“They won’t let me speak to him. I tried that before.”

“They will,” Drakon interjected, arms folded across his chest, the shirt molded to his sculpted torso, “if they think you’re ready to make a drop of six million.”

She looked at him. “What if they call our bluff? Wouldn’t we have to be prepared to make the drop?”

“Yes. And we will. We’ll give them a date, a time, coordinates for the drop. We’ll tell them who is making the drop, too.”

“But we’re not dropping any money, are we?” she asked, glancing from him to Rowan and back again.

“No,” said Rowan. “We’re preparing a team right now to move in and rescue your father. But speaking to your father gives us important information, as well as buys us a little more time to put our plan in place.”

She nodded, processing this. “How long until you rescue him?”

“Soon. Seventy-two hours, or less.”

She looked at Rowan, startled. “That is soon.”

“Once we have our plan in place, it’s better to strike fast.” Rowan’s phone made a low vibrating noise and he reached into his pocket and checked the number. “I need to take this call,” he said, walking away.

Morgan exhaled as Rowan exited through the sunroom, into the stairwell that would take him back up to the main level of the villa.

“You okay?” Drakon asked, looking down on her, after Rowan disappeared.

“Things can go wrong,” she said.

“Yes. And sometimes they do. But Dunamas has an impressive track record. Far more successes than failures. I wouldn’t have enlisted their help if I didn’t think they’d succeed.”

She hesitated. “If Rowan’s team didn’t succeed … people could die.”

“People will die even if they do succeed. They’re planning a raid. The pirates are heavily armed. Dunamas’s team will be heavily armed. It’s not going to be a peaceful handover. It’ll be explosive and violent, and yet the team they’re sending are professionals. They’re prepared to do whatever they have to do to get him out alive.”

So some of them—or all of them—could end up dying for her father?

Nauseated all over again, Morgan moved from her chair, not wanting to think of the brave, battle-tested men, men the world viewed as heroic, risking their lives for her father, who wasn’t a hero.

Stomach churning, she pushed open one of the sunroom’s tall arched glass doors and stepped onto the terrace, into the sunshine. She drank in a breath of fresh air, and then another. Was she being selfish, trying to save her father? Should she not do this?

Panic and guilt buffeted her as she leaned against the terrace’s creamy marble balustrade and squeezed her eyes closed.

Drakon had followed her outside. “What’s wrong?”

She didn’t answer immediately, trying to find the right words, but what were those words? How did one make a decision like this? “Am I doing the wrong thing?” she asked. “Am I wrong, trying to save him?”

“I can’t answer that for you. He’s your father. Your family.”