Something scratched at the door.
Maxence’s eyes turned toward the sound, the muscles around his eyes and in his temples straining to see in the absolute blackness.
His heart tapped faster.
Rusty gears in the door ground against each other.
Maxence rolled, lightly bracing himself on his toes and fingertips and crouching. He grabbed his discarded clothes beside him.
Metal squealed.
A slice of sunlight blasted into the room.
A man’s silhouette blocked the brightness, the barrel of a semiautomatic handgun visible in his black shape.
Maxence stayed low as he threw his clothes at the man, standing well to the side of the beam of sunlight. The dark fabric fluttered in the air in front of the guy like attacking birds.
The silhouette recoiled, and sparks and a gunshot slammed through the air in the tiny room. Acrid sulfur stung the inside of Max’s nose.
Maxence leaped and drove the man’s hand holding the gun against the wall beside the door. Steel clanged.
The gun discharged again, a blast that barreled pressure into Maxence’s ears. The bullet ricocheted off the metal with a sharp ping.
Maxence slammed the man’s hand into the wall again, forcing him to drop the gun. The heavy steel landed on Max’s bare foot. A spike of pain shot through the thin bones there.
The man bent, reaching for the gun skittering across the floor. Maxence drove upward with his knee, catching his assailant in the face. The man’s head whipped backward.
As the kidnapper was toppling out of the room, Maxence kicked the gun, and it skittered away into the darkness.
The man had another gun and was bringing it around to aim at Maxence.
Maxence punched him hard on the side of his head.
The guy crumpled at Max’s feet.
Shouts rang out on the deck of the ship beyond Maxence’s prison cell.
Maxence sprinted out of the darkness and into the fire of the morning sunlight.
Chapter Three
THE GODDAMN EASTER BUNNY
Dree
Dree Clark waspissed off.
Not only had these jerkstornher Cinderella ball gown, which wasn’t even hers because her friends on the palace staff had borrowed it from some rich lady’s closet, but they’d also tied her hands behind her back. She was rolling around in the back of a stupid delivery van that was driving her God-knew-where, and to top it all off, that dang Russian drug dealer, Kir Sokolov, wastauntingher.
Nobody shouldtaunta country girl who grew up castrating calves on her cousins’ cattle ranch.
Kir Sokolov was a tall, cadaverous man with a sickly, sallow cast to his white skin and epidermal lesions that made Dree consider a hepatorenal syndrome diagnosis. If he had walked into Dree’s ER, she would’ve immediately run a liver panel to screen for cirrhosis, acute hepatitis virus infection, and liver cancer, and then a renal panel to see if he needed to begin kidney dialysis immediately. In addition, with his height and gangly posture, she would’ve run a genetic test for Marfan’s syndrome and an echocardiogram of his heart in case his aorta was ready to rupture.
Yeah, this guy was a mess of diagnoses waiting to happen. She hoped he had good health insurance.
From her position on her stomach on the cold floor of the van, she yelled at Sokolov and the driver, “Just drop me off anywhere, okay? We don’t need to tell anybody about this. I’ll make my own way back to Monaco. But just drop me off here, ‘kay?”
Kir Sokolov said, “Give me your phone.”
