for me,” I say, keeping my expression ice cold, even though my insides are boiling over. “But you seem to think she’s leverage. If that’s true and you kill her, what are you left with?”
He grins, lifting the knife so it’s pointed at me. “You.”
“And I’ll die before I’ll tell you where the rest of my family is. Then you’ve got nothing.”
He thinks about that for a second. “Not nothing. Your dead body’s worth a buck and a quarter to me.”
I whistle through my teeth. “Not bad. What’s the price for all five of us?”
He shakes his head. “It’s only on four of you. A hundred twenty-five thousand each for your bodies. But the real money’s the five hundred grand for bringing the little one in alive.”
My eyes narrow. A thousand questions spin through my mind like a cyclone. But there’s one I need the answer to in order to bring my family home. “Whose marker?”
He grins, but just as he opens his mouth to answer, his words are cut off by his scream as Adri swings her arms up, the neck of the broken Jameson bottle in her grasp. It stabs into his chest.
I pounce the second he’s down. I hook my elbow around his neck, crank down as tight as I can as he struggles against me. “Whose marker?” I ask again.
“Stop, Rob!” Adri shouts.
“Who?” I say, but Wannabe’s body goes limp.
I untangle myself from him, scramble for my Glock. My finger tightens on the trigger as I point it at his face.
“Rob!” Adri cries.
I look up at her, writhing on the floor, still bound to the chair and bleeding. I go to her, yank the tape off her wrists.
“Are you okay?” I ask, rub my thumbs over her bruised wrists, look at the wound on her neck.
“You can’t kill them,” she gasps.
The cut’s not deep, but acid rises in my throat as I watch blood ooze from her wound. For that alone, I’d kill them.
“Rob? Promise me.” Her pleading eyes make me forget anything else exists, until the one I hit with the bottle groans from the floor next to us. I’m not entirely sure I haven’t already killed the other one.
I clock him with an elbow. He goes still. I grab Wannabe’s knife and cut the duct tape binding Adri to the chair. “They hurt you. They would have killed you.” Acid rolls up my throat when I think about how close they came.
She sits and lifts my face so I have no choice but to look into those clear blue eyes. “I don’t know who those men are or why they want to hurt you—”
“Kill me,” I interrupt. “And my entire family.”
Her eyes sweep over their unconscious forms. She’s scared, but she’s trying hard not to show it. “You can’t just shoot them.”
I rub a hand down my face. “What do they know?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.” She gestures to Wannabe. “He was at the front desk when I came in, asking sight-seeing questions. He seemed nice and all, but he saw your picture when I showed it to the desk clerk.”
“Did you say the name Davidson?”
She shakes her head again. “No.”
I glance at her bag on the floor. “Did they go through your things? See your ID?”
“No, Rob. They burst into the room and tied me up. The older one was asking me questions about you, but I didn’t answer. The younger one had just opened my bag when you knocked.”
I have a hundred more questions. From the look on her face, so does she. But there’s not time now. Chances are this is a pair of greedy independent contractors, working alone. But I don’t know that. There could be a Savoca army storming the lobby as we sit here. We have to get out of here.
I look at the guys on the floor. The blood on the carpet.
This is Adri’s suite. She registered under her real name. She can’t be tied to this in any way, or someone will track her down in Port St. Mary.
I grab the tape, bind and gag Wannabe and his accomplice, and stuff their weapons into my waistband.
“See if there’s an extra blanket in the closet,” I tell her.
She gives me a worried look, but then does as I say. When she comes back with one, I roll Wannabe in it, then look at the carpet. Adri didn’t catch an artery, so there’s not a lot of blood and most of it has stayed in his