Cold metal slid along her left wrist, and her wrists flipped free from the zip ties.
Hot zaps replaced the crawling in her hands as her blood flow returned, and she couldn’t help but rub her wrists the same way Blaze was.
Logan’s deep green eyes narrowed, and he glared at Blaze. Without shifting his stare, he said to Nemesis and the other Russian guy, “Get them in that other bedroom and lock it, and then you can leave.”
Hope flared in Sarah’s heart. Maybe, as soon as the mercenaries were gone, Logan would release them from the other bedroom, and together they would plan how to defeat Mary Varvara Bell.
Maybe that’s why Blaze was so calm, because he knew this was all an act.
Nemesis pointed a thumb at Blaze and said to Logan, “This one was Navy SEAL.”
Logan narrowed his eyes at him.“Yeah. I know.”
“You have gun?”
Logan reached behind his back and pulled a black semiautomatic from the back of his pants. “Of fucking course.”
Sarah hoped he had a tailbone holster back there. She’d heard about some people shoving a gun in the back of their waistband and the fabric pulling the trigger. The bullet shot them in the backside or burned a line all the way down their leg to the ground.
On second thought, she hoped he didn’t have a holster. She hoped Logan shot himself right in the fleshy part if he wasn’t on their side.
Logan said to Nemesis,“I said,put them in that other bedroom and lock the damn door.”
Nemesis grabbed Sarah’s arm with his sweaty hand, his fingers wrapping around her biceps. “Move.”
The other Russian guy jabbed a gun at Blaze. “Go.”
Blaze raised his hands and walked ahead of her through the unrelieved white hallway toward the door at the far end.
Sarah followed but didn’t have to raise her hands because Nemesis had a tight grip around her biceps and didn’t let her go. He was squeezing her arm, bruising her. His gait stuttered as he walked, tipping her off-balance.
Blaze walked into the bedroom first and kept walking toward the wide window overlooking the gray cityscape of New York, his hands raised.
Nemesis shoved Sarah’s arm, throwing her in after him, and tossed their phones on the bed before slamming the door.
The ratchet and rattle of locks stripped away the outside world, leaving them sealed in the four white walls with only the tinny city noise leaking through the thick window.
The door was in a little alcove off the main room, like the builders had sheet-rocked the door six feet into the hallway from where the room started.
Which meant they couldn’t see if the door began to open unless they were directly in front of it.
The whole room felt like a trap.
Blaze grabbed his phone off the bed. “Oh, fuck this.”
“What are you doing? That twisty guy put spyware on our phones. They’ll know!” Sarah said, trying to reach him to grab his phone before he did anything wrong.
He held his finger to his lips to shush her and swiped and tapped his phone screen. When he found whatever he was looking for, he held the phone in both hands and text-typed with his thumbs.
“The phones are bugged,” Sarah said, trying to say something that wasn’t a dead giveaway of what Blaze was doing because she assumed their phones were also listening to them, like how advertising for toilet hardware follows you around the Internet if your phone is near when you so much as grouse that your toilet is running, except that the listeners were her aunt’s criminal organization.
He glanced up at her again and shook his head with a minuscule vibration so she would stop talking.
Okay, Blaze was the one with a military background. She was just a farmer who got advertisements on social media for everything she talked or even thought about, so she assumed her phone could read her mind.
He finished texting, stuck his phone in his back pocket, and then he rifled through the bedstand drawers until he came up with a small pad of paper and a pen. He wrote in squared-off block capitals,Txtd Rogue Security.
Sarah looked up with a gasp.
