is no safe way to arrive on these shores. The water is shark-infested, the land crawls and seethes. It is a forbidden paradise set apart from the world, and it does not welcome visitors. Peril lurks in swamps. Cat snakes drip from trees. Leopards prowl with silent intent, eyes gleaming gold at the scent of the kill. On a far-off branch, the panicked screech of a proboscis monkey rips through the pregnant heat, high and taut and violent. Fruit bats clap leathery wings.
It is impossible to see in the depths of the rainforest. Dense threads thick as rope are damp and fat and scented like rot. Enquiringly they finger the skin, coiling around wrist, knee or ankle, tethering any who trespass into the sucking, clinging earth. This is no place for humans. The wilderness took over a long time ago.
Beyond a wall of jade, the beach is torn into view. Cliff shards soar, rugged and sheer, their lofty peaks silhouetted against star-crust, prehistoric and bone-sharp. Rivers thread vein-like into the slithering jungle and grottos are sliced out of the rock, interiors caked in salt. Palm trees rise like swords against the sky, a hundred feet up, maybe more. The indigo lagoon shimmers like silk, kissing the pink crust of the reef, beyond which spreads the wide, dark Aralanda Sea. Water whispers onto sand, sighing as satin over pale shoulders. It brings secrets from the far-off Pacific, drifting them onto the shore like shells, for nobody to hear and nobody to pick up.
Everything is still.
The jet appears at first like a silver comet. It is small, a moving star, but to blink will draw it into focus, its clean, light contours and the tipping line of its wings. It falls closer, glinting against the lilac clouds. Too quick it is eating up distance, eerily noiseless as it falls and falls over glittering black, reaching for the moonlit bay.
Smoke trails from the rear, dissolving into the indifferent dark. There is a flash of hot orange, close to the tail. The sky begins to growl.
With a crash the body plummets through the canopy. Profuse thickets resist its mighty onslaught, breaking the descent. Thunder blasts as the fuselage guillotines through trees. The forest shrieks. There is an explosion of birds’ wings.
The captain has a second to think before the windshield bursts and a jagged shaft breaks through, neat as a splinter, impaling him through his chest. His lungs are demolished; his breath is crushed. He is surprised. He wasn’t meant to die today. The last person he thinks of is the woman who sold him his coffee that morning in Jakarta, her light, smiling eyes and the sweetness of the liquid on his tongue. Blood spills from his mouth and he slumps forward, chin on chest, and stops living.
It is a peculiar quirk of fortune that prevents the jet from slamming into hard ground: later, those on board will realise that the forest saved their lives—and curse it for it. Instead, the stricken plane shudders through foliage, hell-bent on its manic detour, battered by rocks and the thump of knotted branch. Parts fall away. The mammoth trunk of a chengal tree severs one wing, flipping the missile. It breaks up, an eagle in the skies but down here little but haphazard pieces of fractured metal. In the cockpit the overhead panel collapses, knocking the first officer cold.
What is left carves a giant wound through the undergrowth. Despite the broken plunge, the impact is severe. The aircraft groans to an uncertain, injured rest, slashed with mud and green. The moon bathes it in light, like a pearl.
Of the seven passengers who boarded that morning, three are men and four are women. It is unclear who is left.
One is smeared with red, her face and neck sticky with salt and iron, though she cannot decipher through her terror if it is her blood or another’s.
One is trapped beneath something solid. He doesn’t know if he is alive or dead. He must be dead, he thinks, because everything is dark.
One is the first to move. She gropes into the black and detects the outline of her hand, tentative and ghostly, and knows in that moment she has made it.
Half a mile behind, the remainder of the cabin is suspended in a tree seventy metres from the ground. It hangs between moss-covered creepers and is tilted on one side, caught in a nest of fronds. The ribbons strain: they cannot hold it.
Inside, a woman opens her eyes. She can hear her breathing, fast and short, and the furious blood in her veins.
There is a final, desperate moment before somebody screams. The animal cry flies into the jungle like spitting fire, a red warning: there are survivors.
II
Szolsvár Castle, Gemenc Forest, Hungary
The same day
Nine thousand miles away, in an ancient fortress buried deep in the woodland, the telephone rings. Its chime echoes through sprawling gothic caverns, lonely and stark.
Billionaire Voldan Cane receives it.
Anticipation climbs in his throat. ‘Is it done?’ he rasps.
The voice makes him wait. Eventually, it comes.
‘Yes. It is done.’
Voldan exhales. A wheezing moan escapes where the skin between his top lip and his nose has ruptured. His bruised heart burns.
It is done.
The call is terminated. Voldan tries to smile but it is hard. The movement tugs at his ruined features, his sallow skin pitted as fruit peel. Normally he avoids his tortured image—mirrors have long been banished from these rooms—but here, in the high, arched windows of Szolsvár’s Great Hall, he catches a flash of the man he used to be: handsome, wealthy, coveted … happy.
One out of four isn’t bad.
The panes are faded and cobwebbed with age. Only Voldan’s eyes betray the depths of his satisfaction. It is done.
He backs away from his reflection and the shadows swallow him whole.
Six months earlier
New York
Angela Silvers was being fucked from here to infinity.
At least, that was how it looked. In the mirrored dressing room of Fit for NYC, the bijou latest addition to her chain of sought-after fashion boutiques, her image was fractured and repeated, chasing replicas of her naked body to vanishing point. Angela was flung against the sweat-slicked glass, her arms wide and her blood racing.
The man between her thighs was forbidden.
Noah Lawson.
Movie star, heart-throb, teenage crush—the man she wasn’t allowed to have.
Noah’s tongue circled with exquisite precision, tracing around, between and beneath, everywhere but the place she knew would ignite her like dynamite.
She grabbed his hair, tilting her hips, and gasped as fireflies swarmed in her belly, rising and rising until the world and everything in it diminished to the pure, clear pleasure of her approaching climax. Oh, how she had tried to forget him. Noah was her lover, her best friend and her constant: he was the magic in her heart.
She couldn’t help the rebellion. It had been in her since she was fifteen.
‘Keep going!’ she begged. ‘Don’t stop!’
Drawing her to him, Noah plunged deep, finally giving her what she wanted where she wanted it, and in a delicious, delirious flash she was there, slave to the surge, electric ripples tearing her apart. He kissed her lips, her neck, her collarbone, and whispered in her ear those three sweet words he saved just