Kari, with that loaded gun still in her hand, stood at the floor-to-ceiling window inside Alex’s childhood bedroom, or villa as the Drakos’s referred to it, when she heard a hard knock on the door.

“Miss Grant?”

It was Alex’s father.

Kari stood erect.  “Yes?”

“Open the door, please.  It’s about Alexio.”

Kari began to move closer to the door.  “What about Alex?” she asked.

“Open the door, please, and I will tell you.  It is not good news, I am sad to say.  He told me to come and get you.”  More knocks.  “Open the door, please.  It is not safe here!”

Kari’s heart was hammering.  Every muscle in her body was telling her to run to that door and open it.  What if Alex was hurt?  What if Alex needed her?

More knocks.  “Miss Grant, please open the door so that I may explain to you what has just transpired.”

She heard what Alex’s father was saying, but she remembered what Alex had said.  She was not to open that door for anybody but him.  He didn’t care who was on the other side.  Do not open that door!

She began running, as if her life depended on it, across the massive bedroom toward the bathroom door.

Just as she did, she heard Elasaid say “do it,” and then she heard kicks on that bedroom door. Then the door was kicked in.  The men who kicked the door open came in first, but Elasaid was right behind them.  And he saw Kari just as she was running toward the bathroom.

“Get that bitch!” Elasaid yelled angrily, and his men ran toward the bathroom, too.

Kari could feel them closing in as they ran at an angle, putting them almost at the same distance from that bathroom as she was.  One of Elasaid’s men was even able to reach out and grab Kari’s blouse, and was about to sling her away from that bathroom door and into their clutches.  But Kari snatched away from him, entered the bathroom, and slammed that door shut.  Then she quickly locked it.

She held up that loaded gun Alex had given to her with trembling hands, backing away from that door in a state of pure panic, as the men on the other side began kicking it in.  She was going to have to kill them.  She was going to have to kill each and every one of those motherfuckers who tried to come for her.  Before, when she was in this position, Alex was with her.  Her protector was protecting her.  Now she was all alone.

But then she remembered something else Alex had told her.  It was during a conversation they had at that window overlooking the sea.  Alex said he would go to that sea, late at night, through an escape route “behind the sink in the bathroom of this very villa, a passage that my parents did not know existed.  I happened upon it by accident myself.”

Kari quickly looked at that sink as that door was within a hair’s breadth of being kicked down.  She pulled on the sink.  She tried to push it side to side.  But it was a sink!  How could Alex claim a sink moved???

Kari was beyond panicking.  “Lord, help me,” she was crying.  “I don’t know where.  Where, Lord, where?!”

But the men outside of that bathroom door weren’t waiting for answers.  They leaned back one last time, and kicked it all the way down.  They ran into that sizeable bathroom, and Elasaid ran in behind them.

To their shock, there was no Kari.  They looked up and down.  Around and around.  But the black girl was gone.

“Impossible!” Elasaid said.  There were no hiding places in that bathroom.  There were no corners or moveable objects.  And they all saw her go into this place!

Then Elasaid looked up.  There was an air vent on the side wall.  It didn’t look wide enough to him, nor did it look as if it had been tampered with.  But that was all they had!

“Remove that vent and see if she somehow got in there,” he ordered to the crew chief.  “And get men to surround the castle in search of her.  I want her found.”

“Dead or alive?” the chief asked him.

“Dead or alive!” Elasaid replied, and angrily left the bathroom.

His plan had gone awry already, he thought, as he left.  She was going to be his hostage.  She was going to be that extra leverage he had should Alexio try something crazy.  Because Elasaid knew his son.  He knew he was going to make it out alive with those five underbosses no matter who didn’t make it.  Alexio, he was certain, would.

And he just might come for his father.

But when Elasaid was angry, he was irrational.  And he was irrational now.  He didn’t care about having a hostage.  He didn’t care about having a bargaining chip.  He just wanted that bitch captured, however way they caught her.