Philippe suspended the auction at seventeen million five hundred thousand, two families having formed a quick alliance across the table and pooling their money to win the witness protection list away from a Reno hotelier unwilling to bid higher. The hotelier’s father, brother, and two first cousins had all died of mob hits, and he believed the names of their killers were on that list.
Philippe called a ten-minute break, encouraging everyone to try the catered food. He’d done so not out of greed, but because this time one of his own men had interrupted, calling him from the meeting. First Ricardo, now him: embarrassing as all hell. But a few words whispered into his ear convinced him he’d had no choice.
“We’ve got the Stevens woman upstairs.”
For a moment he was dumbstruck, the news nearly unfathomable. He had men out sweeping the grounds while the Stevens woman had infiltrated the manor house?
He rounded the landing on the first floor in time to see outside: Ricardo climbing into the back of a black Navigator. Philippe hurried to get a better look. Katrina was propped up in back wrapped in blankets, her face smeared with blood, her eyes blinking but unseeing. The door shut and the car motored off, Ricardo calling out, “Back gate!”
“What the fuck?” Philippe asked his nearest soldier.
“Thrown from a horse,” the man reported.
More likely Ricardo had been pulled from the meeting because Katrina had been caught leaving him, and this was how he’d punished her.
“How bad is she?” Philippe knew it then: He’d kill Ricardo.
“Stab wound right below the tit,” the man said. “Like a fuckin’ machete got her, is what I heard.”
Philippe climbed the next flight of stairs heavy with concern over Katie’s condition, asking his guy to keep her situation monitored by the minute. He arrived into the empty suite of rooms on the third floor to see Hope Stevens sitting in a comfortable chair. She jammed her hand down into a crack in the chair and Philippe signaled his man over to inspect. He came up with the blue BlackBerry.
“You let her keep that?”
“Keep what?” the young kid said. “I never saw it.”
“You patted her down?”
“Of course I patted her down.”
“But not her crotch, did you?”
“What?” The man mistook the question, believing himself accused. “Listen, Mr. Romero, I did not in no way touch her in that kind of way.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” Philippe ordered him, disgusted.
Just before the man left the room, Philippe stopped him and asked for his gun. Alone with her now, he stepped closer.
“You have been one major pain in the ass, Ms. Stevens.”
She held her head down, her hands gripped firmly, pressed between her legs. “Let my daughter go.”
“Shut up.”
“Do what you want with me, but let her go.”
“Shut up.”
“She’s a child.” She looked up at him then, her eyes glassy but not tearful. “What’s the point in killing a child? What can it possibly gain you?”
“There’s nothing to discuss with you. You’ve wasted far too much of my time and resources as it is.” He came around the back of the chair.
Hope no longer could control herself. Her entire body shook. Her teeth chattered, and she heard herself whimpering. She so wished she could have been stronger at this moment, could have found the words to defend herself and put him in his place, this human monster who was behind her daughter’s abduction, her years of running, her loss of life despite her living. She managed to say, “You took away my life once already.” Then she added the words that were the most difficult of all to say; words she had practiced reciting from the moment she’d been discovered down the hall.
“God forgive you,” she said.
At first she thought he’d fired the shot and blown a hole in her head, that somehow she’d transformed herself at that moment, feeling no pain, rising above her own body to hear the gun’s discharge more distant and disconnected, more like a round of fireworks than the last sound she would ever hear.
But then a flash of light entered the room and she realized she could see that light. More fireworks went off. Only to realize he’d not pulled the trigger. He’d spun around to face the window frozen at the spectacle outside.
The younger man who’d found her burst through the door, a look of panic in his eyes. “Boss?”
Now she heard gunfire as well-short handclaps and staccato pops through the window that sounded nothing like she thought they should.
Philippe was frozen, picturing his guests on the first floor panicking at the sound of small weapons fire and fleeing for their cars.