Straps bit into Evan’s chest, stomach, and thighs, adhering him to the gurney. Hard leather restraints bound his ankles and wrists to the side rails. He fought to find a place inside himself that would protect him from what would come. SERE training had taught him to deal with stress, disorientation, torture. To this end he’d been maced, electrocuted, and drownproofed, his reactions observed and critiqued. He’d learned to find corners of his mind to retreat into. It never made the pain go away, but it allowed an extra layer between him and it, let him observe the agony from a slight remove. As with meditation, it was essential not to take his thoughts or sensations literally. He had to find the space around them. In the space there was relief.

From whatever René was readying over by the vault, Evan would be requiring a good deal of relief. Dex stood at René’s side, but facing Evan. He held up his grinning hand, wore it over his mouth.

“I’ve tried to be reasonable,” René said, “but I’ve never come across anyone as stubborn as you.” His back remained turned, his bowed shoulders rippling with some movement of his unseen hands. Daylight and frigid air streamed through the shattered basement window. “I wanted this to be civilized but you refused and refused and refused. And so now.” He turned to face Evan, a syringe in hand. “This.”

In the course of his training, Evan had been injected with sodium pentothal and other “truth serums.” He wondered if that was what René was up to here. A psychoactive medication would make him more pliable, more likely to be manipulated into sending the wire transfer and unleashing whatever came with it. But even as a kid, he’d found the drugs not to live up to their reputations.

Judging by Dex’s tattooed grin and René’s very real one, whatever that syringe held was something much worse.

“I can promise,” René said, as if reading Evan’s mind, “it’s like nothing you’ve ever encountered.”

A fly buzzed over and landed on Evan’s knuckles. He wiggled his fingers to scare it off. “More sadistic research out of Cornell?”

“Out of Oxford, actually. You wouldn’t believe what it cost for me to procure a few tiny vials of this.” Taking his time, René ambled closer to Evan. “Like most experiments, it started with a simple question: What if you could make prison sentences for heinous crimes last longer?”

Evan’s heart rate ticked up, pulsing in the side of his neck. “Longer?”

“Longer than a lifetime.” René regarded the syringe with something like affection. “There was a couple who kidnapped a four-year-old boy. They kept him in a closet, tortured and starved him for weeks, then beat him to death. Given the UK’s disdain for capital punishment, the husband and wife were given a thirty-year sentence. Which seems woefully inadequate.”