The green room was on the second floor, and it was nicer than any room Tyler had ever slept in.There was a long table down one wall covered in food. Cold meats, three kinds of bread, fruit cut into shapes, little pastries lined up in rows on silver trays. There was a fridge full of glass bottles. There were fresh flowers in a vase, and nobody in the room to look at them.Along the opposite wall stood a rolling rack of clothes in plastic covers."Eat whatever you want," Raina Dustin said. "Do not touch the flowers, they are for the photographs."Tyler walked over to the table and started on the cold meat.Raina watched him eat for about ten seconds. He did not stack a plate and he did not fill his pockets, which surprised her slightly, because she had expected one or the other.Then she went to the rack and pulled a garment bag off it and unzipped it.Inside was a charcoal suit."This is yours for the day," she said. "It is a forty-four long, which I am guessing is close enough. There

For a second nobody in that room moved.Then Curtis Vance found his voice."What the hell is this?""Who are you?" the second producer shouted. "Who let you up here?"Not one of the three of them glanced at the door lying flat on the carpet.It was a reinforced fire door. Steel cored, sound treated, every bolt sunk into the frame. Two men with a crowbar could not have pulled it out of that wall in twenty minutes.None of them thought about that. They were three men who had been interrupted, and their blood was still up, and all they could see was the man standing in their way.Ivy saw the gap and ran.She went along the wall behind them with one hand clutching her torn dress shut. She did not stop until she reached the far corner, with the glass table between herself and every man in the room.Tyler saw the dress.He saw the seam split open from the hem to her hip. He saw the way she was holding it shut. He saw the mark coming up red on her wrist.Something went out of his face.Ivy h

Tyler carried her out.Her legs had given way back in the suite and they had not come back yet. He wrapped his jacket around her, lifted her off the carpet and took her through the empty doorframe. She kept her face pressed into his shoulder the whole way.Heels came running toward them from the elevators."There you are!"Raina Dustin arrived out of breath with her tablet still under her arm."What happened in there? I have been calling the suite line for six minutes and nobody picked up."She was not looking at the girl in Tyler's arms. She was looking past both of them, down the corridor, at the door lying flat on the floor of her presidential suite."Where is Curtis? Did we get the contract signed or not?"Ivy lifted her head off Tyler's shoulder.Her makeup was gone. Her dress was torn from the hem to her hip and only a man's jacket was holding it shut."Those men tried to rape me, Raina."Ivy's voice broke in the middle of it and she made herself keep going."They locked the doo

"I do not know," Tyler said.Ivy let out a breath she had been holding since the hotel."I have not found either of them and I have nothing to go on. But nobody has told me they are dead, and until somebody does, I am going to keep assuming they are out there." He looked over at her. "Do you know anything at all?"Ivy shook her head, and it took her a moment to start."All three of us got through the fence at the back with the roof going up behind us. Then there were headlights on the road and men shouting, and Callie shoved me one way and took Junie the other. That was the last time I saw either of them.""Why did she split you up?""Because there were two directions and three of us, and she made a decision in about one second." Ivy's mouth twisted. "That is Callie. She took the one with the headlights on it and gave me the empty one. I did not work that out until I was about seventeen.""How old were you when that happened?""Twelve. I ran for two days and slept in a bus shelter." I