The men would soon be hunting for her all over. Maybe they already were. Grace had no idea how many more of them Stuart might have working for him. There could be half a dozen. There could be ten. But the castle must have a hundred rooms and a thousand nooks and crannies in which she could hide, so that she could gather her wits and figure out what the hell to do next.

She passed under a stone arch and found herself coming into the residential part of the rambling castle, where the walls were covered with rich tapestries and paintings and the floors were polished marble. She spotted an open door, peeked through to check the room behind it was empty, then darted inside and closed the door behind her.

She was inside the biggest dining room she’d ever seen. Her reflection in the vast gilt-framed mirror on the wall looked tiny and horribly vulnerable. One cheek was smeared with blood. She could still taste it on her lips. She spat and wiped her face, and looked around her. The room had a long, wide dining table set for sixteen and draped with an embroidered satin cloth that hung nearly to the floor. At one end stood a marble fireplace almost half as tall again as she was; at the other, sumptuous floor-length curtains framed a bow window overlooking the grounds. Outside in the dimming afternoon light the snow was plummeting down like crazy, erasing from her mind any thought of fleeing the castle. She wouldn’t survive long out there in that blizzard.

She dropped to her knees and crawled under the dining table, blinking in panic, breathing hard, and tried to focus her scattered wits.

Now what?

Chapter 58

Hacker was in a bad state. On his way upstairs to his quarters he passed out twice and thought he wasn’t going to make it. But in the course of his career he’d been shot, stabbed and burned enough times to know from personal experience that it could have been worse. It was a peripheral injury, he told himself. No way was he going to let a poxy little 9mm bullet wound take him out.

His reason for dragging himself up here was the kit bag he kept in his room. Inside was a little box of tricks that came in useful at times like these. After he’d dosed himself with two syrettes of morphine and snorted a couple of hits of crystal methamphetamine, he reached for a syringe device that was designed to inject small, expandable cellulose sponges into a gunshot wound, soaking up blood flow and plugging the hole like a flat tyre. It was only meant as a temporary battlefield measure. His left arm still wouldn’t work. But with two million pounds coming he was willing to get the job done first and worry about it later.