I walked wearily up the back stairs of the hotel, a bag of takeout in my hand. The second floor was pretty quiet, most of the rooms either empty or occupied by businessmen who went to bed early in order to be back on the road at first light. Quentin had a room three or four doors down from mine, but he was still at Alli’s. At least, he should have been.

The way this day was going, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d snuck out early. Quentin was a good operative, but he had this habit of cutting corners from time to time. But that would be Jack’s problem soon enough. Now that Crispin was healing from his gunshot wound, Jack and Ruth were planning on coming back to Ellaville.

I think I might have chosen to stay in Memphis if I were them, what with Jack’s family being there, and the massive house he owned, and the fact that the Guardians seemed to be restructuring and getting ready for another round of harassment and bullying.

To each his own.

I paused in the hallway to tug my keys from my pocket. A part of me was saddened that I wouldn’t have that big bed to crawl into. The couch was okay, but it wasn’t as comfortable as a wide, pillow top mattress. If this went on much longer, we might have to discuss the possibility of switching back and forth between the bed and the couch. But then again, I’d been raised right. I couldn’t ask a woman to sleep on the couch to accommodate my comfort.

Could I?

Shaking my head, I unlocked the door and pushed it open, so tired I almost didn’t comprehend what I was seeing. Rachel, fully dressed in one of the skirts and blouses I’d bought for her, was standing at the end of the bed, searching through a couple of files I’d brought home from the office a few days before. My duffel was beside them on the bed, my clothes removed and the pockets all turned out. The sat phone, too, was on the bed, reminding me that someone had tried six times to figure out the code.

“What are you doing?”

She jumped, spinning around to face me. Her pretty face was pale, that high color no longer flattering on her thin cheeks.

“You didn’t come back when you said you would.”

“I had work. What are you doing?”

She shook her head, turning back to the bed. She picked up the few articles of clothing I’d kept in my duffel, folding them and returning them to the bag. I dropped the food on the low dresser and marched up behind her, snatching her arm back to make her stop.

“What are you doing?” I demanded for a third time.

“Nothing.”

“Why are you going through my things?”

“I was bored! You left me all day!”

I jerked her around, pushed her back against the bed. “Don’t lie to me,” I hissed close to her face. “You could have done this yesterday or earlier today. Why now?”

“You’re hurting me!” Her eyes jumped from my face to my hand on her arm and back again. “Please…”

But even as she adopted that victim’s mannerism, it all began to click in my head. Her un-churchlike underwear, her vague description of her attackers, the fact that she’d tried to break the code to my sat phone once before. I’d known there was something not right here, I just didn’t want to see it.

“Why are you here?” When she didn’t answer, I shook her and demanded again, “Why are you here?”

She suddenly looked up, her eyes snapping with anger. “You’re a damn fool!” she said, everything about her suddenly changing, her face, her voice, even the color of her eyes. They were darker, filled with a cynicism I was sure I’d never seen in a woman’s face.

“They know all about you! They knew you would come to my rescue, play the knight in shining armor. They knew you’d bring me here, let me into your private space. They hoped you’d take me to Stone Security, too, but I guess you were just smart enough not to.”

“Who?”

Something shifted in her eyes. But then she smiled slowly.

“Briggs Thomas and his Guardians.”

Understanding was like a bucket of ice water being poured in slow motion over my head. But then the anger that came quickly after burst through me, from my feet to my head.

“It was all a setup?” I gripped her by the arms, squeezing hard enough that pain exploded in her eyes. “The rape? The guys in the van? It was all a setup?”

“They didn’t know you knew someone who’d been raped. That was an added bonus.”

That caused a burning pain in my chest. The idea that they would use that story—her story—to manipulate me…

I slapped her. Hard. Her head snapped back, and her split lip reopened, blood trickling down over that wide bottom lip immediately. But there was defiance in the way she faced me, in the way her chin came up almost instantly.

“You have no idea what you’ve done,” I growled. “How could you use something that dark, that horrible, to get close to someone?”

“I’ve done worse.”

“Yeah? I don’t think there’s anything much worse than that.”

“You’d be surprised.”

Her defiance both infuriated me and impressed me. I shoved her back onto the bed, crawled over her and dragged her up against the headboard. When I grabbed her wrists and reached for the drawer of the bedside table, she began to struggle. She must have seen what I kept in there. Her hips bucked up against mine, her wrists jerking and pulling, trying to break free. At one point, she got a hand free and tried to claw at my face, but I managed to get her hand back against the pillows, holding her down with both hands.

“Stay still!”

“Let me go!”

But I couldn’t let her go, could I? She’d lied about getting raped, lied about everything from the first moment I set eyes on her. I had to know why.

I lay my body flat against hers, for the first time in my life wishing I weighed significantly more than I did. But she was a good fifty pounds lighter than me. Despite being in good shape, she couldn’t knock me off in the time it took me to grab the handcuffs out of the drawer.

Maybe that’s why she spread her legs and pressed her sex up against me, her body suddenly relaxing and becoming pliant.

“Is this what you want?” she asked, her voice filled with a forced huskiness.

“Shut up!”

“You want to fuck me? I see the way you look at me, the way you touch me. No man touches a woman he doesn’t know with such tenderness unless he wants something from her.”

“You’re a bitch, you know that?”

“Come on, Patrick. You know you want me.”

I jerked her arms up above her head and snapped the cuffs on one wrist. It took a little maneuvering to get the cuff chain around one of the decorative cutouts in the headboard. It didn’t help that she kept moving her hips, rubbing her body hard against mine. Or that she leaned up and began nibbling at my throat, her breath hot on my skin. It was an awkward situation, one I’d been in a few times in the past. But those had all been completely consensual situations.

“Cut it out!”

She laughed, the huskiness less forced now. “I can make you feel really good. Everyone always leaves my bed beyond satisfied.”

“I’m sure they do. But I’m not interested.”

“Your body says otherwise.”

She laughed again, but the laughter died when the cuff finally fit through the cutout, and I was able to lock the other side around her free wrist. I climbed off her, refusing to even look at her as I stormed around the room, gathering the things she’d been going through so that I could see what she’d learned about me and Stone Security.

“They think we’re a threat,” I stated.

She didn’t answer.

She’d tried another dozen times to get into the sat phone, but the code had done its job. I was locked out of it for now, but that was okay. That meant she hadn’t seen anything.

Thank God!

I dropped the phone into a drawer and packed my clothes into the duffel again, slipping the envelope of cash I also kept there back in the side pocket.

“Always ready to run, right?”

I ignored her in favor of returning the bag to the closet. The files were a concern, but as I flipped through the pages, I could see that most of them were just background checks on a local business we’d been running. Nothing of interest to her, the Guardians, or even the company who’d commissioned them. All the people included were clean.

I reorganized those and slipped them into another drawer of the dresser before turning to focus on her.

“Why does Briggs Thomas want to know about me specifically?”

She tilted her head to one side. “Because you’re running the company.”

“I’ve been running the company for more than two months now.”

“Yeah, well, it takes time to get things organized when you take over an organization decimated by a bunch of do-gooders.”

“Is that what he told you?”

She pulled at the cuffs, pulling herself to a partially sitting position. She crossed her ankles, looking quite demure despite the fact that her skirt was pulled up to mid-thigh and her blouse had popped a few buttons in the struggle. The bruises on her face were still dark, her nose still slightly swollen. And her lips were smeared with fresh blood.

“He believes in what he’s doing. And you and your friends are first on his hit list.”

“He the one who gave you those bruises?”

Something passed in her eyes, a flash of something like anger. “He wanted it to look authentic.”

“He often beat women in order to trick people?”

Her eyes dropped for a second, long enough to tell me there was something there. But then that defiance filled her face again.

“He does what he has to do.”

“You’re not a member of the church.”

She tilted her head to one side. “What was your first clue?”

“Your bra.”

She laughed. “You’ve known since that first night? Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I was hoping I was wrong.”

“First instincts are almost always right.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

I walked around the room, trying to remember everything I had done and said over the past few days. What did she know about me? What had she learned about Stone Security? Was I responsible for making the company vulnerable?

I couldn’t think of anything…except…

“You speak Hebrew.”

I glanced at her. “You’re mistaken.”

“No, I heard you that first morning. You speak it flawlessly.”

“What makes you think it was Hebrew?”

She shot me a dirty look, like the question was intended to offend her level of intelligence.

“I studied linguistics in college…among other things. I recognized it.”

I crossed my arms over my chest as I watched her watching me. Her arms were awkwardly pulled over her head by the handcuffs, but she had this way of making it look like an intentional pose. Our eyes met, and then hers moved slowly over the length of my body, a heat in them that had not been there before. She was like a totally different person from the girl I’d rescued in the parking lot of Alli’s. She was like a siren, trying to use her sexuality to lure me into trusting her.

She had no idea how hard I had to fight to keep it from working.

“Where are you from?”

Her eyes came back to mine for a brief second, something new bringing a touch of color to her cheeks. “Here and there,” she said, as vague as possible.

“Where’s here and there?”

“I’ve lived in Germany, Asia, New York, Massachusetts, Chicago for a while.”

“Where was the last place you called home?”

“That’s a loaded question.”

She was trying to wear me down, but I was a trained interrogator. She wasn’t going to stop me from getting the answers I needed.

“How do you know Briggs Thomas if you’re not in the church?”

Her eyes flashed with anger. “We dated for a while, before he was in the church.”

“He wasn’t raised in the faith?”

“No. He converted about two years ago. Thought it was his salvation here on earth.” She rolled her eyes. “He always had these weird ideas, and the church just seemed to fortify those.”

“How did you meet him?”

She pushed her feet against the mattress, trying to move into a more comfortable position. I watched the cuffs cut into her wrists, but I had trouble feeling bad for her. She deserved the pain for what she’d done.

“We were at college together. He was this huge personality, the kind of guy everyone wanted to be around. It doesn’t surprise me that he has this following now. He always drew a crowd, even when he was spouting the most ridiculous stuff.”

“You were in love with him?”

“Does that matter?”

I shrugged, dropping my arms to my sides. The food I’d brought back to the hotel with me was still sitting on the floor just inside the door, growing cold. I went over and snatched it up, tugging one of the full cartons free. I could feel her watching me as I took a big bite of the chicken the carton held, but I wasn’t really in a generous mood. I put the carton that had been meant for her in the fridge and took a seat on the couch, shoveling food into my mouth as she watched.

“You can’t keep me here forever, you know,” she announced.

“Who knows you’re here besides him?”

“Lots of people.”

I grunted. “I doubt that.”

“He knows. You think he won’t come looking for me?”

I glanced at her, trying to show absolutely no interest even though my lungs refused to work properly every time I looked at her. “He beat you like that, and you want me to believe he cares about you? I bet he’d be just as ready to write you off as a loss as come and start something to get you back.”

“You don’t know him.”

“Do you?”

She was quiet for a long moment. “Starving me will only get you in trouble.”

“You ate. The lunch meat is all gone.”

She had no answer for that.

I continued eating my dinner despite the fact that it was cold and tasted like slime. It bought me a little time while I let her stew in her own hunger and frustration.

“Where are you from?” I asked again as I took the final few bites.

“I told you, a little bit of everywhere.”

“Where was the last place?”

“California.” She rubbed the side of her face on the inside of her arm. “Los Angeles.”

“What’d you do there?”

“Not much.”

I set the food aside and wiped my hands on a napkin, my attention seemingly on my hands and nothing else. “Why did he call you? Why ask you to do this?”

She was quiet for a long moment. “He knew I was in a bad spot. He knew I needed money.”

“Why?”

“Does it matter?” She tugged at the handcuffs, making them rattle between the headboard and the wall. “What does any of this matter?”

“I’m asking the questions, sweetheart.”

“You played right into his hands, you know. He knew you’d be a big teddy bear when you saw me out there in the parking lot. You did exactly what he predicted you’d do.”

“Any human being would respond the way I did.”

“No. Most guys would call the cops as soon as possible, get as far from the situation as possible. But you brought me back here even after I passed out on you. You could have dumped me at the hospital, could have called the police. But you brought me back here.”

“I thought I was doing you a favor.”

“You did. You brought me right where I wanted to be.”

I stood, tossing the empty food carton away. “Why did he want you here? What did he think you’d find?”

She shrugged. “Some vulnerability. Something he could use against you.”

“What, specifically?”

She had that defiant look on her face again, but there was uncertainty beneath it. I didn’t think she knew what it was he wanted, and it was a source of frustration to her.

“Let me get all this straight: you dated Briggs Thomas in college, breaking up with him after he joined the church. You haven’t seen him since, but then he calls you up out of the blue, tells you he’s concerned for your situation and that he believes he can help you out. Then he tells you that all you have to do is get close to some guy, get a little information on him, and he’ll give you what you need to survive. Only then he makes you take a beating that a man twice your size would have broken under.”

She turned her face away, her hair falling like a curtain to hide her expression. But I already knew I had hit it exactly on the button. She would have been gloating otherwise.

“You don’t know shit about me!” she suddenly said, but there was no fight in her voice, no fire.

“No, I don’t. And don’t really care to.”

I walked over to the bed and released one of her wrists from the handcuffs, catching her arm as she tugged her other wrist down from the uncomfortable position. I tugged her off the bed and pulled her toward the bathroom. When she realized where we were going, she planted her feet and refused to move.

“Where are you taking me?”

I pulled, and she cried out as the cuff cut into her wrist again. She followed, but not happily.

In the bathroom, I forced her to her knees with a hard push against her shoulders. She was once again secured, this time to a pipe under the sink, before she even realized what was happening.

“You can’t keep me here forever!” she cried. “I’ll scream. I’ll make so much noise that one of the maids will come and free me.”

“Be my guest.” I stood and ran water in the sink to brush my teeth. “But then you won’t get the money Thomas promised you.”

“You caught me. I wasn’t going to get it anyway.”

“If you cooperate with us, Thomas doesn’t have to know a thing about this.”

That sobered her up. She waited for me to finish my grooming ritual before she asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“When are you supposed to check in with him?”

She bit the inside of her cheek. “Tomorrow at noon.”

“Is that the first check in?”

“I called him Monday morning, too.”

“What did you tell him?”

She rolled her shoulders. “Just that I was here at the hotel.”

I wasn’t sure if I could believe that, but I had no choice at the moment. “You’ll call him tomorrow as planned and tell him what I instruct you to say. You tip him off, you don’t get a thing. But you play along, I’ll make sure you get what’s due you.”

“And if I don’t?”

I knelt in front of her so that I could look her in the eye. “I’ll send you back to Briggs Thomas in the same condition he brought you to me. Only I don’t imagine his reception of you will be quite the same as mine was.”

Fear suddenly burned in her eyes. “You wouldn’t do that!”

“Try me.”

I walked out, shutting the door behind. I undressed, the exhaustion that had seemed almost overwhelming when I first came back to the hotel washing over me again. I dove under the covers of the big, spacious bed, my body grateful for the pillow top mattress and the warm blankets. Her scent was all over the pillows. That provided me with a few interesting dreams. But I slept, probably better than I had in weeks.