When the engine started, the radio came on. More show tunes. The engine and music snapping off so suddenly when he stopped was probably what had awakened her. Thank heaven something had.

He switched stations as they pulled onto the road and Elvis came on. He hummed along to “Burning Love” as she continued to try to pull her hands out of the rope he’d used to tie her.

It wasn’t long before she could feel a slick, sticky substance on her hands. She was bleeding, all right. But she didn’t let that deter her. Her life—and her child’s life—depended on how she handled the next few minutes. She just wished she were stronger. The drugs he must have slipped her left her feeling slow and lethargic, not to mention dim-witted.

Dim-witted? She stiffened. Had he already performed the lobotomy he planned to give her? He’d been waiting until after she had the baby, but with everything else that was going on—this sudden flight from the ranch—he could easily have changed his mind. Maybe she wasn’t drugged. Maybe he’d cut into her brain while she was lying on the cooler floor so that she wouldn’t become a problem.

She blinked rapidly, trying to tell whether there was any pain in her eye sockets. A lobotomy affected each individual differently. Some of the thirty-five hundred people who’d received a lobotomy at the hands of Dr. Walter Freeman back in the forties and fifties had lived relatively normal lives afterwards; others had not. Bishop’s track record for his victims’ survival was far worse, but still. If he’d drilled through her eye sockets, they would take a few days to heal and she’d likely have two black eyes even if she hadn’t lost all ability to think and reason.

Fortunately, she couldn’t feel any pain or soreness. But whether he’d given her a frontal lobotomy or not, she couldn’t lie there and allow Bishop to take her even farther from Amarok. She had to use what faculties she had left to escape.

Her hands were swelling, further hampering her efforts.

She almost gave up—several times. But the harder she tried, the more she bled, and, in the end, it was the blood that made the difference because it acted as a lubricant.

When she finally managed to pull her hands free, she almost couldn’t believe it. She hadn’t untied the rope, but she’d stretched it just enough.

At first, having her hands free did nothing for her. They were too unwieldy—like trying to use two bricks. But that wasn’t the worst of what she was experiencing. As full circulation returned, her fingers and hands began to feel as though they were on fire.

Resisting the urge to rip the gag out of her mouth first thing, she curled into herself, trying to endure the pain without so much as a whimper. She needed the ability to feel if she was going to find something in the back of the van to use as a weapon. The glow of the instrument panel didn’t reach into the back and it was too dark to see much of anything. There was nothing she could do but wait it out.