The tension in the room could be cut with a knife.

Mary sat behind her desk, tapping her fingers against the surface. When she lowered her glasses, allowing them to hang from the chain around her neck, the troubled look in her eyes startled me.

“I’m trying,” I said in an attempt to head her off. “Really. She’s speaking now, so that’s a positive development. Right?”

“Yes, that’s a positive development. I knew it was only a matter of time.” She exchanged a look with Gate, the only other person in the room with us.

“All right, then. What gives? What don’t I know about?”

“Sit down,” she instructed, pointing to a chair across from where she waited.

There were very few people in my sphere of acquaintance who could make an order like that and expect me to acquiesce without question.

She was one of them. I sat, as did my cousin, while she stood.

“There’s something we didn’t tell you about when Alan found the Jeep,” Gate explained. “Not that anyone deliberately tried to keep information from you, but it didn’t seem at the time like this could uncover anything serious.”

“I don’t understand. What did he find?”

She looked at me as though I had gone nutty. “The car’s license plate. We ran it through our system in the hopes of finding the girl’s name, an address, anything we might need. Don’t forget—while we’re protecting and caring for her, there could be people looking for her out there. People who love her and think she’s dead. If that were the case, I couldn’t harbor her here without at least letting them know she was still alive—and if there are extenuating circumstances which make it impossible or ill-advised for her to return home, I would be happy to provide protection. But there’s no way I could keep her here without knowing the first thing about her.”

“Fair enough,” I managed to reply through the ruckus in my head.

Neither of them looked happy at that moment. The news they’d found wasn’t good. “So? What did you find?”

“The car is registered to one Richard Davison,” she reported, handing me a thick file enclosed in a manila folder. “I realize you have no reason to be familiar with the name, but it’s a rather notorious one on the islands.”

My heart sank when I heard the way she said the name. As though she were giving voice to a curse she’d rather not speak aloud.

“I guess it would be too much to ask that he be infamous for doing great charitable works?” I asked, dreading what I would find inside.

“Just look at the file,” she asked, unamused.

I opened it, and the sight of a dead body greeted me. A man with half of his face blown off, in a black-and-white police photo. Another of a body in a garbage dumpster. Two bodies in a car, both of them shot through the head as they sat in the front seat. Another, and another, and more after that.

“This is the handiwork of Mr. Davison, then?” I asked, my stomach turning at the grisly images.

“If not his direct handiwork, definitely that of his close associates. Likely performed at his command,” Mary mused, leaning against her desk with her arms folded across her chest. “This is merely the tip of the iceberg. He has his hands in more illegal, violent, shady deals than even the most experienced members of the intelligence community are aware of. It’s his job to be discreet, after all—the crimes we’re aware of were mistakes, slip-ups.”

“And it was his Jeep which Alan found on the cliff.”

“Correct.”

It still didn’t add up for me. “What are you saying, then? That this girl stole his car? Or was she one of his associates?”

I couldn’t believe that. Not her. I’d told myself countless times since bringing her to the resort that she could be a violent criminal, but that didn’t mean I wanted to believe it. Was she capable of being part of his world? Was she—God forbid—his girlfriend?

I hadn’t seen a photo of him yet. He could be a young man, or she might be the type to cozy up to an older fellow for his money or connections. The thought nauseated me.

“You could use the word ‘associate,’ I suppose,” she replied with a grim smile. “He has a daughter, who by all accounts is twenty-five years old. Savannah.” She tapped the file. “There’s a photo of her in here.”

Damn. It was even worse than I thought. No wonder she didn’t want to say anything about herself.

I flipped through, hoping against hope for some sort of mistake but knowing Mary too well to believe any such thing to be true. She was thorough, if nothing else.

And the girl photographed with a tall, stately looking man in what had to be a two-thousand-dollar suit and dark sunglasses was definitely the girl I’d just dropped off in her room.

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered.

She was dressed up for some sort of event, her hair pulled into a twist, diamonds at her ears and throat, wearing a sleek dress and looking like a wealthy, pampered princess.

“So she’s this monster’s daughter,” Gate confirmed. “And we’re harboring her here. Great. I’m sure he won’t come looking for her or anything.”

“If they had a falling out, he wouldn’t,” I suggested, though even I knew I was reaching at that point.

Men of the sort Mary described didn’t let go of what was theirs. I was sure of it, because I was that sort of man, too.

“She would be the one to ask about that,” Mary reminded me. “If he’s going to come for her, we need to know. We have to be prepared.”

“We can just tell him she isn’t here.”

“Naturally—and we would, if he were to appear at our door today,” she assured me. “I don’t know what the truth is behind why the girl tried to kill herself, but something tells me her relationship with him couldn’t possibly be a positive influence in her life. I wouldn’t send her back to him. Even so, if he finds out we lied…”

“You would have to leave the island.”

“Oh, most definitely—granted, we’d have to leave and go back to home base at some point, regardless, but I would rather do that on my own terms. When I’m ready to go.”

“You must talk to her, find out the circumstances under which you found her.” Gate winced a little as he spoke, showing me how hard he was trying to be diplomatic. “The time for coddling her is long since passed.”

The dragon roared within me. “Don’t you think I know that? I just tried to talk to her, to level with her for once. She shut me down.”

“Now that she’ll know we know something about her, it might not be so easy for her to do that again,” Mary suggested. “We know her name. We know that her mother passed away under mysterious circumstances when the girl was only eight years old.”

“Mysterious?” I grimaced. Not the word one would want to hear when it came to one’s mother’s passing.

Mary nodded. “Yes, it looks as though a rival had her killed—or killed her instead of her husband. She was driving his car the night it mysteriously exploded.”

“Wow.” I tried to imagine how devastating that must’ve been for a little girl. “And she was left with him as the default parent. What a prize.”

“Yes, I’m sure she’s been through quite a lot.” She sighed, leaning back on her palms with her gaze fixed on the ceiling. “To do what she did, or tried to do, took a lot of guts. Suicide isn’t the coward’s way out that so many people like to believe it is. I can only guess how tightly he controlled her life, or tried to. She may have decided she’d had enough, or she could’ve found out just what Daddy does for a living and decided she couldn’t live with the knowledge. This isn’t a case of a kid acting out. She was crying out. Determined to affect change in her own life, by any means necessary. And now, she’s afraid to tell us anything. Push too hard, and she’ll clam up even tighter.”

She wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t already considered as I sat there, trying to put the pieces together.

Savannah.

She didn’t look like a Savannah.

What did a Savannah look like, though? What did a criminal’s daughter look like? I never would’ve guessed it.

The girl in the photo was who I would’ve expected—sleek, sophisticated, high-maintenance. In control of herself, commanding the respect of those around her. The girl in the bed was someone completely different. Natural, fresh, in the light, cotton dresses the others had loaned her from their shopping trip with Martina when we’d first brought them to the island. With her hair down and not so much as a touch of makeup, she could’ve been any girl who made her home on the islands.

“What are you going to do?”

They were both looking at me, waiting for some sign that I hadn’t entirely shut down at the information I’d just been presented with.

“Why does this fall squarely on my shoulders?” I asked, though I knew it was a stupid question before it was even out of my mouth.

She was mine. We were meant to be.

Even Mary felt that I had a special responsibility in this.

Neither of them bothered to answer.