her, angered with himself for the twin physical reactions he was having a hard time holding at bay. "Come on, stand up. All I want is your camera."
She slowly pulled herself to her feet. "My what?"
"The camera you had with you in the cave, and the pictures you took. I need all of it."
"You want...the pictures? I don't understand - "
"You don't need to. Just give them to me." When she didn't move to comply, Rio trained a piercing look on her. "Get them. Now."
"O-okay," she stammered, and hurried over to a large backpack that stood in the corner of the room. She dug through it and pulled out the slim digital camera.
When she started to open it up to pop out the image disk, Rio said, "I'll do that. Give it to me."
She held the camera out to him with shaking fingers. "You followed me all the way to Prague for this? What's so important about those pictures? And just how did you find me anyway?"
Rio ignored her questions. In a few minutes, none of this would matter. He'd have the images and then he'd scrub the female's memory of the entire chain of events.
"Is this all of them?" he asked her as he turned the camera on and scrolled through the contents of the disk. "Have you downloaded them to any other devices?"
"That's it," she replied quickly. "That's everything, I swear."
He reviewed the handful of shots from the cave, the ones of himself in partial transformation, and the ones that showed the Ancient's hibernation chamber and the glyphs painted in human blood on the walls. "Have you shown these to anyone?"
She swallowed, then shook her head. "I still don't understand what this is about."
"And that's how we're going to keep it," Rio said.
He walked toward her, only three steps between them. She backed away, but came up against the window on the far wall of the room. "Oh, my God. You said you weren't going to hurt me..."
"Be calm," he instructed her. "It will be over soon."
"Oh, shit." A strangled moan curled audibly in the back of her throat. "Oh, my God...you're really going to kill me..."
"No," Rio said grimly. "But I need your silence."
He reached out for her. All it would take was a brief settling of his hand on her forehead to erase her knowledge of the mountain cave and him from her mind.
But as his hand descended toward her, she drew in her breath, then let it out on a string of words that made him freeze in place where he stood.
"I'm not the only one who knows!" She panted with fear. Words tumbled out of her mouth in a rush. "Other people know where I am. They know where I've been, what I've been doing. So, whatever you think those pictures mean, killing me won't protect you because I'm not the only one who's seen them."
She lied to him. Rio's anger spiked at the deception. "You said no one else knew."
"And you said you weren't going to hurt me."
"Jesus." He saw little point in arguing with her, or in defending his intentions. "You need to tell me who you've shown the pictures to. I need names and locations."
She scoffed, too bold for her own good. "Why? So you can go after them too?"
Rio's mind switched into immediate reconnaissance mode. He threw a glance at her belongings and saw a messenger bag slung over the hotel chair. The bag looked like it probably contained a computer. He stalked over to it and withdrew a thin silver laptop.
He opened it and hit the power button, which must have given the woman an idea that she could make another break for the door. She bolted, but Rio cut her off at the pass. He stood in front of her, his back against the heavily locked panel, before she even had a chance to imagine freedom.
"Holy shit," she gasped, blinking at him in disbelief. "How did you get - ? You were all the way across the room - "
"Yes, I was. And now I'm not."
Rio stepped forward, away from the door, forcing her to retreat. She backed up as he kept advancing, obviously unsure what to make of him now.
"Sit down," he ordered her. "The sooner you cooperate, the sooner this will be over."
She took a seat on the edge of the bed, watching as he went back to her computer and fired up her Internet connection. Her e-mail was a revelation. Aside from the usual personal