Page 7 of Protector Unmatched

“You know what? Tell my brother to grow up!” She stabbed the end call button and tossed her phone on a stack of papers. “Jerks!”

Her cubicle neighbor, Neil, a geek with John Lennon glasses and a goatee, popped his head over the cubicle wall. “Problem?”

She tossed him a glance and rolled her eyes. “Family.”

He grimaced. “Yep, best to ignore them. That’s what I do.”

“My plan exactly,” she agreed, and watched him dip down again. A moment later, she heard him tapping away on his keyboard.

Ready to work, Daphne opened a new window on her screen, but before the program could even fully load, a chime on her phone alerted her to a text message. She reached for it and looked at the display. A message from her brother. Big surprise. Clearly, he was pissed that she hadn’t played along with his little game. Reluctantly, she read the message.

Don’t dare ignore me or your brother dies.

The message jolted her for a second. Was the guy serious? While she was still contemplating how to react and whether to respond, another message arrived.

Watch the video.

What video?

Ding! Another message, this time a video attachment.

“I’m gonna kill you myself, Tim, if you’re sending me porn,” she murmured to herself. Okay, she would watch the damn video, and then she’d read him the riot act. But just to be on the safe side, she slipped on her headphones and plugged the jack into her phone so nobody in the office could overhear her.

With a sigh, she tapped on the video to play it back.

At first, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. It was dark, a basement of some sort. Then a light beam was redirected to a spot in the middle of the video, and then she saw him: Tim, her twenty-seven-year-old brother. She almost didn’t recognize him. His hair was disheveled, his shirt ripped, and bloodstains were visible both on his chest and around his nose and mouth. One eye looked swollen. His arms appeared to be tied behind his back.

Daphne suppressed a gasp. Oh God, what was going on?

Suddenly, Tim stared right into the camera.

“Daphne, you’ve gotta help me. I’m in trouble. I owe them a lot of money. Please, help me. Or they’re gonna hurt me.”

By the looks of it, they’d already done so.

The video suddenly ended. Horrified, she sat there frozen in place. She couldn’t even blink. She’d always known about her brother’s gambling problem and his inability to handle money responsibly, but she hadn’t known that he’d gotten in that deep.

Shit!

The phone chimed again. Another message.

Ready to talk now?

She had no choice but to reply.

Yes.

A second later, the phone vibrated. She was receiving another call from her brother’s number. She accepted the call, kept the headphone on, and spoke into the attached microphone, keeping her voice as low as possible so her cubicle neighbor couldn’t hear her.

“If you hurt him—”

“Shut up!” the man interrupted her. “I’m the one talking now. Glad we were able to get your attention. Next time, don’t hang up on me, or you might just piss me off.” He grunted something unintelligible.

“Who are you?”

“You can call me Guido.” He chuckled to himself.

Daphne didn’t find it funny. “What do you want?”