She could swim. She didn’t want to think what the salt water would do to the bullet wound in her arm, but maybe she’d be lucky. Maybe she’d get to kill the bastard who’d raped Paige and Lucy and a half-dozen other women.
She counted the shots she’d fired in her head.
Dammit, she only had one bullet. She’d better make it count.
She ran.
Trask watched on the webcam as the man jumped through the window and kicked Frank in the face.
When he received the message that the outer perimeter had been breached, he’d tried to reach Roger. Nothing. What good was he if Trask couldn’t count on him when it mattered? Roger had used his silence twenty years ago to demand trust. “I never said anything about Trevor, did I? I never said anything about Monique. You can trust me, you know that, right?”
Fucking idiot.
Now his prize had been stolen. Frank was dying. For all he knew Roger and Denise were dead, too.
And Dillon Kincaid-the last man Trask thought would come after Lucy-had shot Frank and destroyed his show. He took his girl. Monique.
No, no, Lucy. Monique was already dead.
Trask slammed his hand on the dashboard of the Hummer. He was at the docks at Anacortes, but he didn’t dare go out to the island now. Not with the feds this close.
That fucking Mick Mallory. He must have figured out where they were. Alerted someone.
Kate. She’d been in contact with the Kincaids. Her fingerprints were all over this travesty.
Damn, damn, damn! First his money gone. He’d lost more than half his wealth in minutes. Minutes! Then his people.
He should never have trusted anyone. Hadn’t he learned that before?
His father. The whores. His own mother turning her back on him after he was expelled. Roger and Paul, weak, needy fools.
No one had ever stood by him. He could only depend on himself. Everything he knew, everything he was, was due to his intelligence, his foresight, his vision. No one had seen the potential of the Internet until he had launched his online pornography company. No one saw the potential of fantasy role-playing until he did it first.
Because he understood the darkest fantasies of human nature. He harbored them. He’d harbored them his entire life.
Everything was crumbling, but Trask felt free for the first time in years. Everyone he had mistakenly trusted was dead. Now he could go after Kate Donovan on his own. No cameras, nothing but her and him and his hands on her neck.
He’d keep her alive for a long, long time. Long enough to crush her soul before he watched her blood flow.
But first he had a need. Lucy had been stolen from him. In nine hours she should have been dying underneath him.
Someone else would fill her role. An understudy.
He looked around the dock. The day was warm and bright, hundreds of people out in boats and walking along the dock, shopping, taking in the sun.
He spied a lone woman. A little old for him. But she had short blond hair like Kate. Tall and skinny. Walking toward her sporty little car.
He got behind the wheel of his Hummer and followed her. She would go home eventually, and he had backup recording equipment in his car. If she had a family, he’d kill them first. If she lived alone, all the better.
He hoped she lived in the country where her screams couldn’t be heard by neighbors.
TWENTY-FOUR
DILLON STEERED THE BOAT toward the island in the distance where help waited. He swallowed anger and a deep, intense protective rage he’d never felt before. He gently touched Lucy’s hair as she huddled in the bottom of the boat, under a damp wool blanket Kate had taken from the helicopter and stuffed under the seat. Lucy shook uncontrollably, her face buried in her hands.
“Lucy, you’re safe. I promise.”
“You know.” She looked up at him, blinking in the harsh sunlight. Her voice trembled, the pain and anguish evident in those two words.
“Yes.” He couldn’t lie to her.
Tears streamed down her face and she closed her eyes, burying her face again.
He gently, cautiously, touched her cheek. She was bruised, but her external injuries would heal. He remembered what Kate had said in her note when she had planned to leave without him.
“Luce,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm, “you’re the strongest, bravest woman I know. We’re going to get through this, okay?”
She nodded but wouldn’t look at him.
She was scared and hurting. He was trained to help people deal with tragedies, their fear, their overwhelming sense of hopelessness. Intellectually he understood what Lucy was feeling: the humiliation, the fury, the helplessness, the terror, the injustice. Wanting to live and die at the same time.
But he didn’t know how she felt. He’d never been a victim. He’d never been physically and emotionally terrorized by a sadistic killer.
He wanted to take and internalize her pain. Yet for the first time he felt ill-equipped to offer the right words or guidance. She was alive, and that meant everything to Dillon and the Kincaid family. But what did it mean to Lucy?
As he neared the island where the copter waited, he saw three men standing on the shore. As he came closer, he recognized Jack. Quinn Peterson. The pilot, Hank.
How could they, four men, possibly know how to help Lucy?
He tossed the rope to Jack, who tied it off. That’s when he saw a tall, lean woman standing with Quinn Peterson. Her long black hair was pulled into a high ponytail and her face was ruddy from being outdoors.
She stepped forward. “Miranda Peterson. May I?” She nodded toward Lucy.
“Please be careful.”
Miranda looked him square in the eye. “I know exactly what she went through.” Then she stepped into the boat.
“My wife,” Peterson explained. “Lucy is in good hands.”
Dillon didn’t need to ask questions to connect the dots.
Jack said, “Trask shot and left for dead an undercover agent. I dropped him at the hospital before coming here. Where’s Kate?”
“Back there. Where’s Trask?”
Jack paused. “I had to let him go. I didn’t know where Lucy was, and I didn’t want to risk exposing myself and having him call for her execution. He’s driving a yellow Hummer and I already gave the plates to Peterson.”
“I ran them,” Peterson said. “Registered to Denise Arno.”
Dillon started for the boat. “I’m going back.”
“Not alone,” Jack said.
“I’m going, too,” Quinn said. “Miranda will take Lucy to the hospital.”
“You go with her,” Jack ordered Dillon. “Peterson and I will go back to the island.”
Dillon slowly burned. He’d been the one who’d left Kate behind; he wasn’t going to just walk away. If she died, how could he live with himself? He’d made a choice, the only choice he could make, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t finish the job.
Miranda led Lucy from the boat. She wrapped her in a second wool blanket. “We’ll be at Bellingham General,” she said. “But Lucy wants to go home.”
Dillon felt all eyes on him.
Lucy was safe. Alive.
Kate was in trouble.
“We’ll get Kate, then regroup at the hospital,” Dillon said.
No one argued.
Kate ran.
She’d hidden on the far side of the island, but Roger had closed in on her and she’d had to run again.
Roger Morton was chasing her through the dense growth on the island. Her arms were cut, and the gunshot wound throbbed. Her makeshift tourniquet had slowed but not stopped the flow of blood. It didn’t help that she was running, pumping blood faster and faster through her veins. Her chest burned, but she had to escape.
Everyone else was dead.
She was covered in blood, but she couldn’t think about it. The blood came from killers and rapists; she must not feel remorse. Not for Denise, the woman who set her and Paige up for Trask. Not for the young man she’d killed, who would have killed her without remorse. Not for the man whose neck she’d broken.