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“If that should happen, I’ll be a lot less inclined to want to help you.”
I laughed again. “Help me? At what point have you helped me?”
“When I killed the two men who were out to murder you and snatch your sister. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I would have thought that counted.”
He seemed genuinely annoyed I didn’t consider that help. Perhaps he even thought I should be thanking him—I didn’t know, maybe I should—but that didn’t change the fact that he had been here to kill me, too.
Even so, I reached down to help him.
He wasn’t a massive man—I guessed about five feet eleven—but he was lean and compact with muscle. I was strong, too, but even so, it took all of my strength to try to haul him up with one hand and pull the back of the chair up with the other. He was able to help by pushing up with his bound hands, but only a little. I noticed he’d managed to get his wrists free from where they’d been bound to his thighs.
“You could untie me,” he grunted, as I tried to get him upright and failed. “That would make things a lot easier.”
“Nice try,” I replied, not considering it for a second.
I shifted my position slightly and tried again. This time I was able to get his ass into the seat of the chair, and then I used his momentum to pull the back of the chair up and slam the rear two legs onto the floor.
He was upright again.
I spotted the knife on the floor and bent to snatch it up. “I assume this was what you were going for?”
“You’d assume right.”
“And if you’d gotten free, what then?”
“I’d have escaped.”
“And would you have killed me if you’d had the chance?”
He didn’t answer me, just stared at me with those blue eyes. I suddenly wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.
“I had a cop upstairs with me, you know,” I said, perhaps recklessly. “He was armed. If you’d come through that door, he’d have shot you.”
His eyes narrowed. “A cop came to see you the morning after you were supposed to have been killed. Doesn’t that strike you as suspicious?”
I shrugged. “He comes around every so often to check up on us. He knows we’re in Witness Protection.”
His eyebrows lifted. “My point exactly.”
I didn’t want to admit to him that he was echoing my suspicions.
“Are you suggesting he’s the one who leaked our location?” I asked.
“Just because he’s a cop, doesn’t mean he should be trusted.”
“I already told you, I don’t trust anyone.”
“I figured that, or you would have asked him for help rather than keeping me hidden down here. You could easily have handed me over to him, you know?”
“And if he’s in cahoots with my father, what would have happened then? He’d have released you, and I’d have ended up dead, just like you wanted.”
“I didn’t want it, Vee,” he said, locking me with those blue eyes. “That was your father’s wish, not mine.”
“But you were happy to be his hand.”
We stared at each other, not speaking. Finally, I sighed and looked away.
“So what now?” he said. “How much longer are we going to stay like this? Won’t your sister be home soon?”
