He didn’t speak. They were so close that he could see himself reflected in her eyes. In them, surrounding his own reflection, he saw the doubts and the defiance. His hand came to the back of her neck, held there until he could feel the rhythm of her pulse. With a simmering violence, he pulled her against him and covered her mouth with his. A flare that was passion, a glimmer that was hope—he didn’t know which to reach for. So he let her go.

“No one’s going to hurt you again,” he murmured. “Especially not me.”

* * *

It was the longest day of her life. Liz worked and waited as the hours crawled by. Moralas’s men mixed with the vacationers on the beach. So obviously, it seemed to Liz, that she wondered everyone else didn’t notice them as though they wore badges around their necks. Her boats went out, returned and went out again. Tanks and equipment were checked and rented. She filled out invoices and accepted credit cards as if there were some importance to daily routine. She wished for the day to end. She hoped the night would never come.

A thousand times she thought of telling Moralas she couldn’t go through with it. A thousand times she called herself a coward. But as the sun went down and the beach began to clear, she realized courage wasn’t something that could be willed into place. She would run, if she had the choice. But as long as she was in danger, Faith was in danger. When the sun went down, she locked the shop as if it were the end of any ordinary day. Before she’d pocketed her keys, Jonas was beside her.

“There’s still time to change your mind.”

“And do what? Hide?” She looked out at the beach, at the sea, at the island that was her home. And her prison. Why had she never seen it as a prison until Jonas had come to it? “You’ve already told me how good I am at hiding.”

“Liz—”

She shook her head to stop him. “I can’t talk about it. I just have to do it.”

They drove home in silence. In her mind, Liz went over her instructions, every point, every word Moralas had pushed at her. She was to follow the routine, make the exchange, then turn the case with the money over to the police who’d be waiting near the dock. She’d wait for the next move. And while she waited, she’d never be more than ten feet away from a cop. It sounded foolproof. It made her stomach churn.

There was a man walking a dog along the street in front of her house. One of Moralas’s men. The man whittling on her neighbor’s porch had a gun under his denim vest. Liz tried to look at neither of them.