of her scalp when she tried to move, and she hurt all over. More importantly, her limbs failed to obey her commands.
She was either paralyzed, dead, or dreaming. The fact she felt pain in her head pretty much eliminated the last two choices as a possibility, and pain or no pain, since she could struggle, only not move, she was discounting the whole paralyzed thing. At the moment, a couple of those choices seemed preferable to what her instincts were telling her, especially when something scuttled across her legs. Though her head pounded with the movement, she tried kicking out, hoping to discourage any more visiting creatures. She hated the dark.
“Tex?” Her whisper seemed to echo off the walls, then disappear into hardening silence. The damned dark kept her from seeing whether they’d brought Tex in. He’d either been shot or knocked unconscious when the gate hit the car, and she knew he needed help. But who would come here looking for them, wherever here was? Maybe she was in a hospital, sedated after the crash. Unfortunately, this sure as hell didn’t smell like any hospital bed she’d ever been in. It smelled of must and mold of some long-forgotten place. And she felt stones beneath her on the floor, cold and hard. Once again she tried to move, gritted her teeth against the pain, only then realizing what was wrong. Her arms were tied behind her, trussed to her feet. She’d survived the crash of the car, only to be taken captive. She tried scooting across the ground, scraping her arm and leg in the process. Her foot hit the wall, then something leaning against it. It fell across her legs, clattering to the ground with a ringing echo.
A shovel, she realized, and wondered if it was going to be used to bury her.
This was a black ops mission, something she knew before she’d agreed to assist Tex and pose as his girlfriend. They were warned there’d be no rescue. She and Tex were already written off. Hell, she wasn’t even sure that Tex was alive. Griffin couldn’t publicly search for them, would have to create a cover story to account for the accident, even their visit to Carlo Adami’s party, all to cover the planting of the bug in his office, which may or may not have been successful.
She had to get out of here. Her best chance was in the bracelet she’d dropped in the road after they’d dragged her from the car. At least that was her thought until she remembered that no one was going to come looking for them. Which meant that if she couldn’t depend on Griffin or his team, then she was going to have to find a way out of this herself.
Hard to do when one is trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Griffin took his gear bag from the trunk, then left his car at the edge of the woods on the east side of Adami’s property. He climbed the hill, not wanting to drive past the police working the accident scene. Normally Adami would have dogs patrolling the grounds with his guards, but because of the party, the dogs were kenneled. The guards, he hoped, were busy with the commotion at the front; if not, he’d have to deal with them. Once the cops left, once the last guests left, the dogs would be released. And once that happened, the odds of him getting in and out without firing a shot diminished significantly. He’d rather use a knife or his hands. Quiet kills were always more efficient. Right now he needed efficiency, he thought, making his way up the hill through the trees.
The property on this side was surrounded by an eight-foot wall topped by thick shards of glass, and he traversed the perimeter until he came to the back of the palazzo, and the formal garden that would allow him access to the property with some cover, with its hedges, topiaries, and statues at every turn. Getting over the wall was the easy part, because Adami had overlooked a few beech and chestnut trees growing in the midst of the bay wood forest, some with branches extending right up to the property. He threw a rope up into the closest chestnut, used it to climb the wall, rappelling up one side, waiting to make sure he wasn’t observed, then using the leather gear bag to cover the top of the wall, before rappelling down the other side into the