Nope.
Not today.
There’s nowhere to go but hell.
It’s just us here and the steady slap of the waves on the hull, and somewhere distant, the cry of a few night birds hunting.
Even if I threw him overboard, I doubt he’d make it swimming the twenty or so nautical miles back to shore. Not in his shape.
But I step back, lifting my heel off his throat, letting him breathe. He hisses out a relieved sigh, his hands clenching and unclenching.
I lean back on one heel.
Let him get comfortable and think the worst might be over.
Then I whirl around in a sharp, downward-driving roundhouse kick that catches him square in the side of the head with the toe of my pumps. My foot snaps to the side so hard there’s a hollow thunk of impact that echoes as his skull goes bouncing off his own shoulder.
Howling in pain, letting out a sobbing sound, he curls up on his side in the fetal position, clutching his brow.
I sink down into a crouch next to his head, leaning down, and whispering in his ear.
“Now, with that out of the way,” I breathe. “I can make it hurt much more and stain this pretty carpet much redder...or you can be a good boy. Tell me what you meant about Durham and where he is.”
Still this stubborn piece of shit protests, hacking out sounds as he rubs at his head. “I can’t! I...I can’t, he’ll—”
My patience is threadbare.
God, the audacity of some people.
This isn’t even what I came here for.
Snaring my fingers into Rook’s greasy brown hair, I yank his head back, forcing him to look into my eyes, into my sweet-as-sugar smile made sweeter by that fuchsia ball of sweetness clasped in my teeth.
“Listen. You won’t live to find out what he might do to you if you don’t stop testing my patience. Let’s try this again, one more time, with feeling...” I shake his head hard, snapping it on his neck, to punctuate my next words. “Where. Is. Leland. Durham?”
“H-here!” he yelps, kicking his legs like a fussy baby. “He’s in Seattle! He’s...he’s leaving soon. Flying out from the airfield at Bellingham tomorrow. I don’t know where!”
Oh, I have a few ideas.
Places where no foreign government will ever agree to extradite a fugitive to the U.S. Places where a wanted billionaire can molder in lavish comfort while everybody at home believes he’s locked up or dead.
Working my jaw, I spit out, “If Durham’s free...who’s in that jail cell, then?”
“It’s a double. A body double...you know, like Saddam Hussein had?” Rook sniffles, his nose bubbling. “Paid the guy real well—I even had to route a private wire transfer without a bank, was crazy hard getting that much money to his family without a trace. But he gave it all up so his kids could live good.”
Whatever. I don’t want to hear some sentimental story about a man who sold his soul to Galentron for any reason.
Even if part of me knows exactly how he feels.
Goddammit.
This isn’t my mission. This isn’t why I’m here.
And I almost wish I didn’t know this now.
Let the FBI handle fucking Durham. I have more important things to do than run around with an urge to slice off his balls. I don’t need the tempting satisfaction, even if it would feel pretty damned good.
Hey, I might even be nice and call in an anonymous tip to help the Feds out.
For once, I need to take care of me.
I swear softly but don’t let go of Rook’s hair. Closing my eyes, I take a few deep breaths, sucking my candy against my tongue before I stand—and keep my grip tighter, dragging him along like he’s on a leash.
“Get up,” I snap. “Get up!”
Blubbering, he stumbles to his feet. He’s a few inches taller than I am even with my heels, but I make him walk at my level. I turn him around to strut up that red carpet like it’s my own personal runway to the door of the theatre cabin.
“Come on.”
He stumbles after me, batting uselessly at my hands. “Wh-where are we going? Lady, please, I...I told you every—”
“I know you have some kind of data backups here. Durham wouldn’t let whole decades and billions of dollars spent on research get erased. Not even to cover his tracks and ensure his freedom.” I yank a little harder, making him groan in pain. “So you’re going to take me to your workstation and show me everything I want to see in your crystal ball.”
To his credit, he does exactly that.
Without even complaining or protesting.
I train them well, don’t I?
He’s actually got a server closet set up here on the yacht. Necessary, if he can’t securely access everything remotely with the Feds monitoring so many connections. And right now, with Galentron’s data too hot to touch, not even the most black-market private server overseas would host their backups.
It pleases me to think I could wipe their entire recovery plan just by sinking this damned ship.
But if I have my way, by the time I’m done...
There won’t be anyone left to sell the data anyway.
I shove him into the single chair in the small room, in front of a desk where a nest of cables connects a laptop to a mess of fan-ventilated server stacks. They’re attached to a large, high-powered generator that hums with enough energy to vibrate the walls.
Fingers shaking, Rook pulls up the Galentron custom intranet interface, and taps in his user data before gulping and rolling his round, gleaming eyes up at me.
“What do you want to know? I...I don’t think there’s anything else about Durham here. His escape plan was classified.”
“Not Durham,” I bite off, shoving the back of his head. I don’t want that sallow gaze on me, touching me. I feel like he’s getting my sheath dress dirty just by looking at me. “Before the company and I had our ‘parting of ways,’ I noticed two personnel files missing. We never delete personnel records, even on death. So I’m very curious where they went.”
“Personnel?” Rook chews at his lower lip noisily, the pink thing rubbery and flopping. “Wh-who?”
“Former President of Operations. Oliver Major,” I say. “And my daughter. Stillborn. Last name Delaney, first name...unnamed. I carried to term in a Galentron facility. Good company girl to the last—and they never even let me see my precious girl’s body before they took it away.”
Oh, fiddlesticks.
I hadn’t meant to say that much.
It just came falling out of me, the memory of that cold, sterile room that wasn’t even a hospital, just a lab. All white walls, a metal table under me, strangers with cold eyes over surgical masks and the blood everywhere.
They gave me drugs. I remember that part.
Not for the pain.
But so I wouldn’t be able to focus, think, remember.
Or question.
But I remember hearing a baby’s cry.
Dim, fuzzy, distant. I knew the way any mother knows that she was mine, but when I came to the day after they told me I hallucinated it. My daughter was stillborn, they said, and never even drew her first breath.
What did I say about how much I hate being wrong?
That cry has haunted me for years in every nightmare.
She was breathing. I know she was.
She lived.
I just don’t know what they did with her, or why.