Women’s clothes were there with the rest.

Brother dearest had most certainly known team leader was a woman.

She ran for the driver’s seat, turned the ignition, pulled the vehicle out onto the street, and blocked the motel entrance.

The woman still lay on the ground where Jill had left her. The other sedated bodies were missing, and the motel-room door stood open. Holden stepped out, shut the door behind him, headed for the woman and, with barely a break in stride, hefted her over his shoulder, body armor and all.

Jill shoved the transmission into park, jumped out to get the rear door.

Holden dumped the woman onto the backseat and slid in behind the wheel.

She didn’t have the energy to fight him for it.

She climbed into the passenger seat and locked the seat belt in.

He hit the gas, took the vehicle out in the opposite direction of the sirens. A few blocks down he hung a right into a neighborhood of sleepy houses and quiet streets, following Jack’s directions for the fastest camera- and license scanner–free route to the freeway. Distance between them and the motel grew.

Jill’s heart rate settled. They both knew they were clear.

Holden glanced at her.

“Your brother’s a real piece of work,” he said.

In the silence and aftermath and adrenaline dump, those were the last words she’d expected from him, and in the shock of them, she let out a bark of laughter. He laughed, too, and just like that, with the kidnapped woman in the backseat, all of them barreling forward in a race to insanity, they’d made peace.

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 32

Johnson County
Texas, USA

KARA

HER SENSES SURFACED, SUMMONED FROM OBLIVION BY MERCILESS pounding in her skull. Her eyelids fluttered, catching glimpses of muted color, and a blur slowly took shape and formed into a small table, and across from the table, a sofa chair, and on the sofa chair, her pants, neatly folded, and beside them, her shoes.

Conscious thought was groggy, slow to engage, struggling to reconcile incomplete and scattered memories of the motel—the door, darkness—with this.

She was on a mattress, a shaking mattress.

Pillow, blankets, clean sheets. Hands and feet both cuffed.

The click of wheels against tracks reached in from the fog, and the disparate pieces came together. Train. She was on a train, in a private sleeper cabin, sofa pulled out to make a bed. But sleeper cabins were for long-distance routes.