“I am offended that you think we’re that stupid!” Elizabeth retorted. “I want assurance that we’ll go free.”
With a patronizing smile, Alfie said, “Like what?”
“I have a friend in Harpenden. Doesn’t know anything about this, or the lab,” Saffron burst out as an idea struck her. “You tell her we’ll be at her house for lunch.”
Alfie blinked. “Why the devil would I do that?”
“Because if someone is expecting us, they’ll know if we go missing,” Saffron said.
“I could just make a telephone call,” Alfie said easily. “Say the fellows in my care are to no longer be among the livin’. How’s that for an assurance?”
Saffron swallowed hard and stepped out of Elizabeth’s protective embrace. Keeping her voice low, she said, “You’ve got a man in Lord Tremaine’s office. You’ve got people infiltrating at least one government research station. And you’ve got any number of men who look very capable of wielding the weapons they carry. But it’s been two weeks since you killed Jeffery Wells.” The placid smile Alfie wore flickered. Saffron pressed on. “Two weeks during which you could have sent someone to break into the lab for the rest of the information, but you haven’t. Because you don’t know what it is you need.”
Elizabeth stepped up next to her. “Your collaborator is getting impatient. I hear he is a frightening man. Someone who’d be angry if the information goes unretrieved.”
Alfie’s lip curled. “You’re all talk, ladies. I’m getting that information, or bodies are going to start turning up downriver. You do what I want, or you’ll be the first to make a splash.”
After Nick had revealed more about Alfie Tennison’s identity, Saffron had wondered why Alfie would meet with Wells himself in the Dancing Sparrow. He was at the top of his hierarchy. It didn’t make sense for him to be a go-between, but now that she saw how badly Alfie wanted the information from the lab, badly enough to take hostages and drop the niceties after only a few minutes, it made more sense. He was desperate for the information from the Path Lab. Desperate for payment, or desperate to stay in his radical collaborator’s good graces? Either way, this situation was growing more dangerous by the minute.
“We’re at a stalemate, Mr. Tennison,” Saffron said, hoping her estimation of Alfie was correct, and that her voice revealed none of her fear. “You need us. We want to walk away from this alive and well, and our friends returned safely. Unless you’re willing to compromise, you’ll have to find another way into the Path Lab.”
“You’re going to dislocate something if you keep that up.”
Alexander ignored Nick, as he had for the past two hours. He also ignored the sting of his wrists as he continued to tug at where they were bound behind his back. The scratchy rope had rubbed his skin raw. But unlike Nick, he wasn’t content to sit and do nothing.
He’d fought against Alfie Tennison’s men when they took them from Nick’s hotel, and attempted to get away when they shoved them into the motorcar waiting in the mews behind the building. Blood crusted his upper lip and his ribs ached for his trouble, while Nick had come out of it with not a scratch. He leaned on the wall across the room from Alexander, his hands bound and attached to the radiator. Alexander was tied to the iron grate embedded in the fireplace’s grimytiled hearth and had no comfortable way to sit, as Alfie’s men had seen fit to tie his ankles together too.
They’d been tied up and left alone in the small, cold room. They could hear murmurings and movements beyond, as well as the smell of something frying, weighing down the musty air. With dust clinging to every surface and the single window covered with a tacked-up sheet, it was clear this place was a temporary hideout. It was in London, somewhere along the Thames. He’d lost track of the streets as he struggled to push his way out of the motorcar.
Alexander had counted three men in total when he and Nick were hauled inside. If he and Nick could get free, he was confident they could escape, either by going through them or sneaking past. If Alfie had come after Nick, it was likely he’d sent someone after Saffron and Elizabeth as well. Staying here and waiting to see if they’d drag the girls into the little house wasn’t an option.
He gave an almighty tug, trying yet again to muscle apart his wrists, and a sharp, deep pain shot through his right shoulder, accompanied by an ominous pop. Alexander could barely make out Nick’s sigh over the harsh, uneven sounds of his breathing.
“And now you’ll be halfway to useless. But you learned to be left-handed, didn’t you? You can still throw a punch or pull a trigger, I wager,” Nick said.
Alexander was too caught up in the pain to be annoyed that Nick knew he’d taught himself to use his left hand after his injury.
After a minute of breathing through his teeth to get the pain under control, he ground out, “Do you have a plan for when I might need to do those things?”
Nick’s reply was as opaque as his expression. “Just be ready.”
But as the pain in his shoulder worsened and the minutes passed to hours, Alexander began to suspect that Nick didn’t have a plan, at least one he would enact from this room. They’d have to wait for something to happen, and Alexander was impatient for whatever that was just as much as he dreaded it.
CHAPTER44
It was hard to maintain a steely composure when one was shivering like a frightened greyhound, but Saffron was determined not to give way to fear or the cold. She stared into Alfie Tennison’s eyes until he harrumphed and waved a hand to the cab.
“Smith,” he barked, and Colin came forward.
“Mr. Tennison,” Colin said with a strange mixture of deference and smugness.
“You’re to take the girls to their friend’s house. Have a little chat with the friend to give them peace of mind—no funny business—then take them to the lab. Make sure they do what I want them to do.”
Saffron was tempted to lie and say that Colin wouldn’t be allowed inside the laboratory, but that would mean Elizabeth wouldn’t be allowed in either, and she had no desire to force Elizabeth to stay behind with Alfie and his bruisers. “And what precisely do you mean for us to find?”
“Anything related to this,” Alfie said. He dug into his breast pocket and pulled out a paper. He handed it to Saffron.
It was a page of notes written in Quinn’s hand from the middle of October, something that looked torn from a notebook. She’d listed a dozen species names in her neat script, but each had been crossed out. She knew precisely what it was and what Quinn had been trying to do by listing them out.
