Oh God. What were the needles for?
“What do you want?” I asked again. I pictured him picking up a needle. Was this how torture started? Was he going to force me to tell him what I knew? Would he torture me until I told him who else knew?
Vivvie. Henry. Ivy. No matter what he did to me, I couldn’t tell him.
The Secret Service agent picked up one of the needles and walked toward me. I thought I might throw up again, but there was nothing left to expel from my body. Kostas took my head firmly in one hand. I tried to jerk back, but he tightened his grip, then pressed the needle into my neck.
I gasped.
He emptied the syringe into my body, pulled the needle out, then let go of me. I waited.
Nothing. No blackness. No pain. No throbbing in my head.
“It counteracts the effects of the sedative I dosed you with.” Kostas didn’t look at me as he spoke. “I may have given you a bit too much for a girl your size. You’ve been out for over twelve hours.”
Twelve hours. I’d been missing for twelve hours. Ivy would be looking for me. Bodie would have discovered me gone within minutes of my disappearing, and my sister—my whatever-Ivy-was would be tearing Boston apart piece by piece, looking for me.
“What do you want?” I asked a third time. My voice was higher pitched, on the verge of hysterics.
Kostas stared at me for a moment. “I have a problem. It is my understanding that your sister specializes in problems.”
This isn’t about what I know. This is about what Ivy does. It took me a moment longer than that to fully realize the implications. I wasn’t a liability to be disposed of. I was a hostage.
“You want Ivy to make this go away. You want her to get you out of this, and if she doesn’t, you’ll . . .”
Kill me.
“No.” The response was simple and swift. “I’m not walking away from this. I don’t expect to.” He paused. “I don’t deserve to. But I have a problem, and your sister is going to fix it.”
He’d killed three men—and helped to kill Justice Marquette. That made him a monster. The fact that he didn’t sound like one wasn’t comforting.
Neither was the presence of the other needles on the towel.
He doesn’t expect to walk away from this. I tried desperately to concentrate on something else. He’s not wearing a mask, because he doesn’t expect to walk away from this. He doesn’t care if I know who he is.
That should have been a relief, but all I could think was that if Kostas had resigned himself to being caught, I was being held by a man with nothing to lose.
A phone rang. He walked back to his bag and removed a flip phone. A disposable? I wondered. He stared at it for a few seconds, then returned it to its place, ignoring the call.
“You said you have a problem,” I said quietly. “What is it? What do you need Ivy to fix?”
He didn’t answer. This was the man I’d met on Ivy’s front porch—quiet and still as a guard at Buckingham Palace.
“You killed Judge Pierce.” Maybe I should have stopped talking—maybe I should have just sat there and waited for him to decide whether I was going to live or die—but I couldn’t. “You killed the reporter.”
“The reporter was regrettable.” Kostas cast a brief glance back at me, then the phone in his bag rang again. This time, he let it ring, but still, he didn’t answer.
“What about Major Bharani?” I asked, thinking of Vivvie. “Was he regrettable?”
My captor’s face betrayed just a hint of surprise. That I knew that he’d killed Vivvie’s dad? That I cared?
“Your sister should have kept you out of this,” he commented, in the tone of someone who was confident that if I’d been his responsibility, he would have kept me out of it.
“Major Bharani had a daughter my age,” I told him.
“He hit her.”
“Are you telling me you killed one of your co-conspirators because he hit his daughter?”
“I killed him because he was becoming a liability,” Kostas replied, a hint of annoyance entering his voice. “I don’t feel bad about it because he hit his daughter. He’s a doctor who premeditatedly killed one of his patients. He was not an honorable man.”
And what do you call a Secret Service agent who murders three people to cover up the fact that he helped kill a Supreme Court justice?
“The doctor killed for money,” Kostas told me as the phone started ringing again. He picked the phone up and, with one sharp movement, snapped it between his hands.
Special Forces, I thought dully, wondering if he could snap my neck just as quickly. Just as easily.
“You didn’t kill for money.” I repeated back what he had—essentially—told me.
I was tied to this chair. There was no way out. The only advantage I had was that my captor did not seem to want to kill me. Understanding him and playing off that might be the difference between life and death.
“I get why you killed the doctor,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even and calm. “He was a liability. So was the reporter. But what about Judge Pierce?”
No reply.
“I guess Pierce wasn’t very honorable, either.” Still nothing, so I pressed on. “What about Justice Marquette? Wasn’t he an honorable man?” No response. “Why would you get into bed with Major Bharani and Judge Pierce? It wasn’t money.”
Kostas retrieved a new disposable cell, still in the package, from his bag. He ripped the package open and began dialing the phone.
“Why would you agree to poison a good man?” I let the question hang in the air.
Kostas looked up, his face terrifyingly neutral, like I wasn’t having this one-sided conversation tied to a chair, like he wasn’t mentally preparing himself to kill me if the need arose.
“My problem,” Kostas answered abruptly. “Pierce was made aware of my problem. He was in a position to fix it.”
There was a hint of emotion in his voice when he talked about his problem. It wasn’t a money problem. My gut told me it wasn’t about power, either. This was a man who was tasked with protecting the life of the president. It was his job to take a bullet for President Nolan, and looking at him now, I could almost believe that he would have done it.
What could Pierce possibly have offered this man—what problem could Kostas possibly have—that he was willing to throw his life away for? Willing to kill for?