The pool was growing. “There’s so much blood, Madi. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. He’s not moving.”
“Hey!” Sadie snapped, causing Cas to flinch, like she was standing right beside him. “That’s my fucking brother. Do you hear me? If he dies because you’re too busy freaking out like a grieving widow, I’m going to put a bullet in you next. Stop freaking out and think. We don’t have time for your nervous breakdown. How many men in the garage?”
Cas blinked until his vision cleared. “It looks like just Pritka, but there’s gotta be another somewhere. I can’t see who it is or where they went. It could be anybody. They’re in a fucking blind spot.”
The sound of screeching tires came through Jonah’s earpiece, and a limo jerked to a halt beside Pritka and Jonah’s body…no, not a body. A body meant he was dead, and Jonah wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be. He just couldn’t be. It was just Jonah. Unconscious but alive.
A man in a black suit jumped out from the passenger side, darting around to yank Jonah’s dead weight into the backseat. Cas frowned at that. Why the backseat? If Jonah were dead, wouldn’t they have left him there or at least thrown him in the trunk? Cas watched as Pritka also climbed into the backseat. Was Jonah a hostage, or were they just planning on killing him?
The limo peeled out, but the cameras weren’t nearly good enough for him to catch the license plate.
“Jonah. Jonah. Can you hear me?” Was he at least hearing Cas? His coms weren’t dead. “Don’t you dare fucking die on me. Do you hear me, you asshole? Don’t you dare fucking die. We have plans. Big plans.”Please just let him be unconscious. Please. Please. Please.To Madi and Sadie he said, “They took Jonah. They put him in a car and took off. A black limo, but I have no idea what the license plate is.”
“Can you trace his phone?” Sadie asked, just as she and Madi appeared on Cas’s screen from the garage’s south entrance. “It’s not here so he must still have it on him.”
Jonah’s phone. He could trace Jonah’s phone, he supposed, but what good would that do? Pritka probably lived in a fortress surrounded by armed guards. Cas imagined blackmailing high-level targets was a dangerous job. What did Pritka want with Jonah? He had the thumb drive with the names. Did he know that Cas had more than that? His wildly beating heart filled his ears until it sounded like waves crashing on the beach and, suddenly, it all became clear.
This was all about Cas. All about the thumb drive and a bunch of fucking sex trafficking creeps too famous to ever be outed to the world. That was the one thing Cas had never really factored in. Even if they turned the drive over to authorities with all the evidence Cas had found, they would never allow royalty to be involved in a scandal like that. It would be buried. They’d never allow CEOs and celebrities and people holding the highest offices in their respective countries to be held accountable for crimes committed against the most vulnerable of victims. The Turks had never wanted to out these people, they’d only wanted to take over Pritka’s blackmailing scheme, just like Pritka probably had from Jonah and Sadie’s original boss, the scumbag Pritka had helped them kill.
“Do you have the backup thumb drive on you, Madi?” Cas asked, voice raw.
Madi and Sadie were running. Cas could hear their shoes scraping over asphalt and the way their breath huffed in tempo with their movements. “What? Yeah. Why?”
Cas swallowed hard, his chest tight. “I need you to stash it somewhere safe. Stash it some place nobody but you or Sadie would ever think to look, and then get to Wired as fast as you can. But stash the thumb drive first. Don’t bring it here. Oh, and bring a doctor.”
There was a long silence, and then Madi said, “Listen, kid. Whatever you’re thinking of doing—”
Cas cut him off. “If anything happens to me, take care of Jonah, and make sure the people on that list get what’s coming to them.”
“Caspian—”
Cas took his earpiece out. Then he picked up his cell phone and found Jonah’s number, smiling at his contact picture. He’d taken it when they were both naked and in a post-sex haze. Cas had stood on the mattress, straddling Jonah’s thighs. He’d cropped it so it was just Jonah, his storm gray eyes at half-mast, and his sleepy grin.
He swallowed the lump in his throat and pushed the call button. It rang twice, and then a stranger’s voice said, “Ah, Casper. The little hacker who stole my Jonah’s heart. I knew you were going to be trouble from the start. Though, I admit, I had hoped you weren’t the hacker everybody made you out to be. But you proved me wrong in Russia.”
“Is he alive?” Cas snapped, not in the mood to play games. None of it mattered anymore. Not the Turks. Not the Russians. Just Jonah.
“For now.” Pritka didn’t attempt to hide the sneer in his tone.
Cas felt like he’d been kicked in the gut. “I want proof of life.”
Pritka chuckled. “I don’t see how you’re in any position to make demands.”
Cas closed his eyes. “I have the lists.”
“So what?” Pritka scoffed. “What are you going to do with a list of names? They mean nothing.”
“You’re not listening. I have both lists and I cracked your code. I have all the documents that prove you’re running a global human trafficking ring with a client list that appears to include fifty percent of the one-percenters and a handful of celebrities and politicians. I have everything. Everything you’ve been using to blackmail these people for years.”
The line went silent for so long Cas stopped to check his phone to see if Pritka had disconnected.
“Well, aren’t you a clever little ghost,” Pritka snarled. “If you sell that information to the Turks, I’ll kill Jonah. He’s already looking rather like a ghost himself.”
“Proof of life or I hang up now.”
There was the sound of rustling, and then a grunt and muffled voices.
“Cas,” Jonah hissed, his voice a half step below a whisper, like he’d uttered the word with his last breath.
