“Where’s your gun, Michael? I can’t believe you’d do this without a gun.”

“I told you that you’d come back to me,” Michael said, and his smile stung her. Memories — hellish memories — washed over Phoebe, and for an instant she felt like she was drowning. That vision she’d had of going into the sea had felt literal, but this was certainly a bitter foretaste of what was to come for her. “I have your friend in a very special stateroom on my yacht, and each thing that you do that I don’t like is going to cost him first. Your phone call to the police is the very first thing I’ll punish him for. But everything can always get worse, Phoebe. Always. So you’re going to walk with me of your own free will. My beautiful little whore, how I have missed you. And only seeing you when you were sleeping and helpless left something to be desired.” He laughed a little. “Awake and helpless is so much better.”

Phoebe was going to go with him. That was the hell of it. He was going to tell her which way to walk, and she was going to walk beside him, or in front of him, or behind him, because he was right. She would not — could not — leave Alan alone with whatever Michael had planned for him while any chance of saving him remained.

She’d called the police. Maybe her 911 call had been enough. Maybe help was on the way. Maybe it would arrive before Michael could get her where he wanted her and do with her whatever it was that he had planned.

Maybe.

But her vision — of the darkness of the sea swallowing her, of the end of her life coming to claim her — suggested otherwise. Suggested that everything she had done had been futile. Every preparation she had ever made against Michael had been of the wrong sort, every step she had taken had been worthless.

She wanted to live. She wanted to be with Alan. God, she had never wanted anything more in her life than a simple future in which she could wake to see someone who cared for her smiling down at her, brushing her hair back from her face. Not someone. Alan. She knew she would want Alan when she was a hundred — that she would be happy with him. That she had been meant to be with him.

And that Fate had played a cruel trick on her. And on him. And that they were never going to have each other. They were going to share the day of their death, perhaps, but nothing more.

I love him, she swore at the uncaring, unseeing force that had made them so right for each other and given them to each other as a joke at the end of one long hell and the beginning of a short one. I love him and I want him, and I would do anything to have him.

Anything.

But if only one of us can survive this, let it be him.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Michael said, watching her. “I thought you’d be all full of threats and fury. I thought you would at least be screaming for help.”

“I called the police,” she said. “They’re on the way.”

He shrugged. “We aren’t going to be here when they get here. Sorry about that. But I do have to credit you with good use of the only resource you had. You were always surprising that way.”

“I’ll see if I can’t come up with a few more surprises for you,” she said.

He laughed. “Ah. There you are. The Phoebe I knew. I thought you’d be showing up. Nice to see you again.” He turned. “Follow me, dear heart. We’re going back to my yacht, and I’m going to let you negotiate for your boyfriend’s life.”

“Right.”

“Oh, I will. I always do what I say I’m going to do, don’t I, Phoebe? Whereas you don’t.”

“How the hell do you figure that?”

“You promised to be my wife until death did us part.”

“You promised to love and honor and cherish me.”

“I do love you, Phoebe. I honor the bond between us — I have been faithful to that bond as no man ever has been before or ever will be again. And I will cherish these last few days that you and I will spend together.”

“Days,” Phoebe whispered, remembering Michael’s hellish photo-essay on her wall. “Days?”

“I’ve done a lot of reading on how to keep people alive. Took EMT and paramedic courses. Had doctors teach me all sorts of interesting things. I can start IVs, do minor surgeries, make little repairs to keep your heart beating and your mind functioning. I think, considering the admittedly extreme nature of what I plan, I’ll exceed your capacity to survive my art in just a few days. If I’m lucky you may last a week.”

A week, she thought.

And Michael wouldn’t honor any deals he made regarding Alan, either. Her only hope was that she would see some opportunity to kill Michael before he got her where she was going.

If the police didn’t leap out and rescue her. But Michael wasn’t even trying to hurry her along — he seemed perfectly content to move at the snail’s pace dictated by her damaged knee. So he knew that the police couldn’t reach the two of them in time.

Which meant his yacht was close.

She was going to have to do this on her own.

She could, perhaps, catch Michael off balance and knock him into the storm-tossed waters of the marina. He might be eaten by a shark when he fell in, or hit his head on one of the big concrete pillars that drove into the sea — maybe he would drown.

Or maybe he would at least stay down there long enough that she could reach Alan and save him.

Except she had no idea where Alan was.

God.

How was she supposed to survive this? She had nothing.

God, let there be a hungry shark down there waiting, she prayed, and did a little sideways dive and grabbed Michael’s knees.

He did fall. He just didn’t fall into the water.

“I was wondering how long it would take you to try that,” he said, sitting up, yanking the wig off her head, grabbing her hair, pulling her face up so that she was forced to look at him. “Nicely done.”

“You’d thought of that, and you let me...”

“I’ve thought of everything, Phoebe,” he said. “I had a long time where I couldn’t do much else but think. And you were all I thought of. Aren’t you flattered? You should be.”

“I want you to die,” she said. “I want to be the one to kill you.”

“You had your chance.” He laughed. “Now it’s my turn. C’mon. I don’t want to be out here any longer. This is disgusting weather.”

She spat in his face.

He slapped her so hard her ears rang, and she tasted blood in her mouth.

If I were one of those berserkers, she thought, I’d taste my own blood and work myself into a frenzy and charge him and rip him to pieces with my bare hands.

It made a pleasant fantasy for the half second she had before he grabbed her throat and yanked her to her feet.

“By the way,” he said casually, “that little stunt just cost your whore-mongering friend one body part, no matter what sort of deal you and I work out. But because I love you, I’ll let you pick the part.” He yanked her forward and she stumbled. “And if you try any more little tricks, we’ll do dismemberment on a geometric curve — your next stunt will cost him two body parts, the time after that four, the one after that sixteen... and after that basically I’m stuck dicing him into tiny little cubes. So don’t be stupid again, you cunt.”

She couldn’t let herself think about it. She couldn’t let herself believe that Michael would reach his yacht and that she would be his helpless victim. She had to keep fighting, because not fighting was certain death for both of them.

But she had nothing. She had absolutely nothing else that she could do, nothing else that she could think of. Michael had his turf and his plans and his weapons and Alan, and she had the wind and the rain and the taste of her own blood and fear in her mouth.

Michael led her past a dozen multi million-dollar yachts. To an empty slip.

He stopped, his head whipping from side to side, his body suddenly rigid, as if no one less than God had slapped him upside the head with a frying pan, and he screamed, “Where the fuck is my boat?”

He turned on her. “Where the fuck is my boat, you bitch? Where is it? Where is it?”

She stared at him. “How the hell would I know?”

He slapped her across the face again. “Don’t use that kind of language with me, cunt. I own you. And don’t lie to me!”