She had a bad feeling about tonight.
It didn’t help that, even after everything she’d done for him, all the risks she’d taken, Hunter told her nothing. Like who Hélène was and why she’d left in such a hurry. Or why he had to go to this poker game tonight. Or what he planned to do with the money, assuming he won.
“I will win,” he told her, through chattering teeth. It was a flash of the old Hunter, the cocky charmer she remembered. But a rare one. And he didn’t look like a winner anymore. He looked like a desperate man, in need of a real doctor.
After two weeks together, Sally still didn’t even know what Hunter’s mysterious article was about, or where and when he was going to publish it.
“Soon,” was all he’d tell her. “The less you know, the safer you are, Sal.”
But Sally didn’t feel safe. As she dressed Hunter’s wounds, tended his fevers and pumped him up with the illegal antibiotics she’d bought online, she felt further and further removed from reality. From the normal world she’d left behind in London. Her flat. Her job.
Ex-job.
All she had left was her own article, her own secrets. She tried to focus on writing, while Hunter was running around the city doing God knows what, but it was hard. Right now Sally couldn’t imagine how today would end, never mind make any sort of plan for the future. Somehow her exposé of corruption in the fracking business no longer seemed as important and earth shattering as it had when it started. She felt isolated and riddled with doubt.
Even Tracy Whitney had stopped calling. It was as if Sally and Hunter were on a boat with no power, drifting deeper and deeper out to sea. Hunter claimed to know where they were going. But all Sally could do was sit and wait for them to sink, or starve, or go insane out here all alone.
A knock on the door made her leap out of her skin. Darting into the bedroom, Sally reached under the bed with shaking hands and grabbed Hunter’s gun. Images of Bob Daley’s head being blown apart rushed, unbidden, into her mind.
Flattening her back to the wall, she edged back into the living room, towards the door. Adrenaline coursed through her body. She was ready to shoot when she suddenly caught a glimpse of who it was on the doorstep:
Monsieur Hanneau, their sweet, bookish next-door neighbor.
For God’s sake. Feeling foolish and ridiculous, Sally slipped the gun under a cushion and opened the door. He probably wanted to borrow a cup of sugar or something. This was Belgium, not bloody Beirut.
“Hello, Monsieur Hanneau. I was just . . .”
The bullet was silent, but it blew a hole in Sally’s chest the size of a grapefruit.
She was dead before she hit the floor.
HARRY GRAHAM LOST THE first two games. He won modestly in the third and grotesquely overplayed his hand on the fourth, ending up down several hundred thousand euros.
Luc Charles thought, Reckless doesn’t begin to cover it. This fellow Graham clearly had money to burn.
At nine o’clock they broke for a meal—fat, juicy mussels in white wine and garlic, washed down with a local Belgian beer. Harry Graham barely touched his food. Understandable, given how much money he’d just lost, although Luc Charles got the unsettling impression that losing didn’t seem to mean that much to Mr. Graham.
It’s not the winning, Luc decided. It’s the playing. The high stakes. The risk. As long as his adrenaline’s up, that’s all that matters.
“One more hand, Mr. Graham?” Charles asked, as a butler cleared away the plates.
It was a rhetorical question, but the American answered anyway, nodding brusquely.
“Of course. Always.”
FORTY MINUTES LATER, A murderous Luc Charles watched from the window as his guests took their leave. Pierre Gassin and Dom Crecy both left by car, their chauffeur driven Bentleys arriving discreetly at the side entrance to the monastery. Johnny Cray drove off in his own, matte-black limited-edition Lamborghini.
Cray’s friend Harry Graham, the night’s big winner, hopped into a water taxi. Luc watched his skinny, blond head get smaller and smaller before fading to black completely as the boat drifted down the canal, swallowed by the night.
In Harry Graham’s pocket was a check made out to cash.
It was for 850,000 euros.
He played me, Luc Charles thought darkly. The bastard played me.
Luc never made bets above his personal limit of a hundred thousand per hand. Never. Yet somehow this silent stranger had lured him into it.
Johnny Cray had described Harry Graham as reckless. But the truth was, Harry had made Luc Charles reckless.