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“What makes you think we haven’t taken over PeopleClick?”
“You’re bluffing.” Judging his insinuation ridiculous, she stifled a laugh. To her surprise, he laughed out loud and slapped his hand on the wooden table. An ugly smile spread across his thin lips.
“You geeks are fools with too much money. Nothing is private.” He rotated his mobile phone to display its screen.
She recognized a recent social media post she made. The photo depicted her smiling with her best friend, Sophie, in front of a London art museum. A whole new wave of fury raged inside her, but she clamped her lips together so she wouldn’t yell. To protect Sophie’s professional need to remain under the radar, she’d locked the picture so no one else could view it, and she secured her account with the highest privacy settings. At least, so she thought.
“Again, you will give me the code and money.”
Tess shifted in her seat and her entire back itched. “I don’t have it.” Whatever mirth he expressed earlier was replaced with a cold, calculating stare, and she sensed an inevitable impasse approaching.
“You’re Kingsley’s vice president. You’ll find a way.” He shrugged.
“How the hell do you expect me to dig up code here? I’m locked in a cell in the middle of goddamned nowhere.” Despite her best intention to be cooperative, she couldn’t contain her anger and made a fist, fuming.
“Don’t lie to me. You must have high-level permissions to access anything.”
After a quick pause to strategize, she opted to play to the gunman’s presumed expertise. “Standard security protocol prohibits granting unnecessary access to the system. Given I don’t work on source code, I don’t need to access it.” In truth, David possessed permissions to all their network servers, but she refrained from revealing the detail.
“Who’s in charge of the engineers? I want his name.” Yuri pounded his fists, and the ancient table shook.
Tess bit her lip and kept silent. She wasn’t about to rat out her colleague, Declan O’Leary, who also had been one of Kyle’s best friends.
“Fine.”
Maliciousness filled his voice. Before she knew it, he had scrambled around the table and snatched her left hand. He wrenched her wrist at such a torqued angle that she gasped, both from shock and pain.
With his other hand, he whipped out his hunting knife from his belt sheath, and its sharp tip gleamed in the dull morning light. “Last chance, or I cut off one of your fingers.” He dragged her hand toward the table.
Jesus Christ, no. I can’t do this. She observed the odd sensation of floating above her body, watching herself, and wondered if this was what people experienced right before dying. “Please don’t hurt me.” Voice cracking, she parted her parched lips, which were stuck together and dry like raw cotton. Heart pounding, she worried her ribs might break.
“I’m waiting.” With his rough hands, the gunman yanked one of her fingers from her clenched fist and straightened it out on the table. Lifting his arm, he positioned the knife over her left ring finger.
“Stop! It’s Declan O’Leary.” Ashamed about breaking under pressure so soon, she emitted a raspy whisper. The sick irony of the finger he’d chosen made her want to cry. If Kyle hadn’t died, she’d be wearing a wedding band on that finger now.
With one swift motion, Yuri swung his arm and slammed the blade down.
She shrieked. Unable to detect any feeling in her hand, a wave of bile surged in her throat, and she compelled herself to glance down. The knife stood upright, impaled in the decaying soft wood of the table. Splinters clung to the blade’s tip, a hair’s width from her finger.
“You might be more useful than you realize.” A smile curled onto Yuri’s mouth.
Face frozen, Tess stopped holding her breath, and her lungs deflated like a popped balloon and didn’t refill until she remembered to breathe. Drenched in sweat, she felt her blouse clinging to her torso in clammy patches. Terror morphed into anger, and she glared. “Why are you doing this?”
“Do you know what it’s like to have your village destroyed by enemy militants? To watch your mother killed in front of you, your house burned, and neighborhood children murdered in the street?” Yuri pounded his fists on the table, and his face reddened like a rotten tomato about to burst. He grabbed her throat. “Do you?”
Trapped like a caged animal headed for slaughter, she gasped, her pulse pounding in her neck against his grimy hand. “No.” All she could muster was a rasp.
“Rich American. You don’t know sacrifice. Try surviving on rotten fish for months. Now I kill for money. That’s why.”
Was he trying to elicit sympathy? If indeed he was on a ledge, she’d coax him away. “I’m sorry you suffered, but why do you want our code?” She inflected genuine empathy in her voice in hopes of keeping him talking.
“I give you nothing.”
The waistband of her wool pants itched against her lower back, and the irritation canceled out the comforting warmth they provided against the wintry, raw morning. “Why would David roll over and hand you our intellectual property?” She glimpsed a flash of his knife as he flew around the table, and suddenly, the angled tip of the blade pressed tight against her throat. The pressure compressed her carotid artery, and her thudding heartbeat reverberated through her head. She doubted she’d escape his wrath this time, and wondered if his reeking, smoky breath would be her last conscious sensation.
Yuri leaned over and placed his mouth near her ear. “Because if Kingsley doesn’t give us the code and money in the next twenty-four hours, I’ll kill you myself. Slowly,” he hissed.
Incapable of processing the threat, her mind went blank. Static buzzed in her head until it became deafening, like she was tumbling off a cliff and crashing to the ground, where vultures circled, ready to gnash apart her bones and flesh. She shook her head to rid herself of the macabre images, but her synapses had tangled into gobs of slush.
