She looks at Viktor. She looks at Theo. She looks back at me and her eyes are bright and wet and there's a tremor running through her shoulders.
"I can't," she whispers.
"Cath."
"You don't understand. They have my—" Her voice breaks. She presses her hand over her mouth and the sound she makes is small and wrecked.
My heart breaks. This is Cath. She’s not a stooge or a fraud. She’s Cath and I can’t see her like this.
I stand up. The movement makes her tense even further, but then I’m next to her, my arms around her shoulders, hugging her the same way I did when I was a little kid.
Her chest heaves once, twice. Then she drops her hand and she begins sobbing, big raw heaves that seem to pull all the air out of her lungs. She grips me tight and I hold on. It takes a long time before she stops, her breath coming fast and ragged.
When she finally looks up me, her eyes are swollen and red and her mascara has tracked into the lines on her face.
"It’s Lily,” Her voice is raw and the words come out ragged, torn.
My heart stops. I know Lily. She’s Cath’s youngest granddaughter, a gorgeous little thing with bright red hair and a button nose. Rage begins to surge through me.
“What’s happened? Where is she? Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. For now. She’s home. I check on her every few hours now.” Cath takes a deep breath. “Six months ago, Lily was staying over at mine same as she does every Friday night, but in the morning, she had a pink stuffed rabbit. Someone got into the house and put it in her bed. There was a note inside it. It just said that Lily was very pretty. I freaked out."
She looks at me. “They made contact an hour after that. But it wasn’t the last time. She was at a playground with her mom the day after that and she found a teddy bear. Said a nice man had given it to her. Last week, it happened at daycare.Daycare. The staff said her dad had stopped by to drop off her favorite toy. They know I don’t want to do this, so they’ve got to keep making sure I know what they’re capable of.”
My hands curl around the arms of the chair.
"Who?" I say.
"I don't know his name. He contacts me through a phone they left in my locker. Prepaid. He tells me which tables to ignore and when. He tells me which shifts to schedule and where to put Stokes."
"Stokes knows?"
"I’m pretty Stokes is getting paid. I don't know how much. He doesn't know about Lily. He thinks I'm on the take the same as him." She swallows. "There are two others. Ryan Beck in surveillance. He's been deleting footage segments. And a woman in the cage, Janine. She processes the chips. I don't know exactly what she does with them but she's terrified. I think they have something on her too."
She's shaking. The words pour out now, stumbling over each other.
"I'm so sorry, Dom. I wanted to come to you. I wanted to tell Viktor. But they said if I spoke to anyone, if I changed my behavior, if I gave any sign at all, they'd take her."
I sit forward. "Cath. Look at me."
She lifts her face.
"Lily is going to be safe. You have my word."
"You can’t promise me that.”
“Yes, I can.”
"I'll have a team on the daughter's house within the hour," Viktor says from the door. "Full coverage. Daycare, school route, the house. They won't see us."
"They watch," Cath says. "They drive past. A gray sedan, always the same one."
"Good," Viktor says. "Then we'll know exactly who they are."
Cath's breathing is ragged but she's steadying. She looks at me and her face has the desperate, fragile expression of someone who has been holding something terrible alone for weeks and has just been told she doesn't have to hold it by herself.
"There's something else I need from you," I say. "I need you to go back to the floor and keep doing exactly what you've been doing. Nothing changes. Same behavior, same routine, same responses to the phone. Can you do that?"
