Armin escorted me down the hall. It was narrow, with lots of closed doors and fluorescent lights. There was no one else around.

Then we left the hall and stepped onto a wooden deck with a railing. Cool, salty air rushed over my face, and silver moonlight sparkled on water.

We were under a covered walkway, so I couldn’t see above us, and Armin pushed me forward roughly when I tried to look behind him. But from the hallway we’d exited to the bow of the boat was at least a hundred feet. Between them lay a swimming pool, a Jacuzzi, and multiple deck chairs.

We were on a giant yacht of some sort.

Fitting for an evil mega-millionaire bitch.

Armin opened a door that led into a dimly lit room without windows. There was a table inside, and chairs bolted to the floor all around it.

In one of the chairs sat a figure with a black bag over its head.

Fear surged through me. I watched the shape, afraid it might rear up like in a horror movie – but it stayed slumped over.

Armin forced me into a chair across the table from the mysterious figure. He unlocked my left hand and left the right hand bound. Then he used the empty loop to shackle my right arm to the smooth, brass cylinder that made up the chair’s armrest.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“It pays well.”

Armin walked over to the figure in the chair.

“I’ll let the two of you talk before the fun begins,” he said, and pulled the black bag off the man’s head.

I saw a shock of pale blond hair. “Sebastian?!”

He looked up blearily. “…Lily?”

Then he saw who had unmasked him. “…Armin?!”

Armin didn’t answer. He just walked out and shut the door behind him.

“…what’s going on?” Sebastian asked, his speech slow and dazed.

““Armin kidnapped me and drugged me. Looks like somebody did the same to you. You don’t have handcuffs on – can you stand up?”

He tried, and I heard a metallic clinking sound. Sebastian looked down in confusion at the floor, then shook his head. “…they’ve got my ankles chained to the chair… where are we?”

“On a yacht. Miranda’s, I think.”

“…how did you get here?”

“Armin was driving me back from the airfield, after you left. There was a car crash… I think they were waiting for me. Then he – or somebody – knocked me out with some sort of chemical. Either way, he was in on it.” I frowned. “How did you get here? What happened in Tanzania?”

“Tanza… nia…” Sebastian murmured, struggling to think. Then his face froze. “Oh God… Stan’s dead. They shot him.”

“What happened?”

“We were hiding. We saw them unloading crates… someone opened one of them. There were guns. Lots and lots of guns.”

“Miranda’s shipping guns to Tanzania?”

“She’s probably selling them to people fighting wars. Congo… Somalia, maybe.”

“Then what happened?”

“We were leaving, and they caught us. They shot Stan in front of me. Oh God…” Tears squeezed out of Sebastian’s closed eyes and trickled down his face.

After a respectful silence I asked, “What happened next?”

“They hit me on the back of the head. Next thing I know, I’m looking at you.”

Guilt overwhelmed me. “Sebastian, I’m so sorry. I never would have asked you to go if I’d known this was going to happen.”

“Well, you didn’t go, and here you are… so I don’t think it matters much whether they got me in Tanzania or New York.” He looked around the room and frowned. “What the hell?”

I followed his gaze.

When Armin had marched me in, it had been dark enough that I couldn’t see much clearly. Because of the threatening black bag over Sebastian’s head, I hadn’t really taken the time to look closely around the room. If I had, I would have been a lot more freaked out.

It was definitely freaking me out now.

The walls were covered with glass panes. Terrariums.

And inside were lots and lots of spiders.

All I could see were their outlines, really. Silhouetted bodies, two and three inches long, with spindly legs that ended in sharp points.

Bare wooden branches were placed artistically inside the glass cages, and webs covered them. Webs covered everything.

There was an old made-for-TV movie I’d seen when I was growing up. Kingdom of the Spiders. It was a 70’s cheese-fest starring William Shatner, about the world getting taken over by arachnids. I say ‘cheesy’ now, but as an eight-year-old watching it on late-night TV, I had been terrified. It was bad enough watching a bunch of tarantulas crawl up a crop duster pilot’s legs while he was flying the plane – but the ending was horrific. The last survivors all huddled in a little shack and looked out the window to see that the spiders had covered the entire city in webs. Literally, the California town looked like it had been snowed under – but with spider webs.

That’s what the glass terrariums looked like, but on a smaller scale.

“Oh my God…” I whispered, gazing around me in terror.

Suddenly the door opened, and there she was.

Miranda.

She wore a long white dress, appropriate for a fancy party on the beach – or a yacht. Clingy fabric, sleeveless, with a top held up by a single loop of cloth around her neck. A gold metallic belt was cinched around her waist.

She looked like a Bond girl. Or a Bond villain, what with all the spiders. Or both.

She flipped a switch, and suddenly all the cages lit up. I could see the spiders for what they were: black and yellow garden spiders, the kinds that had spun webs in the bushes of my family’s Charlotte, North Carolina home.

A couple of them skittered along their webs as the lights startled them. I shuddered as though I had felt their legs brushing my own skin.

With the lights on, I realized Miranda wasn’t alone. Armin and another man dressed all in black were behind her.

Miranda was carrying a foot-long black box. She laid it at the head of the table and then sat down.

The men walked over and placed bottles of water and paper plates with sandwiches in front of Sebastian and me.

“Leave us,” she said, and the two men exited the room.

“Go ahead,” she commanded me and Sebastian.

Having eaten only three or four hours before, I wasn’t exactly hungry – but Sebastian eyed the food as though he was ravenous.

He obviously didn’t trust Miranda, though, because he kept his arms at his side. He saw that I wasn’t eating, and glanced at me questioningly; I nodded.

“I think it’s safe,” I said.

He immediately began to inhale the food and guzzle the water.

“You think it’s safe,” Miranda scoffed. “You’ve been eating enough of it the last two days.”

“Maybe this time it isn’t,” I said tartly.

“If I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t poison you.”

“Maybe you want to give us some other kind of drug.”

“Then I would have my men inject you. We’re far past the point of subtleties and subterfuge.”

Well, that much was true.

I sat there in silence as Sebastian continued to eat. The entire time, Miranda watched us with clinical detachment, the way a scientist might regard two mildly interesting bugs.

After a long silence, my curiosity finally got the better of me. “So I’ve been here two days?”

“More or less.”

“But you just brought Sebastian onboard?”

“Yes.”

“Where are we?”

“Aboard a ship.”

What a bitch. “You know what I mean.”

“These are the questions you want to ask?” she asked coolly, with a trace of amusement to her voice.

“I didn’t think you’d answer anything else,” I snapped.

She just watched me with half-lidded eyes and made no effort to answer.

“Okay, fine,” I said, taking her up on her implied challenge. “We know you were delivering guns to Tanzania. What were you doing in Venice and Tokyo?”

“You’re right, I’m not answering that.”

“Something that would make Mr. Templeton try to cut you out of the business, though. Is that why you killed him?”

“I had to, before he signed that will.”

Both Sebastian and I stared at her.

“Oh yes, I know all about it. Koffitz thought he was being discreet, but I have eyes virtually everywhere.” She smiled slightly. “As you well know.”

Oh, I knew, all right.

“When did you get Armin to turn to your side?” I asked.

“I didn’t ‘turn’ him. I inserted him. He was mine from the very beginning.”

“That’s impossible!” Sebastian sputtered. “We went through everyone’s backgrounds with a fine-tooth comb!”

“Apparently not fine enough,” Miranda said. “Although I am impressed with how you found out all the little details over the last few days. Was it Eve Saunders who was helping you?”

I tried not to react, but my poker face is nowhere near as good as Connor’s. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you do. I know Grant Carlson visited you in the last few months. And I know you helped him and a woman escape to Europe. Since the press tied the two of them together, it was simple deduction, really. I’m quite impressed. When my men find her – and they will, eventually – they’ll make her a very generous offer to come work for me. And if she turns that down, they’ll kill her.”

My blood ran cold. “Just like you killed the driver and the bodyguards?”

“Exactly.”

“Why did you kill them?”

“They had outlived their usefulness. The only thing I needed them for was to provide access to the limousine so my men could rig the poison, then stand aside and let Templeton die.”

“They did that,” I said. “So why did you kill them?”

“Because people who can be bribed are very poor investments. They tend to ask for – actually, demand – more money later on, and when cornered, they give up secrets too easily. Better to… remove them.”

“Is that why you killed Marta and Vincenzo?”

“…who? Oh, your maid and cook.”

I hated her for the casual disregard she showed their lives. Even though I hated Marta and Vincenzo for betraying us, I was even angrier at Miranda. She couldn’t even be bothered to remember their names.

She read my thoughts like a book. “You’ll be happy to know that both your employees tried desperately to be loyal, to the point where they were willing to accept death rather than betray you. We had to threaten to kill their relatives for them to comply. Everyone has a breaking point. Theirs was just particularly high.”

Tried desperately to be loyal.

They were willing to accept death rather than betray you.

Guilt and shame overpowered me. Guilt, that I had been the reason they had suffered and died; shame, that I hadn’t even given them the benefit of the doubt when they had sacrificed everything to try and protect me.

I started to cry. “You fucking bitch.”

Miranda looked at me and cocked her head, like she found my display of emotion amusing.

“Why are we alive, then?” I asked bitterly.

“Because you’re both still quite valuable to me.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

Suddenly I realized another ominous meaning to her words, You’re both still quite valuable to me.

‘Both’ excluded someone else I cared about.

“Johnny – did you kill Johnny, too?” I asked, panicked.

Miranda paused, just to twist the knife. “No. I had my associates let him go.”

As relieved as I was, I was also stunned. “Why?”

“Because he’s going to prove quite useful to me, as well. Would you like to know how?”

She opened the black box. I couldn’t see what was inside, but she pulled out a cell phone, a cell battery, and a SIM card.

“Your phone,” she said to me, just to make it obvious.

I watched in amazement as she inserted the chip and battery into the cell.

“I’m not telling you my password,” I seethed.

“Oh, you would if I wanted you to. But I don’t need it.” She powered the phone on, then placed it back in the black box. “This is all I need.”