasped. Someone yelled, "She has a knife! Call the cops!"

Catherine quickly pulled her dark hoodie up, letting the thick fabric drape over the sides of her face, effectively shielding her profile from the lenses. Cell phone cameras went up everywhere. She kept her back angled toward the largest cluster of onlookers, ensuring her features remained in deep shadow.

Catherine ignored the noise. She found the cricothyroid membrane on the old man's neck with her thumb.

She pressed the blade down and made a precise, half-inch horizontal slash.

Blood welled up instantly. She shoved the hollow pen tube directly into the bleeding hole in his trachea.

A sharp, hissing sound cut through the panic. Air rushed through the tube into the old man's lungs.

His chest heaved. The purple color began to drain from his face, replaced by the flush of oxygenated blood. He coughed violently, his eyes fluttering open.

The crowd erupted into applause. The chauffeur fell back, crying in relief.

The wail of ambulance sirens pierced the air, growing louder.

Catherine knew the police would lock down the scene and demand ID. She yanked her cap down low over her eyes.

She stood up, wiped the blood off her knife on her pants, and melted backward into the cheering crowd.

By the time the paramedics rushed in, the girl in the black cap was gone.

Catherine navigated the labyrinth of alleyways, making sure she had no tail. She arrived at a rusted iron door behind an abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn.

She knocked three times, paused, then twice. A peephole slid open.

The door unlocked. Catherine stepped into the heavy smell of oil paint and ozone.

Silas sat in front of a wall of glowing monitors. He spun around in his chair, grinning wildly.

"I'm in," Silas said. "I cracked the Hughes medical vault."