Would she ever see Ross again? Her family? She started to think of Meredith—her oldest, dearest friend—but that only took her heartrate higher.
Meredith was behind all of this. The moment someone threw her into the car, she clearly heard Meredith’s voice and her order to take her to the dock.
She still couldn’t totally believe it. Her friend left her those death threats? Sent someone to attack her in the airport and several other times on the trip to Seattle? She also knew exactly where Pippa was at all times—she’d probably grown savvy enough with technology to infiltrate her laptop with the tracking software. Maybe her phone too.
She had no intention of Pippa reaching Seattle alive.
Pippa poked her tongue between her lips and wiggled it back and forth over the fabric over her mouth. She needed to make a pocket of space where more air could rush in, and she found when she wet the cloth, the tape seemed to loosen. If she could find enough saliva in her dry mouth, she might be able to remove some of the tackiness from the tape.
As she worked at the cloth with her tongue, she took stock of the rest of her body. She sat somewhere hard, probably on concrete or asphalt. Her ankles were bound tight. Her hands tighter. When she attempted to move them at all, a tough plastic dug into her flesh.
Zip-ties.
She wore no coat, and a brisk wind cut through the fibers of her sweatshirt, making her shiver. Which in turn took more oxygen.
She gulped for breath, found little, and panic hit. A scream bottled in her throat. Tears burned on her tongue.
If she cried, her nose would clog off and so would her air. She could…not…cry.
Nearby, someone was smoking. The scent of tobacco carried to her on the wind.
Testing the bindings on her wrists again, she racked her brain to find a way to get out of them. Ropes she could do—she’d done it in her training. But hemp stretched. Even nylon rope had more give than hard plastic zip-ties.
Could the plastic snap with enough force behind it? She had to try. What choice did she have?
She sat there for long minutes trying to gain the courage to fight her way out of this situation. Part of her wanted to give up and just sleep, but she knew that was her need for oxygen. Her mind shutting down.
She drank in a deep breath and slowly inched her knees up, dragging her boots across the gritty ground. She no longer smelled the cigarette smoke and hoped the person had moved away.
When she got her feet into position, she used all her core strength to stand. For a minute, her balance gave way. She tipped. If she fell, she had no way of catching herself and her head would slam off the concrete.
She folded at the waist, fighting for balance and some miracle. Praying for Ross to save her from this situation.
Ross…
She couldn’t think of him now. She had work to do.
Straightening, she took in a breath as deep as possible and bent her elbows. The pull against her wrists hurt. But she ignored the pain and tried to work free. Long seconds—minutes, hours?—later, she knew the zip-tie was cutting into her skin.
She still had to get out of it.
Drawing her elbows up and back as far as she could, she pulled the plastic even tighter. Then in one hard jerk, she shoved her elbows out and down at the same time, trying to snap the tie.
Nothing happened.
She tried again. Then a third time. By the sixth, she started losing hope. Her lips trembled, and her face started to feel numb from lack of air.
Focus, Hamlin. You got this.
From some deep well inside her, she drew on a reserve of energy. She yanked her elbows out and down, and her hands broke free.
For a minute, she was stunned that she’d done it. Then survival kicked in, and she raised her hands to scrabble at the hood.
As soon as she ripped it away, her hair falling in her face, she spotted the woman standing not far off.
Her stomach pitched with the bile hitting it. Meredith. She didn’t want to believe she recognized her voice, but she was right.
“Impressive escape, my friend,” Meredith drawled out.
Her feet were still bound. Dropping to the ground, she grabbed a rock, and using the point to dig into the plastic along with the power from years of martial arts, she set herself free. Meredith didn’t move to stop her, but a man rushed in from the side and tried to slam Pippa to the ground.
She grabbed his forearm, hooked her other behind his elbow, and using the man’s momentum and body weight, she dislocated his elbow.
He screamed and dropped.
Pippa thrust her shoulders back and faced Meredith, only to find the woman was the source of the smoke.
“You smoke too?” The question came out as a low rasp of surprise. In the recesses of her mind, she realized how stupid it was. But the shocks kept hitting her when it came to knowing her friend.
Meredith lowered the cigarette from her lips and gave a hearty laugh. “You’re such an innocent, Pippa. Which is why I’m doing this—you’ll never survive the cutthroat industry after you deliver that speech and the world knows of your find. People will come after you.”
“You came after me,” she said with more strength than she felt. Her voice boomed out across what she now saw was a shipping dock. She was on the coast, and a ship was coming in, the big lights glimmering in a V-shaped path on the choppy water.
Meredith dropped the half-smoked cigarette and stubbed it out with her toe.
“Why are you doing this, Meredith? Are you jealous that I made the discovery? You weren’t even working on the same project.”
“Grow up, Pippa. Stop being so naïve. You want to help people? The best thing you can do is put your research into the hands of someone who can actually do something with it. Something big.” She barked out a laugh. “We all know you’ll be content with your named as the scientist who found the big breakthrough to change medicine. But there’s a lot of money to be made here.”
She sucked in a breath. That spam email and the massive sum of money offered to give up her information loomed in her mind’s eye.
“Where did you get the money, Meredith?”
“So naïve, like I said. I don’t have the money. I know people who do, though.”
“I thought we were friends.”
“Friends? No. You’ve been laboring under the delusion that we’re friends, but I’ve hated you since college.”
Pain struck her heart.
“All the guys wanted you. You had the long legs and pretty eyes, while I got the stumpy legs and fat ass.”
She started to respond that Meredith was curvy and beautiful, as she always had. But those times were gone, and she snapped her lips shut.
“Your mother gave you diamond earrings for graduation. Mine gave me a smile. The other girls all liked you better too. You were the one getting invited to parties. I just tagged along. Same with the professors. They only saw you, Pippa, while I was always invisible, standing in your shadow.”
“None of that is my fault.” She raised her head high.
“Of course not. You’re just tripping through life in your happy-go-lucky way. You even fell into snagging the best boyfriend, didn’t you? Joke’s on you, though—I fucked him first. I know how he groans when I put my mouth on his cock.”
That bile did rush up her throat this time, and she swallowed hard to force it down. She wouldn’t give Meredith the satisfaction of seeing how her words affected her. But deep down, her insides were crumbling into ruin. Their long friendship had been nothing but a scam and a knot of lies.