He shakes his head, and my throat dries up like sandpaper. It’s a setup. Sebastian is a parent, which means he knows the agony I am feeling at the thought of being separated from my child. At being helpless to save her. He has to know what this is doing to me.

Sebastian lifts a brow—a silent Well?—and Cam was wrong about this man. He is not a good guy. Anyone who separates a mother from her child, who ties her to a chair and turns her defenseless is evil. Never, not once ever in my entire life, have I wanted to kill someone like I want to kill this man. He is a monster.

I look at my daughter, silent and strapped to the couch, and her expression makes my stomach hurt. “No. I won’t do it. You can’t make me.”

“Mom.” Beatrix widens her eyes, round and insistent. “Just go, okay? It’s fine.”

A hand reaches into my chest, seizes my heart in a fist and squeezes it in two. Beatrix is always doing this—acting mature beyond her years, assuming responsibility for matters a little girl shouldn’t have to assume responsibility for. An inflexible, type A perfectionist who carries the weight of the world on her shoulders. Now she sees my distress and wants to comfort me.

“It’s not fine.” I shake my head, and tears tumble down my face. I will not sit apart from her. I won’t.

“Come on, Jade, ticktock. Get moving, or I’ll drag you there myself.”

Thirteen minutes. All I have to do is hold on for thirteen more minutes.

My mind shuffles through the items around me, inventorying the ones that are heavy enough, sharp enough, solid enough. The fern in a ceramic pot, the footed bowl on the coffee table, the antique marble bust, the PlayStation guitar on the stand in the corner. These are the things that could bash in a head, but I’d never make it to any of them in time, not without getting shot in the back. He’s too strong for me to fight, too fast for me to outrun.

I grab on to the recliner, digging in with my entire backside until every part of me is flush to the chair. If he wants me on the other one, he’ll have to unglue me from this one first.

Sebastian cocks his head. “Hey, what do you think Cam meant when he said don’t listen to me?”

It takes a second or two for my mind to catch up to his sudden change of subject, and then another few seconds for the meaning to come to me in a slow drip. Cam told me not to listen to Sebastian. He said he was lying, that none of the stuff he told me was true.