Chapter 4: Inside the Black Sedan
The interior of the car smelled of expensive leather, rain, and a faint hint of cedarwood. The door clicked shut with a heavy, deadened thud that isolated us completely from the outside world. The tall bodyguard climbed back into the driver's seat, and the sedan glided forward into the mist without a jerking motion.
Vance didn't speak immediately. He turned his head slightly to look at me, his dark eyes studying my profile in the dim amber light filtering through the windshield. Up close, without the diner's fluorescent tubes overhead, he looked younger than I first thought—perhaps thirty-two or thirty-three—but carved from the kind of heavy-duty stress that ages a man faster than years.
"You've changed your hair," he said softly.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I whispered, staring straight ahead at the glass partition behind the driver.
"In Chicago, it was long. Down to your waist. Always braided back when you worked the ovens," he continued, as if I hadn't spoken at all. "You used to wear an apron with a blue trim at the old place on Taylor Street. Before the fire."
My breath caught in my throat. The fire. The word hung in the confined space of the car like a physical weight. I had read about it in the local papers five years ago—an electrical fault, they said, that gutted the old family bakery and left three people hospitalized. Everyone thought the kitchen girl had perished in the smoke. I let them think it.
"The fire was an accident," I managed to choke out, my voice barely a rattle.
"The fire inspector said faulty wiring," Vance agreed, his voice dropping lower, vibrating with a dangerous, suppressed fury. "Insurance investigators called it an act of God. But my uncle lost his life, and you disappeared the exact same night."
"I didn't cause the fire," I turned toward him, tears finally breaking free and spilling hot down my cheeks. "I tried to put it out. I screamed for help until my lungs were full of ash. You think I wanted to leave?"
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"Then why run?" Vance demanded, his large hand coming down on the leather seat between us, not touching me, but close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his skin. "Why change your name? Why hide in a diner in the middle of nowhere serving coffee to truckers if you had nothing to do with what happened?"
"Because your family owns half the city, Julian," I said, using his name for the first time, tasting the syllables like old copper. "And the other half belongs to men who wanted my father's recipes in their hands by any means necessary. You think the fire was an accident? Ask your cousin Marcus who bought the insurance policy two weeks before it burned."
