Get ready for what? Sabrina wanted to demand.
None of her abductors wore masks. They weren’t worried about her IDing them. And if they weren’t worried about her IDing them, they had had no plans to let her leave, even if the Black Knights made good with the money.
So what was the play? Why had they taken her? And what did they plan to do to the Black Knights when they came for her?
The woman’s voice was serpentine, her S’s overpronounced. “So, my sweet, soft thing. I see you’ve gone and made Diesel mishandle you.” She tsked. “If you value that pretty face, you’ll make sure you behave from here on out.”
Diesel. A nickname? A last name?
“Why should I?” Sabrina snarled, her heart slamming like it was trying to break free from the cage of her ribs. “You’re not letting me leave this building.”
The words hung in the air. A verbal punch of defiance. A nanner-nanner-boo-boo, I know more than you think I do. But also, there was a part of her that hoped maybe…maybe…the Banshee would contradict her.
The woman only smiled again. And there was nothing in her eyes. No malice. No humanity. Just a swirling gray abyss.
Sabrina’s stomach churned, nausea rising like a high tide through the marshlands. Despite the heat and humidity gathering inside the abandoned building as the rain let up and the sun rose steadily into the sky outside, goosebumps peppered the flesh over her arms.
She could hear the rushing blood in her ears—a drumbeat to drown out the scuttle of rats and the faint, echoing drip of water from the sagging roofline at the far end of the space.
I’ve been here before, she thought again. Not here, here. But here with people who have no intention of letting me live.
She had survived the last ordeal. Her brother hadn’t, but she had.
Something told her she wouldn’t survive this one.
Making herself sit up straight—or, as straight as her restraints would allow—she lifted her chin and mirrored the Banshee’s cold, careless stare.
If this was the end, she refused to let them see her fear. She refused to give them any more of her tears.
7
The White House, Washington, D.C.
Lura Dougherty sat at her desk, reading over the speech the president was due to give to the United Steelworkers later in the week. Being raised by a mother who went to debutante school meant Lura’s posture was ramrod straight.
Well, that and her post in the West Wing, where slouching garnered a side-eye from the Marine who stood guard outside her door.
The AirPod in her right ear hummed with Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up the Sun.” Her left ear remained empty because she had to be ready to hop to when her boss barked orders like a drill sergeant with a headache.
Leonard Meadows, the White House chief of staff, refused to use the intercom on his desk, preferring to shout from the adjoining room.
And preferring to see me scamper in with tablet in hand, she thought with annoyance.
The whole shouting thing was just one of her boss’s many quirks. She’d learned to tolerate almost all of them. The only one that still made her want to take a sledgehammer to his head was when he acted like he was doing her a favor every year when she actually took the two weeks of vacation she was due.
She put in for the leave months in advance, made sure her temporary replacement was up to speed on the chief of staff’s calendar of events, and left him a three-ring binder chock-full of anything and everything she could think of regarding potential questions he might have. And still, the day before her vacation started, he would look at her over the top of his reading glasses, sigh heavily, and say, “I suppose I can do without you for a fortnight.”
Fortnight? Seriously?
Who was he? Some British colonel in a BBC miniseries or?—
Clunk. Snick.
The sounds caused her to lift her head and pull the AirPod from her ear. Sheryl’s voice shrank to a tinny murmur in her hand.
She knew that little clunk-snick by heart, even though the door connecting the chief of staff’s office to the Oval Office was rarely used.
Her boss preferred to enter the Oval through the main entrance, insisting it was the proper way to meet with the president of the United States. But, occasionally, when Madam President wanted to pay a visit to her right-hand man and not have it clocked by her secretaries, her body man, or the three Marines posted outside the Oval’s windows, she used the connecting door.
