Prologue
Wilderness hummed around Fletcher as she fought to catch her breath. She’d grown begrudgingly used to its melody over the last few days—the whistle of hot wind through the reeds at the watering hole, the elephant trumpet in the distance, the frog song from the jungle thick.
Of all the people Fletcher thought she’d be here with, the last was Waylon.
Waylon, who had tried to sabotage her career when it had barely begun.
Waylon, who had every right to inherit the Cartwright legacy and none of the qualifications.
Waylon, who held a steak knife to her throat, the blade pinching her skin.
Something greedy burned in his gaze. A hunger. Like he’d been wanting to do this for a long time and only now got the chance.
“I want to trust you,” he said, the steel scraping across her rapid pulse.
Breathing. Fletcher wasn’t breathing. “Then trust me.”
“But how do I know you won’t betray me?”
“I could ask you the same thing.” The last week flashed behind Fletcher’s eyes. Sparkling cocktails served with gourmet meals. Handshake deals signed with blood. And now, a knife to her throat. Careful, she asked, “What do you need to convince you?”
His voice was low in her ear. “Tell me what you want, Spence, and I’ll let you live.”
Last month, she could have answered his question in a heartbeat. TSA PreCheck. An invitation to the company retreat. A byline in the travel magazine she’d sold her soul to. But that was before. Before she’d ever set foot on this patch of untamed land, and before there was a serrated edge against her esophagus.
He was asking the wrong question. She knew what she wanted.
What was she willing to do to get it?
1
Three weeks earlier
Fletcher could be dead, and she’d still see the safari when she closed her eyes.
The mock-up November issue of Cartwright Media’sJet-Settermagazine splayed across the workshop table in front of her, right next to a paper take-out box spilling with lo mein, and her phone, where some fraction of her consciousness watched her boss’s little blue dot travel up Fifth Avenue. The rest of her attention was glued to the glossy photograph.
For the last half hour, she’d stared at the magazine. Something was off.
She stabbed her fork into the noodles, swirling them mindlessly until the bite was so big she had to unhinge her jaw to chew. “It’s missing something.”
“Add sriracha,” Ford said from the other side of his desktop.
From here all she could see was a thin stripe of her coworker’s bleached-blond hair, but she knew he was scrubbing through test shots from last week’s luggage shoot in Bali, featuring a pair ofmated toucans and what was being dubbed “the perfect weekender bag.”
“Not Szechuan’s,” she said. “Page twenty-three.”
If she’d been behind the camera, she would’ve framed the shot differently, angled the model forty-five degrees clockwise, and called out for more emotion. The centerfold spread—a spotlight on Southern Hemisphere wildlife experiences—should’ve popped. Instead, it was lopsided and top-heavy, guiding readers’ eyes away from the page instead of toward it.
Pacing across the office, Fletcher swatted the magazine onto Ford’s desk and pointed at the bald composition. The page wasliterallymissing something. “Shouldn’t there be something else in this third to balance it out?”
“By ‘it,’ do you mean the naked man holding a strategically placed tote bag next to a lion?”
“I’m serious,” Fletcher said.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Ford said. “You’re Fletcher Spence. You’realwaysserious.”
Truthfully, she didn’t want to hear his boss chew him out for not catching the framing error. But also she wouldn’t say no if the editor in chief walked through the Design Lab doors and offered Fletcher a spot on her staff. (Her bank account could really use the promotion, too.)
