Chapter One
Jessa
Two bodyguards have failed and I still owe the bank twenty thousand dollars. And please, let’s not mention my other debts.
I tap my fingers on the conference table and watch Yasmin Bayard choose her words carefully. She has a folder open in front of her that she hasn’t looked at once. Outside the window, London is doing what London does in November, which is exist under a sky the color of wet concrete and make no apologies for it.
“Miss Holloway, the agency wants to express its sincere regret,” Yasmin says, “regarding the outcomes of the previous two assignments.”
“You said that on the phone.”
“I wanted to say it in person.”
I stop tapping my fingers.
“I appreciate that. But I drove five hours to get here, and it wasn’t for an apology.”
I truly hope this is the last time I need to make the trip from Cornwall to London, and back again. After this, the only trip I want to make is back home to New York. With my pockets full.
She nods. She has the posture of someone who delivers difficult news regularly and has made her peace with it – shoulders straight, hands still, expression measured. She is good at her job. I can tell because she hasn’t flinched once, and I have been staring at her since I sat down.
“You gave us your requirements,” she says.
“I did.”
“And we have someone who meets them.”
That is why I’m here.
That is why I took the bank loan in the first place, why I came back to Cornwall after the first failure and the second, why Ididn’t listen to my mom when she called me late at night and said, with the exhaustion of a woman who’s been afraid for a very long time, that she needed me to stop.
She tried the vault herself, years ago. Mr. Tremaine, the keeper of Hollowmere Castle, pulled her out of the tunnels and half carried her back to the gatehouse. She came home to New York with a broken arm, a permanent limp, and a determination to keep me away from Hollowmere.
The Holloways were wealthy for centuries, and then they weren’t. Because that is what happens to old families that confuse luck with permanence. Bad investments, gambling debts, political misjudgments, and the quiet drain of heirs dying in pursuit of a vault they couldn’t reach – it adds up.
By the 1800s, the castle was falling apart. In 1889, the last of the English Holloways packed up and emigrated to America, leaving Hollowmere behind. What followed was a long, slow slide through generations of diminishing returns, until the name was all that remained. The name, and the vault.
My mom and I live in a cramped apartment in New York, splitting rent and bills we can barely cover.
But the Holloway fortune is real. I’ve seen the historical records, the ledgers, the accounts of what the family accumulated over four centuries of tin mining, shipping, and, later, smuggling. It’s all locked in a vault, deep in the cave system beneath Hollowmere Castle, on the north Cornwall coast, and it can only be opened with Holloway blood.
The traps standing between the entrance and the vault have killed or broken every heir who came before me, including my mother and her mother before her.
I spent two years going through every piece of family documentation I could find before I went the first time. Every Holloway before me went alone. I decided I wouldn’t, that Iwould do what none of them had thought to do, which was hire help. Not human help.
Monster Security Agency is the best private security firm in the world, and their operatives are monsters. They are also expensive, which is why I now have a bank loan. I calculated that if I succeeded, I could pay the bank back, clear my student debt, and finally start my life.
My first bodyguard failed. My second one too.
Two failures. Twenty thousand dollars. A debt I can’t service on a psychologist’s salary I don’t yet earn. Because the practice I want to open, which would treat the patients everyone else has given up on – the narcissists, sociopaths, and the people with the kinds of minds that frighten other clinicians – requires money I don’t have. And won’t have unless I get into that vault. The bank was patient once. There is a limit to that patience, and I am aware of it every day.
A few days ago, when I called Yasmin and informed her the second bodyguard had failed, I also told her exactly what I needed.
Someone that doesn’t breathe underwater.
Someone that doesn’t bleed.
Someone that can’t be poisoned.
