her face is black and blue with relatively fresh bruises. She looks like she either got hit with a fly ball or punched in the face. I don’t have to be too creative to assume it’s the latter.
Next to my feet is another guy, who’s restrained, conscious, and sitting up with his back against the wall. He’s been beat up pretty badly—his face is covered with blood, some dried and some fresh. He snorts, blowing a spray of blood out of his nose, and I realize it’s Barclay. He’s not quite close enough for me to touch him.
“It’s your job to handle this, both of you,” a male voice says. I think it’s Meridian, but I’m not entirely sure.
I can’t see him—or any of the people talking to him in hushed tones. Unless I’ve damaged my ears, they must be at least a room away from us, because I can only hear them when their voices are raised.
The girl at the computer looks at me. Our eyes meet, and she knows I’m awake.
00:09:01:21
She looks at the door and then back at me. She’s thinking—trying to make a decision about something. I can see it on her face, the way her lips are pressed together. I just don’t know what she’s planning.
My pulse speeds up. It feels like it’s pounding directly in the ear I have against the carpet. I look at Barclay to see if I can get his attention, but he’s got his eyes closed. He’s either passed out or hurting too much to concentrate.
The girl gets up from her desk and moves to the door that separates our rooms. She’s in jeans and a white sweater. If she didn’t have the bruises, she’d look so normal. It makes me wonder what she’s doing here. How she got roped into this.
She hesitates and looks at the door to the hallway—the direction the voices are coming from.
No one is in view.
She rushes to my side, putting her hands under my shoulder and hip as she turns me a little—just enough so I have a better view of what’s coming, and then she presses a ballpoint pen into my hands. “I don’t have anything else,” she whispers, her attention still on the doorway.
“How many of them are there?” I’m not sure what I can really do with a pen, especially if I’m still in restraints, but if I’m going to do anything, I need to know that much.
“Right now?” she says, biting her lip. “They always have four guys who are like Secret Service or something. The governor and her husband, I mean. Tonight her cousin is here. He had a few people with him, but he sent them out. They’ll probably come back, though. And then this new guy showed up.”
“So at best there’s eight of them,” I say. Not good odds. “At worst, maybe twelve?”
She nods.
“Where are we?”
Her head tilts just slightly and she says, “Governor Worth’s house.”
I’d already guessed that much. “No, I mean, the layout of the house, where are we?” Our best chance may be trying to escape while they think we’re still knocked out.
“Second floor,” she whispers. “Near the back of the house.”
Not what I wanted to hear. In the condition we’re in, the three of us aren’t going to be able to do a second-story drop and then get up and start running, and we’re obviously too far from a door.
“I think they’re coming,” she says, and as she stands up, her left hand moves past my face. She’s wearing a gold ring on her ring finger, and she’s missing most of her thumbnail.
The words pass my lips before I think too much about it. “What’s your name?”
She glances back and smiles. “Renee,” she says, and then she’s through the doorway and back at her desk, looking at the computer.
Brown hair, early twenties, half of a fingernail and a ripped sheet at the scene, Renee.
Cecily said Renee Adams worked with computers somewhere downtown, but according to the stalker files we found on her, she worked an assortment of temp jobs during the day and otherwise spent a lot of time at home on her computer.
Assorted temp jobs at big companies—ones with big databases and information that potentially could be worth something. If I wasn’t restrained or lying on the floor, I would be looking up whether those companies ever filed suits about information being stolen. I’d be looking into Renee Adams’s bank accounts and seeing what kind of major deposits were being made.
I watch