“The tip of that cigarette was about a thousand degrees Fahrenheit,” Brody says. “The Flammenwerfer burns at twenty-five hundred. The pain you feel now is like a paper cut compared to it.” He pulls a strand of black hair from her eyes. “Can you imagine? I honestly can’t.”

As I struggle maniacally to free myself, Brody stares at me as he might a troublesome dog. “Save yourself the pain, Cage. That chain is tempered steel.”

Still I struggle, shredding my palms on the chain. Only one thing is going to stop this torture—a name. But whose? I don’t even have enough raw data to make up a credible candidate for “Huggy Bear.” What was the name from her phone? Rambin …?

“I don’t know the witness’s name,” Caitlin says in an exhausted voice, “but he’s out there. And he will tell his story. It will probably be our deaths that finally push him to go to the FBI. He’ll tell them what he knows”—Caitlin looks Royal full in the face—“and that will be the end of you.”

He peers into her eyes as though intrigued. “How subtle are you, I wonder?” Then he walks behind her again, and her whole body shudders. When Brody circles back in front of her, she practically folds her shoulder blades around the pole to get away from him. On the third circuit, he takes out the razor and severs the rope binding her wrists. Then he backs away to give his son-in-law a clear field of fire.

“Pay attention, Princess. I want you to hold your arm as far away from your body as you can. It’s for your own good, believe me. If you can keep it far enough away, you might lose no more than your hand and forearm.”

I realize I’m clenching and unclenching my own hands. Why else would they have freed my hands except to use them in the same way?

Whatever self-control Caitlin still possesses is fast draining away. Her face is so pale that even the cigarette burn has lost its redness.

“We don’t know the name!” I scream at Brody. “Torturing us won’t change that!”

“You don’t know it,” he says with calm assurance. “But I’ll tell you what I think. I think she winkled the name out of Sexton but kept it from you. She knew she couldn’t trust you not to use it as currency to buy your father back.”

Could he be right?

“Your arm,” Brody says patiently, trying to penetrate Caitlin’s now-infantile terror. “Hold it way out to the side, like this.” The old man extends his left arm, then tilts his head far in the opposite direction and covers his eyes with his other hand. “You don’t want your face spoiled any worse than it already is, do you?”