Two hours passed. Elmer Fudd took her to the bathroom once, and then back to the room, and shut the door. More waiting. She paced the room, barefoot. Her right ankle hurt, but the pain was manageable, thanks to the adrenaline humming through her limbs.

Her adrenaline spiked when the screaming started.

It came from somewhere downstairs and roared past the closed door, causing Ellie to come to an abrupt stop. The floor swayed under her feet and her organs turned to water. Elmer Fudd suppressed a yawn.

The screaming went on for approximately ninety-eight minutes. She knew the time because she tracked it on her watch. Out of those ninety-eight minutes, the last twenty-two were those of someone experiencing the type of pain associated with the lower rings of hell.

That someone, she knew, was Anton.

When he wasn’t screaming in agony, he was cursing in Russian, and every now and then, when she willed herself to be still and strained to listen over the blood exploding against her eardrums, she thought she heard a faint whining sound—the kind made by a power tool motor. She heard it now, that faint whine, heard Anton howl and curse, and Ellie thought she was going to be sick, maybe even faint.

She had caused this. Whatever hell Anton was experiencing, she had caused it.

And at some point Frank would come for her. Frank or one of his men, or maybe Frank would contact the man in the room with her over his earpiece, tell him to drag her downstairs.

Where she’d be tortured.

Killed.

The stark, terrifying truth she’d been ducking for the past few hours came at her and hit her in the heart like an arrow:

She was alone.

On her own. Roland and his men hadn’t followed her. If they had, they would have been covertly watching the house. They would have known she was being held prisoner here and they would have known Anton was being tortured. They would have known she was next. If they were here, they would have intervened by now, and they hadn’t, because for a reason she didn’t know, they weren’t here; they weren’t watching. She was alone.

What could she do?

She could tell Frank who she really was. She could tell him about Brentwood and about Paul and Sophia Vargas and everything she’d seen. She could tell him she was working with Special Agent Roland Bauer of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and his team, that they had been listening and tracking him for months.

And Frank would then torture her and kill her.

Ellie turned her back to Elmer Fudd and faced the sliding glass door. A window was cracked open, and she could hear the frenzied squawk of seagulls and waves crashing against the shoreline. Death was waiting for her downstairs, here in this beautiful house with its sweeping ocean views and bright sunlight. You weren’t supposed to go out in a place like this. This house, its location—this was where you came to build your future, not end it.