Ri let out a whimper.
“It’s okay, Catnip,” I reassured her with as much confidence as I could muster. “Just hold tight. I won’t let him hurt you.” I lifted my attention to Atlas. “Does our silent partner really want it so badly you’d stoop to threats of murder, Atlas?” I was shocked at how steady my voice was. But my brain was ticking. I could fix this so everyone walked away from this with what they wanted.
Or at leastthinkingthey had what they wanted. Atlas might be desperate, but he wasn’t canny.
Atlas scoffed. “They couldn’t care less, as long as the Tickle numbers keep growing.” Atlas caressed Ri’s head. She flinched, a weak yelp erupting from her.
A head injury.
Fuck. I didn’t have time to stall him. I needed to get her to themainland. With my phone still trained on them, I surreptitiously opened my text thread, thumb flying over the screen.
Henry: Get a chopper out here immediately!
I hoped that Lucian would obey. It was a two-hour flight from the mainland. Four hours at best until I could get Ri medical care. She looked woozy, pale and unwell. Would she even last that long?
I had to believe she would.
“… when Dorian and Jules could make us so much more money selling that algo to every social media platform around the world?” Atlas asked, and despite having missed the first half of the question, I balked.
“What? SynAPPsee?” I spluttered. “They’rethe ones you’re trying to get it for?”
Atlas rolled his eyes. “You never thought big enough, mate. We’re sitting on potentially the most profitable code ever written, and you want to hoard it for our silly little porn app? Be fucking for real. I could have cut you in on the deal, but you never showed any interest in growing beyond Tickle. So …” He caressed Ri’s temple with the gun. Her eyes squeezed shut, and I ached to run to her, to shove him away from her, to take her in my arms and make all of this go away.
He could kill her before I took so much as a step. I locked myself to the spot.
“So, I give you the decryption information, and you let her go.”
He grinned. “That’s the spirit! Now, just let me get Beau on the phone. He’s sitting at home on his laptop, waiting for me to call in with the details.”
Beau. I should have known. I should have fired him weeks ago. But it wouldn’t have stopped Atlas from this insanity, anyway. This was all him.
“Ri … are you okay?” I asked as Atlas fumbled with his phone.
“No.” Her voice was barely more than a breath of air. “I feel …” Her eyes slid shut, her head lolling to the side.
“She’s fainted! She needs medical attention!”
“She’s fine, she’s been doing that on and off all evening. She’ll wakeup again soon.” His dismissive tone filled me with sick fury, but there was nothing I could do—not while he had a gun to her head.
Better a slowly progressing head injury than a bullet through the brain, I told myself through the waves of anxiety.
“Beau!” Atlas crowed, holding his phone in front of him. “Henry’s here, and he’s ready to play nice. What do you need from him?”
The line crackled. “I … uh … hi Henry. I just need the decryption key. It’s probably easiest if you text it to me, so I can copy paste.”
“I’ll send it via CatChat,” I muttered, fingers a blur on the screen. What I was about to do was so inherently risky … but wasn’t this the exact reason I’d set up encryption on the algorithm to begin with?
“Done.” I swiped out of the app, my phone torch still trained on Ri. Her chest was rising and falling. As long as she was breathing, there was hope. “You can untie her now.”
Atlas tsked. “Let’s not be too hasty. Ri’s staying right where she is until Beau confirms he’s been able to access the algo.” Atlas scooped his hand under Ri’s chin, lifted her head until he could look down at her face. “See, she’s so unfazed by all this she’s literally sleeping through it.”
My vision blurred, the burning in my lungs begging me to hyperventilate. I sucked in a deep breath through my nose, squeezing my fists and counting my inhale. If there ever was a time to use all the simple strategies for preventing overwhelm that I’d learnt in primary school, now was it.
“Got it!” Beau cried through the crackly phone connection.
“Perfect. Send it to Dorian.” Atlas hung up the phone, smirking. I bit the inside of my cheek. There were so many things I was desperate to say to Atlas, but none of them mattered.
Only Ri mattered.
