Page 2 of Hell to Pay

And we needed shit. Most importantly, a thermal camera. It was going to cost us a pretty penny, but the money didn’t matter. The camera wouldn’t allow us to see inside theArtemis, but it would show us the heat signatures on the yacht and that might tell us if Lilah was on board. If she wasn’t, we’d pass the camera to Rafe to use on theOsprey.

“Give those to me,” Jude said.

I lowered the binoculars with a mixture of relief and reluctance. I needed a break but I almost didn’t trust anyone else to watch the boat, not even Jude.

This was bad.

Bad that Lilah was gone, taken by whoever was behind Imperium Fratrum, but also bad that I was so emotionally entangled in her disappearance — that we all were. It was rule number one of the work we did: don’t get emotionally involved. It was bad for the client and bad for us.

Except Lilah wasn’t a client. She was more.

So much more.

The alarm on my watch beeped and I reached to turn it off.

“Go,” Jude said when I didn’t move. “I’ve got this. Don’t fuck around.”

I headed below deck, grabbing my small med kit on the way to the bathroom. The boat we’d chartered was nothing like the yachts we were watching off the island of Folegandros, but there was a small head with a toilet and a shower so narrow I wasn’t convinced it could contain Jude or me if we got desperate enough to use it.

I shut the door and locked it — force of habit, even though it was only Jude and me on the boat — and opened my med kit. I had enough pen syringes to cover me for another twenty-four hours. Then I’d have to go back to shore and resupply.

I didn’t know if there was a god, but I prayed anyway — prayed we’d find Lilah by then, prayed we’d find her in time.

I removed one of the pen syringes from the kit and prepared it, lifted up my shirt, and placed it against my stomach.

2

LILAH

I was on a boat,but I didn’t know if it was the same boat I’d traveled to with the German woman. That was because they’d obviously drugged me, something I only vaguely remembered as a pinch in my neck after I’d tried to take on the gun-toting guard who’d blocked my escape.

I’d woken up on the floor of a locked room, the boat pitching under me, nothing but sea in every direction from the small windows in the room where I was held prisoner. It was disorienting waking up after being drugged, the first time I’d felt truly out of control since that fateful night at Brandon Miller’s party, and I’d done a quick check of my body and was relieved to find I was still in my jeans and hoodie.

I hadn’t found evidence of any kind of assault, but the back of my neck had stung, and when I went to touch it, I’d found a gauze bandage there. A bolt of pain had surged through my body, but since there was no mirror in the small bathroom attached to the room I was in, I had no way of seeing what was under it.

Now it was morning again. Twenty-four hours since I’d left the island? I couldn’t be sure, but it was hard to believe I’d been unconscious for more than a whole day. Plus, my heart was still beating regularly, which meant I hadn’t been without my meds for too long.

I tried not to think too long about my meds. It would only make me more anxious.

More afraid.

Fear was the enemy when you were in trouble. I knew that from the self-defense classes I’d taken, from the sparring I’d done at the Gym under Locke’s guidance.

I heard the sound of footsteps outside my room and paused my work on the bolt under the nightstand in my prison room, wanting to give myself time to get on the bed if my captors returned, but the footsteps continued down the hall.

I bent my head to the bolt, threaded onto what looked to be a monster of a screw, then repositioned the torn piece of my sock I was using to get a grip on it.

It was a long shot. I knew that. But my knife had gone flying in the scuffle with the guard before I’d been drugged, and the first thing I’d done when I’d regained consciousness and my head had stopped pounding was to search the room for something — anything — I could use, either as a weapon or to free myself from the locked room.

My search had netted exactly nothing, not even in the bathroom, and I’d spent the next two hours fighting despair as I’d tried to formulate a plan for escape.

Because escape was my only option.

I knew that the best chance of escape when being kidnapped was before you were actually kidnapped. I’d tried and failed at that one, but I was still in one piece, and I was going to fight every step of the way.

It had taken me a while to think about the furniture inside my room. That is, to think about the fact that it was on aboat, which meant it was probably bolted down to keep it in place in case of bad weather. A cursory glance at the base of the bed, nightstands, and dresser had proven me right: they were all bolted to the floor.

Unfortunately, the bolts were practically welded onto the screws that held them in place — all except one.

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