Not alone.

A twig cracked underfoot and then she was thrown against the wall, a cold muzzle pressing against her head.

‘State your name,’ a male voice hissed, one hand grabbing her by the hair, holding her in place, the other reaching up and down her body, feeling for weapons. She did the same as she was pressed against the cave wall, reaching for something, anything – a stone as a missile, a stick as a knife . . .

‘Marina. Marina Marquez,’ she whispered, hating that she could hear her own fear. Taste it.

There was a palpable silence, and then she was spun around again. And suddenly nothing and everything made sense.

Chapter Twenty-Four

‘Ah, Charlotte, you slept well, I trust?’ Mateo asked as she appeared on the terrace and began hobbling over.

‘Like the proverbial,’ she smiled, even though the bags under her eyes clearly told another story. But if she looked bad, Nathan looked a lot worse. She could tell from a single glance that he was hungover: it was in the droop of his eyes, the stiff set of his shoulders. Not that she was surprised – she had been able to hear him and Mateo getting stuck in to the brandy, their voices drifting through the house in the early hours. It had been past two when he’d come up and she’d heard him go into the bathroom again at six so she knew he too had barely slept. At one point, she had heard the creak of the treads and seen his shadow stop by the bathroom door into her room. She had frozen, her eyes glued to the dim hovering shape, her heart beating like a jackhammer, all her anger beginning to ball in the pit of her stomach. If he so much as dared . . . She didn’t want his damn apology, not after everything he’d said. But after a while – had he been listening for the sound of her breathing? Crying? – he had moved away, the soft click of his door closing telling her it was safe again.

She would have missed it had she been sleeping herself but she had forgotten to draw the curtains – hopping to the window had felt a hop too far last night – and she was stuck in that no-man’s-land of physical exhaustion and mental mania. Her eyes ached, burning to sleep, as she stared at the wall instead, mind whirling as she listened to the sound of him in the next room but one. She had heard him on the phone to someone – her? – his voice low and even, and then, exercising – push-ups, sit-ups, pushing himself hard, driving on. She just lay in bed listening to it all, these unremarkable everyday sounds of the man who had once been her world, the man who in the space of single days had seduced and then abandoned her, who had rescued and then forsaken her. She had loved him once but now she hated him, and he wanted that? He welcomed it?