Her mouth went dry with fear. Fear and self-loathing, and the agony of what she was terrified might be love. That she didn’t have the nerve to tell him exactly how she felt made her clench her fists in frustration. Did they have a chance of rescuing what was between them after all?

She watched her colleagues run toward the school in the snowy darkness, hating the worry that now started to bloom—for Shane, Alex, and Ashley. On top of the all-consuming fear for Laura. All because of one man’s twisted actions.

If any of them died she would be devastated. She shook herself out of her inertia. Stared at the code in a side panel on her laptop screen.

If she could tap into Ethan Grice’s system or even slow him down by trying to penetrate or disrupt the live feed…

Her machine suddenly got a hit on his IP address. Shit. She started typing furiously and opened a program to probe his machine for possible vulnerabilities in the background.

She typed in the offer Ashley Chen had outlined. “Two million for the woman alive. I want her for myself. I’ll give you three others in exchange.”

It took a moment for EG to see the comment and respond. When he did, he tilted his head to one side, then gave an exaggerated shrug and shake of his head in rejection. He moved on to creating the next torture poll instead.

Dammit.

Yael shivered. Laura wasn’t leaving that place alive unless the others saved her.

And suddenly she was inside his machine. Oh my god.

She desperately wanted to shut him down, but if she did that he might panic and run. He might escape when he was so damn close, she could almost smell him.

Instead, she inserted a trojan into his operating system. If he got away this time, she’d track him down and paralyze his machine at will.

She smiled grimly. Not so clever now, EG. They were closing in on him from every direction.

“Hold on, Laura. We’re here. We love you.”

33

The first thing Shane did was run over and punch his KA-BAR knife through the front tire of the Subaru. This motherfucker wasn’t going anywhere and if it was a case of mistaken identity, he’d go buy the owner a new tire and fit it himself.

He scanned the area before he dashed back to the others. There were no obvious footprints but the wind was fierce, driving the snow horizontally into his face and blinding him. Visibility was twenty feet and closing. The storm was forecast to become a whole lot worse in the next couple of hours.