I’m not ready.

But I begin.

20

SAM

“Steady,” Mike says to me. “Stay focused.”

I’m watching from the cold interior of his black Jeep. We’re in a far corner of the lot, parked under a security spotlight that doesn’t illuminate us, but blinds anyone looking that direction. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to find that Mike had come back to Knoxville; he’d known where we were heading when we left Wichita, and I thought he was tracking Gwen, waiting for the FBI evidence to come in that would let him get a federal warrant to arrest her.

But instead he’s sitting with me in the freezing, icy night, watching as Gwen is abducted.

He’s right to warn me, because it takes everything I have not to draw my gun and go shoot this man wearing a Melvin Royal rubber mask in the head, and then kick the guts out of him. My sick anger is pulsing in my head, ready to blow the top of it off.

It isn’t just because he’s beaten Gwen down enough to have her hanging limply on his shoulder, but because he wore that disguise to do it. It’s fucking vile, and it makes me imagine what went through her mind when she saw it.

I’ve done this to her. I hate myself as much as I hate that asshole who’s hurt her.

“It could still be him under that mask,” I tell Mike. Words are tough right now, but I force them out anyway, so I don’t lose it completely. “Melvin would think it’s funny.”

“Could be. Probably isn’t. Just hang in. She’s all right. They want her alive.” He cuts his gaze swiftly to me. I know he can see the rage. “You can call this anytime you want, Sam. Anytime.”

I wish I already had. I’ve been second-guessing this decision from the moment I said yes. I’d never intended for Absalom to actually take Gwen, but for this to work they had to think that I was carrying through on the bargain. In the abstract, all it took was nerve.

In practice, I was watching a woman I still cared about get dragged away, limp and bloody, to what was certainly going to be her death, and this didn’t feel like a clever gambit. It felt like I was complicit in her murder. If he gets away . . .

“He’s not going anywhere,” Mike says. His voice is calm and steady, and it helps tamp down my adrenaline shakes. “This ice will keep him slow and easy. We’ve got him whenever we want to take him. You know that. Don’t blow it now. Did they send it yet?”

I check the tablet that I got at the coffee shop again. The battery’s still at 80 percent. It’s got a cell signal, but there are no new messages. Not yet. As soon as we have Melvin’s location, we’ll move. Christ, this is hard, watching this asshole take her. It wakes echoes of my sister, and they’re trying to drown me.

I know Gwen’s willing to risk herself. She’d be the first to tell me that. She’d look me in the eyes and tell me, Let me do this. She’d say that getting Melvin is the first, the only, priority we should have.

But it isn’t, and knowing that breaks the shell of doubt I’ve grown around my feelings for her. Shatters it completely. Doesn’t matter what she’s done. It matters who she is, and how I feel about her.

Come on, you bastards. Send the message. The air’s frigid, but I’m glad; I feel like my skin is on fire, and the pressure of fear for her is burning inside my chest like phosphorus. Every second they delay is another second she slides deeper into danger.

“We should move,” I tell Mike. “If we lose her—”

“Not gonna lose her,” Mike says. “I don’t like using her as bait, but either she’s the bravest goddamn woman I ever met or she’s a psychopath, and either way it’s the best move we can make. Let Absalom think they got her, they give up Melvin Royal, we get her back.”

I wish this was an official FBI operation, with covering vehicles and drone support, but on this, we’d agreed to go without that sanction. Mike’s already way out on a limb, the way he’d involved us in Wichita, not to mention the cabin in Georgia. If he gets results they’ll forgive and forget, but meanwhile, drawing federal resources—or even local ones—is out of the picture.

Another thing that rasps against my nerves: Mike’s confidence. He’s good at throwing up false faces.

“Nothing yet,” I tell him. The tablet isn’t giving anything up. We watch the man in the Melvin Royal fright mask make his way carefully to a white panel van, and he nearly goes down as he shifts his weight to toss Gwen inside. I feel it like a punch in the guts, the way she falls like a sack of sand, no attempt to catch herself. Is she alive? God, what if he killed her in the room? The thought almost makes me lunge forward, but I get control with an effort. Absalom wanted her for something special. They won’t kill her out of hand.

That sounds desperate, even in my head. I could have misjudged this completely.

I could have gotten Gwen killed.

The man’s slip on the ice means that Gwen’s only halfway in the van, and I see her twitch, and her feet move slowly, as if searching for a floor.

“She’s okay,” Mike’s saying. “She’s moving, man. She’s fine.”

No, she’s not fine. I know Gwen. She’d be up and fighting this maggot with everything she had, cuffed or not, if she could. As we watch, the man in the Melvin Royal mask climbs into the back of the van and disappears, and there’s that gut punch again, only this time it rips deeper. What the fuck is he doing?

Gwen’s weakly moving feet are dragged into the dark, and for a long, suffocating moment, we can’t see what’s going on. I hear Mike say, “Hold on, wait,” even before I know I’ve got my hand on the door release. His hand grabs a fistful of jacket and yanks me toward him. “Wait.”

“Wait for what? You know what kind of people we’re dealing with!”

If she couldn’t move much, she probably couldn’t scream, either, and that thought makes me strike his hand off me and pull my gun, and Mike slowly holds up a hand to signal his surrender.

But when I turn my attention back to the van, I see the bastard climbing out again. I can just barely see the soft bottom of Gwen’s socks, ghostly pale in the reflected light.

I see her move. Thank God, I see her move.

“Any word from—”

“You check it,” I tell him, shoving the tablet at him. I don’t want to take my eyes off this man. He’s concentrating on keeping his balance as he slams the doors closed, and as I watch, he uses a key to lock them. No windows in the cargo area. She’s invisible now.