The Lion's Den: The 'impossible to put down' must-read gripping thriller of 2020

by Katherine St. John

  I’m physically tired, and I know I need to get some sleep so that I can be on point tomorrow, but I’m not in the least bit sleepy. My gears are cranking. I’m amped. My mind is speeding a million miles an hour. I need to get my passport back, my computer and my phone. I need to get to the police in the morning.

  Eric had a picture of me in his bedside table.

  Breathe.

  Should I give Wendy and Claire a warning so that they can save themselves? If they haven’t been interviewed yet, they haven’t lied. As hurt as I am by Wendy, I don’t want her to go to jail. And certainly not poor Claire.

  I tried cocaine once and never did it again because it made me feel exactly how I feel right now: unable to hold on to thoughts speeding by too fast to articulate, a sense of impending dread, an anxiety I couldn’t pinpoint. Though now I can pinpoint it.

  I repeat the same mantra now that I used that night—Everything is going to be okay, everything is going to be okay, everything is going to be okay—over and over and over, ad infinitum. But it’s hard to believe.

  I check the clock. 4:56. Okay, that’s good. Time is passing. Just two more hours until I can get up and shower.

  Eric kept a picture of me in his bedside table.

  (twenty days ago)

  Los Angeles

  In the morning, a leaf blower aroused me from fitful sleep.

  Eric is alive and on my couch.

  My eyes flew open. I jerked myself out of bed and padded quietly into the living room, where Eric was still sleeping soundly. He didn’t look good. His skin was pale and his brow glistened with sweat.

  Should I wake him and drag him to the emergency room immediately?

  No. Sleep was probably the best thing for him.

  I gazed out the kitchen window as my coffee percolated, watching the wind ripple the fingers of the palm trees. The day was bright and clear, the world fresh from last night’s rain.

  What was he doing here?

  It dawned on me that I should call Dylan. I palmed my phone and scrolled through my contacts for his number, but hesitated, my thumb hovering over the call button. Though Dylan had given me no reason not to trust him, calling him somehow felt like a betrayal of Eric, who had come to me, not his brother. A little voice in the back of my mind whispered that perhaps I should wait to find out why before I contacted anyone.

  I put the phone down. Maybe I’d find when Eric woke that he’d already contacted Dylan and my caution was unnecessary. Regardless, Eric would be up soon—I could delay calling anyone until I talked to him. The fact that Eric had shown up on my doorstep demonstrated some level of trust in me, and I felt obligated to at least honor that faith until he’d had the chance to relate what had happened to him.

  But why come to me?

  My head throbbed. I’d had less than four hours’ rest, but was afraid that Eric would leave if I fell asleep again, so I poured my coffee and trudged back to the living room, where I curled up in a chair to wait for him to wake and promptly nodded off myself.

  My neck was cramped from napping in the chair and my leg was asleep by the time his moaning woke me. His eyes fluttered, his skin clammy in the light through the curtains. Pins and needles shot through my foot as I limped to the bathroom, returning with a thermometer. I slipped it into his mouth, and he opened his eyes with a start. “It’s okay,” I said as calmly as I could muster. “I’m just taking your temperature.”

  He closed his eyes while I watched the numbers on the digital screen escalate. The thermometer beeped and flashed red: 104.3.

  Shit, that was high. I dredged the depths of my mind for the medical knowledge I’d garnered while playing a med student. If I remembered correctly, 105 was hospital zone.

  I googled it to confirm, then ran a cool bath, as the Internet suggested. I returned with Tylenol and a glass of water, but he waved it away.

  “Just wanna sleep,” he murmured.

  “Eric, your temp is really high,” I insisted. “You need to take this Tylenol and drink this entire glass of water, then come get in the bath, or I’m calling 911.”

  He raised his head, and I placed the Tylenol on his tongue and held the glass while he gulped most of the water before diving back to the pillow.

  “Okay, now the bath,” I instructed. He didn’t move. “Eric, I’m serious. I can’t lift you myself, and I’m not sure where all you’re injured, so you have to help me.”

  I assisted him up to sitting, and he swung his feet to the ground. I slipped my right arm around his waist, placed his left around my shoulders. “Okay, on three. One, two, three.”

  And we were standing. Unsteadily, but standing. We shuffled the short distance to the bathroom, where I closed the lid to the toilet and sat him on it, then helped him out of his T-shirt. His torso was covered in scratches and bruises; a bandage on the outside of one of his biceps was soaked in blood. Even beaten to a pulp, he was still beautiful. His chest was lean and toned, like someone who did yoga and free weights, and his abs were hard.

  But I couldn’t be looking at his body. I had to get him into the bath. Naked. Right. I’d glossed over that part of the operation when I’d come up with it. He must’ve had the same thought, because he gave me a half smile. “I always wondered what it would be like for you to undress me.”

  How he had it in him to flirt right now, I had no idea. But I felt the heat rise in my cheeks and turned away to check the water temperature. “It’s cool,” I said without turning around, “but not cold, so it shouldn’t be too much of a shock.”

  I’d just put him in the bath in his underwear; that would solve the problem. Without meeting his eyes, I reached for the bandage on his arm, and he instinctively jerked away. “Sorry. That one’s the worst. Maybe we should leave it.”

  “We need to clean it and rebandage it.”

  “Separately,” he insisted.

  I acquiesced as he used the sink to push up to standing and undid the button to his jeans. Should I leave? I didn’t want him to fall asleep and drown. I could wait in the kitchen, where I could see him through the open door but still give him space.

  “Do you need help?” I asked, turning to face him.

  He unzipped his pants and let them fall without a hint of self-consciousness. He wasn’t wearing any underwear. So much for modesty. I kept my gaze lifted as he stepped into the bath and slowly sank into the water.

  “Okay, I’m gonna go make some tea in the kitchen. I’ll be right there if you need me,” I said, indicating the kitchen.

  “Stay.” He laid his head back and closed his eyes.

  I perched on the toilet lid. The faucet dripped. Neither of us spoke for a long time. Outside, two birds chirped back and forth.

  “Maybe it’s a love song.” He referenced the birds without opening his eyes.

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you have any coffee?”

  “Yeah. But you gotta drink it iced.”

  I kept an eye on him through the open door while I made his coffee, and brought him a banana as well. He didn’t want the banana, but I made him eat it.

  I prepped a fresh washcloth with warm water and soap as he sipped the coffee. “Do you mind?” I asked. He shook his head. “Lean forward a bit.”

  I lightly washed the wounds on his back, then his arms, all the while studiously avoiding looking at any other part of his body. He opened his eyes as I moved to gently wash his chest, and I looked down to notice my boobs were right at eye level, straining against my thin spaghetti-strap nightshirt. I straightened up and handed him the washcloth. “You can finish the rest of your body,” I said, turning away.

  “Belle.” I felt his eyes on me and met his gaze. “Thank you.”

  I nodded. “You still owe me an explanation.”

  “I know.”

  After thirty minutes, he was looking a little better. I helped him out of the bath and wrapped him in a towel, once again averting my eyes from his naked body. The clothes he’d been wearing were filthy, pieces of mud crusted around
the bottom of his jeans.

  “My friend keeps some things here,” I said. “You guys are about the same size. Let me see what I can find.”

  “Boyfriend?” he asked too quickly.

  I laughed. “No.”

  He followed me to the bedroom and watched while I rummaged through Hunter’s drawer, coming up with a pair of gray sweatpants and a dark-green T-shirt. “They’re not black,” I said, “but they’re comfortable.”

  He took the clothes, and I turned back to the drawers to rummage around for nothing while he pulled on the pants. He started to put on the T-shirt, but I stopped him. “Wait. We need to deal with your wounds.”

  I sat him on the bed facing the windows and opened the curtains so that the morning sun streamed in. He squinted into the light. “Is that the Hollywood sign?”

  “Yeah. The—wood, anyway.”

  I placed the thermometer in his mouth while I gathered the bandages and first-aid ointment. The thermometer beeped and flashed red: 102.2. I showed him. “You’re still hot, but you’re moving in the right direction.”

  “You think I’m hot?” he joked.

  “I’m glad you’re feeling well enough to joke, but we do need to get you to a doctor.” I rubbed ointment into the wounds on his chest and inspected the laceration on his forearm. “This is deep.” I filled the wound with antibacterial ointment and closed it with three butterfly bandages. “And your cheek, the bones . . .”

  “We need to go to Mexico,” he said.

  “You’re in no shape to be traveling.”

  “I want you to take me,” he entreated. “Please. I’ll see a doctor there.”

  “Eric, I . . . I can’t just go to Mexico. I have responsibilities. I have to be at work in three hours. I have . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I’m asking a lot without telling you anything. What do you want to know?”

  He winced as I peeled the bloodied bandage from his biceps, uncovering a deep gash. I inhaled sharply. I had no idea how to clean a wound so serious, but I knew it needed to be tended to immediately.

  “I told you it was bad,” he said.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Summer pushed me off a cliff.”

  I froze, my breath caught in my throat. Well, there it was, then. She was capable of it after all. As soon as I could speak again, the questions came. “How? Why? Does anybody else know you’re alive?”

  “No. When I got your message, I went out to the park to meet you. I saw your car in the lot, but when I got to the lookout point, Summer was there.”

  “What message?” I asked, confused. “The only one I sent you was the evening you disappeared, asking you what was going on with Summer. And then a bunch in the days afterward, wondering what had happened to you.”

  He wrinkled his brow, processing. “Of course. I’m so stupid. It must have been her. I got a message from you early the morning after Summer and I fought, saying that you needed to talk to me about something important but that no one could know, so to meet you at this lookout point at a park in Ventura. . . .”

  I grabbed my phone and opened our message thread, showing him there was no such message. “Not me,” I said.

  “Could she have gotten into your account?” he asked. “She could have deleted the message on your end after she sent it, leaving it on my end.”

  “Yeah.” I smacked myself in the forehead. “She knows my passcode. I spent the night with her in Malibu last Friday and left my phone downstairs when I went to bed. Do you have your phone?”

  He shook his head. “You back up messages to the cloud?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I handed him my phone, and he thumbed through a few screens. “Here we go.”

  He hit the button to restore my messages. Luckily, there weren’t many, so we had to wait only a few excruciating seconds while they loaded. When the screen refreshed, sure enough, there was a message from me to Eric, sent at 5:42 a.m. on July 22, begging him to meet me at a park in Ventura. And his reply, agreeing.

  “Jesus.” I stared at the screen.

  “She must’ve banked on the fact that you wouldn’t check your deleted messages.”

  “Or she didn’t care if I knew.” I tried to put myself in her shoes. “And she’d want them to still be traceable by police if necessary.” I knew at this point I shouldn’t be surprised by her duplicity, but the betrayal still stung. My best friend had tried to frame me for murder. It was incomprehensible. A flame of anger flickered to life inside of me. “What happened when you got there?” I asked.

  “It was foggy, and your car was the only other one in the lot. I didn’t run into anyone on the trail. When I got to the lookout point, Summer was there waiting for me. I asked her where you were, and she started yelling at me, accusing me of cheating on her with you. She demanded to see my phone, so I unlocked it and handed it to her. She went over to the edge with it and was saying all this shit about how I wouldn’t care if she just jumped. She was freaking me out, so I went to her, and when I got to her, she attacked me. We were tussling—I thought she might try to jump, so I was holding her as tight as I could, and then she kneed me in the balls and pushed me over the edge. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a tree at the bottom of the cliff.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I got unbelievably lucky I landed in that tree,” he said. “I know how to fall from rock climbing, but no one survives a fall from that height.”

  “She tried to murder you.”

  He nodded. “I should have left when I saw it was her waiting for me instead of you, but . . . I underestimated her.”

  “We have to go to the cops.”

  “No,” he refused. “No one can know where I am.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “My father.”

  “What does Summer trying to kill you have to do with your dad?” Then, remembering, “We have to call your brother—”

  “No!” He grabbed my wrist, his grip gentle but firm.

  “My brother cannot know I’m alive. Do you understand?”

  “But he—”

  “He’s working for our dad. I can’t trust him.”

  I would’ve been exasperated if he didn’t look so dreadful. “What does any of this have to do with your dad?”

  “You don’t know,” he said, realizing.

  “Know what?”

  “But how would you? I have my mother’s last name, and Dylan uses his middle name instead of his last.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  His eyes met mine. “John,” he said. “John Lyons—is our father.”

  I stared at him slack-jawed, my mind unable to knit the two worlds together. “What?”

  “The man Summer’s dating is—”

  “I heard you. But—how?” It was too big of a coincidence. The world just didn’t work that way. “Does Summer know?”

  “Yes. It’s why she went after him. I didn’t find out until recently.”

  “Wait—” I had so many questions, I didn’t know where to begin. “So, does John know about the two of you?”

  “He knows we dated a while ago—he has to; he does his due diligence on anyone in his orbit and he has eyes everywhere—it’s probably one of the reasons he chose her, to spite me—but there’s no way he knows we’d seen each other since the two of them got together. If he did, he would have dumped her—or worse. But that wasn’t—”

  “And you threatened to tell him when you found out, so she tried to kill you?” This much, at least, I could gather from what Summer had related of her phone conversation with him when we were in Malibu—though the very fact that he’d threatened to tell John bothered me.

  “It’s more complicated than that.” He sighed. “My father is a bad man. I didn’t want to be with Summer anymore, but I still didn’t want her caught up in his world. I mean, was I angry that she’d gone through my personal things and tracked down my father so that she could throw herself at him? Sure. But that w
asn’t why I called her. I was worried she was in over her head with him and was trying to warn her off getting involved any deeper than she already had––but she wouldn’t listen. My threats to tell John about us were empty and aimed at getting her away from him for her own good. Shit, there are a million other rich old men out there that aren’t monsters, who I’m sure would be happy to give her what she wants.”

  I watched him carefully as he spoke, weighing whether to believe him. It was his word against hers, and I recognized now more than ever that I didn’t know him well at all. But I knew her. And she was at this point officially the person I trusted the least in the world, which meant that, comparatively, I trusted him more. “So much for saving her,” I said dryly.

  He nodded. “But I have far more to fear from my father than I do from her.”

  Was this real? I was beginning to feel like I was in a telenovela. I closed my eyes and pinched my nose. “What do you mean?”

  He grabbed my hands, his eyes clear. “I promise I’ll tell you everything. But can we please get out of here? They’re looking for me, and I don’t want to put you in danger.”

  My head swam with questions: Who were “they”? Why were they looking for him? What had I gotten myself involved in?

  The sun caught in his shorn golden hair, giving him a halo that framed his beaten face. He needed a doctor worse than I needed answers. I would put my trust in him, at least for now.

  Day 7

  Friday morning—Terralione, Italy

  I’m up at first light, showered and completely packed before I finally hear the lock turn in my door.

  “Who is it?” I call out.

  “Julie.”

  I open the door to Julie, who hands me a cup of coffee. “Thanks.” I glance into the hallway to see Bernard disappearing up the stairs.

  “Where’s Camille?”

  “She’s no longer assigned to you.”

  “Is she okay?” I ask, worried that I’ve gotten her in trouble for allowing me to go up to the deck last night.

  Julie gives me a tight-lipped smile. “She’s fine.”

  Obviously I’m not going to get any more out of her on that score. “Any news?”