When Nash awoke he was back in his bed. He would have thought it was all a dream but when he moved his arm, he realized it had all happened, painfully so. He lifted his limb and looked at the wrapped and bloodied bandages. He had the same brand that he now knew Temple carried.
We’re both owned by that woman, or at least she thinks so. But if I survive Myanmar her life will be over, even if it costs me mine.
CHAPTER
10
SPEERS SAT ON HER TATAMImat with a large mirror hanging on one wall in front of her. Her mother was Chinese, her father of English descent, but culturally she was Japanese, and her possessions, interests, and lifestyle reflected that upbringing.
With her white robe off she ran her gaze over her naked reflection. Steers’s eyes passed along her face, her chest, her flat belly, her long legs. The flames had not reached there. In those areas she looked “normal.”
The clothing she typically wore concealed everything that she wanted hidden from view. This was not from embarrassment. She could walk naked through her people and no one would ever make a comment, or even flinch in revulsion. Not because they cared about her, but because they cared about living.Thatwas the power she held, and it was an intoxicating thing.
Sometimes too intoxicating. Sometimes too . . .
No, Steers kept her damaged flesh away from everyone because it belonged to her and no one else. Steers had been running the business for years when theaccidenthad occurred.
The plane they were on had suffered an explosion of some kind while in the air. Her father had looked upon her in horror, as, afire, she screamed in her plane seat across from him. This was moments before part of the plane’s interior dislodged from the violent impact with the ground, and crushed his life away.
The only other person to survive the plane crash had been her loyal Hiroko, who had been with Steers since birth. Hiroko was a woman whom Steers revered, and loved. This woman, then over seventy years of age, had managed to pull a critically injured Steers from the wreckage and roll her over until the flames were extinguished.
Hiroko had tended to her as best she could and then alerted authorities, who had taken the unconscious Steers to the nearest hospital. Steers had then been airlifted, along with Hiroko, to an acute trauma facility, where a number of operations had taken place to stabilize her health. Hiroko’s miraculously minor injuries had been treated there as well. Two years of more surgeries and intense rounds of physical therapy had followed as Steers regained the use of her arms and normal range of motion in her back, shoulders, and arms. She had then endured additional surgeries to repair and clean away more damaged flesh. Hiroko, the only family she really had left, had been with her for every moment of this hellish journey.
Steers had resisted calls from her doctors to completely fix the damage to her skin. As she had explained to Nash, what remained was the most powerful incentive she had to survive.
Because I almost didn’t. And my father did perish. That is all I need to understand how precious what I have truly is. And how deadly even one mistake can be.
After she had recovered, Steers had thanked Hiroko profusely and rewarded the woman for her courage and loyalty. Hiroko, now long since retired, lived in peace with all her needs taken care of in an apartment in Steers’s building.
During her recovery, with her father dead and her mother imprisoned, Steers had nearly lost her empire. But the loss of her father and her own miraculous survival drove every small step she took in her recovery. There were many tiny victories and more sweeping, grander moments that, at the end, saw her reassume her perch at the top of the Steers organization.
She now rose and stood before the mirror.
They thought they had beaten me. But in the end, I survived.
She smiled at her reflection as she thought of this. Then the smile wilted away, like a rose in the frost.
She had, for years,notsucceeded in her other lofty goal: the liberation of her mother. Now Steers sensed that this was her last chance. And not only for Masuyo, but Steers’s final opportunity as well, for her empire and her life were more precariously situated than they appeared. She had long suspected that enemies of the Steers family had sabotaged her plane, hoping to take out both her and her father. Then with her mother behind bars in another country their empire would be ripe for conquering. But from her hospital bed Steers had not allowed that to happen, taking decisive action while she was in excruciating pain to ensure that her business remained intact. Now the only thing lacking was her mother.
She had not told anyone who it was that actually ran that mysterious prison. He was also the man who had met her on the airplane tarmac and ordered her to destroy Walter Nash. This man was not her partner but hermasterin crime. The very same man who had finally allowed her a visit with her mother. He had not done so out of kindness, for he possessed none. He had allowed the visit simply so Steers would understand that he had complete control over her. That he had all the leverage necessary to dictate the remains of her life.Thiswas his message to her. And it had been effectively if subtly given.
Well, I am preparing my message back to him. And I will either be free of him, or I will be dead.
She flexed and stretched for one hour, allowing her stiffened skin to push and pull in remarkable ranges of motion that not a single one of her doctors told her would ever be possible. Finished, she put her robe back on, sat down, and stared once more at her unblemished face in the mirror.
Dillon Hope is a most interesting man. Perhaps the most interesting of my current acquaintance.
Temple was not remotely fascinating to her, largely because she had divined everything held within the man’s heart and soul within five minutes of meeting him. The same had been the case for his father. Barton Temple had been smarter, cagier, more ruthless than his son. But he, too, had been quite transparent in what drove him to do what he did in life: money, greed, and power. Sought by so many and, in the end, meaning absolutely nothing at all.
I have money and power. But I do not possess greed. What I desire is survival. And then to die on my own terms. That is all.
Dillon Hope was a different matter altogether from the Temples. She did not really know why he was here, since she did not believe that he was simply Temple’s bodyguard. Paid mercenaries did not blindly walk to their deaths for men they barely knew. Money was never a great enough incentive, and she did not see in Hope a man obsessed with wealth. So he was here for another reason.
Friend or foe, Mr. Hope? I saw how you looked at me yet I could not read what your gaze truly meant, although most men are so easy to understand. But we will have to see with you, won’t we?
But even as she thought this, Steers’s spirits faltered and she pulled her gaze away from her reflection.
Dillon Hope said that he is nothing to me. But, in reality, I am nothing, too. I have been that way for a long time. And I see no way back to where I truly began. Which is a defeat that no discipline, no effort, no sheer willpower on my part can possibly overcome.