Mike called Theo next, she had just gotten home and was about to take a bath. She sounded stilted and strange and still in shock. It had been a hard morning for her, even before that, going through Axel’s things and overwhelmed with memories. And now she had fully understood the danger she was in as long as the kidnappers were out there, even three of them. They were on a mission, with their own lives probably at stake if they didn’t complete it successfully. Men who were after a fifty-million-euro ransom didn’t take it lightly.

“Are you okay?” He knew she wasn’t, but as much as she could be in the circumstances. The terror she must have experienced when they grabbed her must have been even worse than being poisoned.

“Yes, I am,” she said in a small voice. “I thought they were going to kill me.”

“They probably would have,” he said, and thought they still might. He just prayed that the DGSE agents were equal to the task this time, and able to protect her if the kidnappers tried again.

“Do you think they’ll come back?” she asked softly.

“There’s a chance they will. You have to be very careful. Stay below the radar right now, don’t go out more than you have to, and I’ll be back in a week.” She sounded very meek when they hung up, peeled off her blood-soaked clothes and slipped into the tub. Their blood was still on her skin and in her hair, under her nails, and on her eyelashes. She felt as though she would never be able to scrub it off her adequately. All she wanted to do afterwards was come home.

After the crime detail and forensics experts had gotten all the evidence they needed, the police had promised to bring her crates from the château to her apartment. She didn’t want Axel’s things to get lost in the shuffle.

She lay in the tub with her eyes closed, playing over in her mind everything that had happened that morning. Her ears were still ringing from the shots that had been fired, and she could still see the foreman’s head as it exploded inches from her. It could all have turned out so differently. She could have been tied up in the back of the moving truck by then, her fate sealed, in exchange for the rest of the ransom they hadn’t gotten before.

Agent Guy Thomas called her at five o’clock. The fingerprints and the DNA were a match for all six of them. It was the same crew as before, but at least two of them were dead, and two were injured, one of them in custody. They didn’t have the team they needed to pull it off smoothly now, which might mean they’d use greater force and more violence if they tried.