Mira rubbed her wrists and eyed him, wondering if she could take him down. Her combat skills were rusty, and he had a gun.Better not risk it yet,she thought.
"Do all prisoners get such nice accommodations?" she asked.
"You're not a prisoner," said another voice from the hallway. "You are a guest."
This voice was deep, resonant, and commanding. The man who walked in was a good twenty years older than Mira. He had to be in his early sixties at least, from the head of silver hair and network of fine lines on his weatherbeaten face. But he carried himself with the strength and bearing of a much younger man. He was as tall as her bear-shifting guard, and nearly as muscular.
With his thick silver mustache and neat military bearing, there was something dignified and old-fashioned about him. But it was his eyes that worried her. They were so dark they were nearly black, and there was no expression in them at all. They were the coldest, deadest eyes she had ever seen on a living person. If she allowed herself to be fanciful for a moment, she would have said that he looked like a man whose soul had died a long time ago, or perhaps who had never had one.
"Colonel," her guard said, snapping to a salute.
Mira did not salute, although some part of her actually wanted to, a buried instinct that his commanding military presence brought back to her. However, she forced herself to keep her back erect and face him head-on. Her gut told her that you didn't want to show weakness to a man like this.
"Do you always handcuff yourguestsand hustle them into helicopters at gunpoint?" she asked tartly.
The Colonel went over to the window. "A necessity," he said. "Come here, please. Look at the view."
Mira came. Her heart sank to see how high up they were—and how little there was to look at. There was nothing but ocean as far as she could see. It wasn't a beautiful view; it was a terrifying, lonely reminder of how far she was from anywhere she could get help.
"Where are we?" she asked.
The Colonel turned to look at her. "It's called Black Rock Island. This is my place."
"I'm sure it belongs to some country," Mira said. "What country are we in?"
"None. This island was never claimed. Due to a treaty dispute, and because it has nothing on it of interest to anyone, it fell between the cracks long ago. It is now mine, and everything on it belongs to me."
He said it so matter-of-factly that it chilled her even more than his eyes.
"Idon't," she said sharply.
The Colonel smiled. It didn't touch the rest of his face, which made it somehow worse.
"Of course I didn't mean you," he said.
Mira didn't believe that for a minute. "What do you want with me?"
"I want to talk about a friend of yours. A man named Dane."
Her heart lurched at the sound of Dane's name.
They don't know anything,she reminded herself. And in truth, neither did she. She couldn't tell them where Dane was because she didn't know herself.
"I don't know anyone by that name," she said.
"I think you are lying. Why were you on that island?"
"Because I got in a shipwreck," she said, picking and choosing selective bits of the truth. "I managed to swim to the island, and I found a cabin with some food. I've been living there ever since, trying to find a way to get off and call for help."
"Didn't you send a distress beacon?"
She wasn't quite sure how to answer that. Her beacon, she assumed, had been ripped off her life vest while she was floating on the sea. "I had one, but I lost it before I got to the island."
"You never sent a distress signal from that island."
"No," she said, genuinely baffled.
"And you never, I suppose, saw an orca swimming around it."
