“We’ve got to stay calm,” Brad said. “That man, whoever he was, wants us to kill each other—expects us to kill each other. But we can outsmart him and have the last laugh if we just… stay… calm. We’ve all got Loki starting to run through our brains right now, enough to make half a dozen people crazy. But we’re all intelligent men, right? We’re smarter than Loki. We can beat it.”

“Right,” Kent said. “If we all sit quietly, saying nothing to upset anyone else, we can all survive until the cleaning service comes.”

Brad moved to the far corner of the table and patted the chair there. “Milos, you sit here. Kent—”

“No!” Dragovic said, dropping into the chair opposite Luc. “I sit here.”

“Very well,” Brad said. “I’ll sit here. And Kent will sit opposite me. That way we’ll all be as far as possible from each other. Now: everyone be quiet and just… stay… calm.”

Silence. Luc closed his eyes and listened to the faint hum of the air conditioning. After a few minutes he realized that his mood was lifting. He felt nowhere near as miserable as when the stranger first imprisoned them.

Thoughts of Nadia returned, but he found he could view them from a fresher, more realistic perspective. Absurd to blame himself for Nadia’s demise when clearly it was her own doing. If she’d kept her attention focused on the task she’d been assigned, she’d still be alive and welL But no… she had to go sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. If you play, you’d better be ready to pay.

And hadn’t she lied to me about her relationship with Gleason? Damn right. Told me they were just friends when all the time they were engaged. Engaged! Serves the bitch right. Can’t lie to me and get away with it.

Luc opened his eyes and found Dragovic staring at him.

“What are you looking at?” he said.

Dragovic sneered. “Dead meat.”

“Please,” Brad said from the far end of the table. “If we don’t talk we won’t—”

“Shut up!” Luc said. “God, how I’m sick of your whining, wheedling voice!”

“OK,” Brad said, his face twitching as he pressed his palms flat on the table. “Fine. Let’s leave it at that.”

Luc bit back another remark. Brad was right. Tensions could soar under the influence of Loki. A casual remark could spark a war. He and everyone else had to keep quiet.

But damn he felt good! Hard to believe that just moments ago he’d been mired in some morass of guilt over what he’d done to Nadia. The Loki was letting him see the idiocy of expending even a nanosecond of thought, let alone guilt, on a nobody like her.

Loki… he regretted never trying it before. This was wonderful. His senses were turned to a higher pitch—he could feel the air, the individual oxygen molecules, hear the ticking of Dragovic’s Rolex or whatever that garish contraption was on his wrist, feel the grain of the mahogany writhing beneath the varnish of the tabletop.