Cautiously she slid her legs from under the covers. The house had got hotter and hotter as the weather improved, and she hated it. They couldn’t open the windows. She had gone over and over the same questions: What kind of house was this? How could such a place exist? Why had it been built in the first place?

With unbreakable windows.

And impenetrable doors.

Everything that was needed to make the house a home was there: running water, a bathroom, a fully equipped kitchen. A property like this couldn’t exist in a vacuum. It was sophisticated. It was real.

Just like the man who’d brought them here, and delivered food supplies at irregular intervals.

Malin had no recollection of ever having met him before, and Dan had quickly said the same. He didn’t know who the man was, didn’t know why he was punishing them. And yet that was exactly what the man had said when they’d tried to talk to him.

‘You,’ he’d said, pointing at Dan. ‘You know why you’re here and how this must end.’

But Dan had simply shaken his head. He had no idea what the man was talking about, no idea how their stay in the house must end.

Nor had Malin, but the weeks went by and it felt as if they’d been away for an eternity. She hated it.

Hated, hated, hated it.

Once again she looked in Dan’s direction, stared at his back.

Maybe he did know how this drama must end. Maybe that was why he’d taken the knives.

Malin forced herself to go through her options. There weren’t many, and none of them were pretty. If she seriously believed – and she did – that Dan was capable of harming her and the children and was prepared to do so, then she had only two strategies to fall back on. Either she did her best to carry on monitoring his every move, or she got in first.

She shuddered.

If she chose to get in first, what did that mean? Was she going to have to kill him? Or could she lock him up somewhere while they waited for mercy, waited for help?

Which was never going to come.

The man had definitely pointed at Dan, made it clear that they were all being punished because of him. So what would happen if Dan disappeared, if he died? Would the man still want to harm Malin and the children?

Would we be allowed to go home?

She closed her eyes for a moment.

She loathed the man who had forced them to live through this hell.

She loathed his silence, his anger and his fucking gun.

But most of all she loathed the power he had.

Power over life and death. Her life and death.

Chapter 2