I think I would’ve liked it better if she’d hated me. You have to have feelings for a person to hate them. I don’t think she felt anything for me at all.

“If you’re concerned about Benjamin,” she said, “he can be removed from this equation. My boss can easily substitute a different smuggler for him.”

Interesting. “But my skills are unique.”

“Precisely. Is that what you want, then? To remove your partner from the deal?”

“Benny and I come as a package,” I told her.

“That’s loyal, for a business partner.”

How little she knew.

“What do you want, Sean?” Quint asked. I wondered if Quint was her first name, or her last. “If you could have one wish, any wish. Many things are in my boss’s power to do, and he’s willing to do many things. What do you want?”

“I want to turn back time,” I told her. “I want what happened to Kystrom to be undone. I want my family back alive.” The honesty of it scraped my throat.

Her expression sent me straight back to my childhood on Kystrom, the teacher looking at me in frustration when I answered the question wrong for the third time because I hadn’t been listening.

“I meant a wish for now,” Quint said. “What do you want now?”

CHAPTER FIVE:

Leashed

The third time strange men in suits arrived to take me from my cell, it had become almost routine.

“Gentlemen,” I greeted them. One of them came and grabbed my arm, which was new; I’d never tried to escape so I wasn’t sure why they thought they needed to restrain me. “Getting a little friendly,” I started to say, but then the other came up beside me, and I felt something prick my neck.

I woke once, cold, face pressed to astringent plastic, and felt something digging into the back of my neck.

Alone, I thought. It was the only thing left in my empty head, the knowledge at the base of all my thoughts, as permanent and pervasive as the beat of my heart. No one here; no one left. Just me.

“He’s coming to,” someone warned, and I mused dazedly over pronoun and verb and colloquialism, and did not quite put together the sense before another pinprick sent me back into the dark.

I woke fully in the elevator. My whole body felt clammy, and I was balanced between my two guards, each of them with a hand beneath my arm. I struggled to find my feet, and as soon as I was balanced enough to pull my arm from their grasp I pressed my fingers against my nape. There was something hard there, solid and beneath the skin, right up against my spine. The elevator doors opened before I could do more than register its presence, and I was dragged into the hall, and tossed, once again, into the well-appointed room.

Benny was there, this time. He stood beside the desk, Quint behind it, and watched me with a cold, resentful gaze.