Page 96 of Take Me Darkly

First came the sheer physical agony—a deep, splitting throb at the base of my skull that pulsed in malicious lockstep with my hammering heart. Then a wave of intense nausea rolled up my throat, thick and greasy, forcing me to swallow hard to keep from choking on the bitter copper taste in my mouth. Finally, the suffocating dark. I blinked frantically, but my eyelashes scraped against coarse, heavy fabric cinched brutally tight across my eyes.

A wave of wild, animal panic surged through me. My wrists were wrenched behind my back, the cold nylon of heavy zip-ties cutting deep into the raw flesh of my forearms, binding me to an icy, unyielding iron pipe. My ankles were tied just as tightly. A thick, dry cotton gag filled my mouth, knotted so fiercely at the corners of my lips that my jaw throbbed with a dull, sickening ache. When I tried to scream, all that escaped was a pathetic, muffled groan.

Where am I? Think, Serena. Shut down the panic and use your head.

I forced my rigid muscles to go limp, tuning out the frantic rushing of my own blood to listen. Beneath the high-pitched ringing in my ears, a sound emerged. Rhythmic. Heavy. A deep, wet slap and a hollow, churning rush. The floor beneath my hip lifted on a slow, sickening swell before rolling heavily to the left, the iron pipe groaning against its bolts.

Water.

The sound I heard was the relentless lap of waves against a fiberglass hull.

A boat. I’m on a boat.

The realization dropped into my stomach like a block of lead. On land, there were variables—traffic cameras, gridlocked streets, pedestrians who might notice a struggle. On land, Anton’s massive, terrifying security apparatus possessed a tactical footprint that could lock down an entire city block in seconds. Out here, on the open Atlantic, there were no witnesses. No digital trails. There was only the black infinity of the deep, and whoever had tossed my body into the hold.

Heavy, measured footsteps echoed down a wooden companionway, dripping with a terrifying familiarity. A hand fisted violently into the knot of hair at the nape of my neck, yanked upward, and dragged the blindfold down.

The sudden influx of harsh, yellow light stabbed my retinas like twin needles. I blinked rapidly against the searing glare, tears leaking down my cheeks as the cramped cabin swam into focus. Dark teak bulkheads. A low, claustrophobic ceiling. A brass-rimmed porthole crusted with salt spray.

And directly in front of me, crouched on the balls of his feet—close enough that I could smell his expensive designer cologne beneath the stench of diesel fuel—sat Cade.

He looked exactly as he had the last night he’d slept in my bed in Florence. The thick, dark hair sweeping across his forehead. That sharp, aristocratic jawline. The effortless, clean handsomeness that had once made me believe I was the luckiest woman in Europe. But his eyes were dead. An erratic, unhinged intensity flared behind his pupils—a sinister shadow that had always been there, masked beneath two years of gentle smiles and calculated affection.

He held a sleek semi-automatic pistol without taking aim. He merely swung it loosely by the trigger guard, dangling the instrument of my death from one finger the way a person might hold a house key. That casual indifference turned my blood to liquid nitrogen. It meant taking my life wasn’t a monumental decision—it was a routine chore.

Behind him, draped sideways across a worn leather bench with one bare leg swinging lazily over the armrest, sat Briana. She wasn’t even looking at me. She was meticulously filing her manicured nails.

“There she is,” Cade murmured, his voice dropping into that smooth, velvet baritone that used to make my heart race. “Hi, Serena.”

A violent surge of adrenaline overrode my physical pain. I threw my entire weight against the restraints, my back arching violently off the floorboards as I screamed his name into the gag. It came out as a suffocated, furious roar. A fleeting shadow of something resembling regret flickered across his handsome face before his expression curdled into something defensive and ugly.

“I know. You’ve got a narrative running in your head right now, and a thousand questions,” he said, dropping lower, his forearms resting on his knees while the muzzle of the gun pointed loosely at the deck. “You always had to ask questions, Serena. That was your fatal flaw from day one. You could never just let a beautiful thing exist.”

His composure held for five seconds. Then the polished mask cracked, his voice rising into something sharp and erratic.

“You were getting too close. Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Your father spent five years searching for something he was never meant to discover. Then he finally died, and I thought, good. It’s over and buried. But then you picked up the torch with his journals and that goddamned rubbing. I knew it wouldn’t be long before you figured things out. You always were smarter than your father. I tried to protect you, but when you started digging in Rome, people in high places began asking me why Carlo Martinelli’s daughter was still sniffing around. But it wasn’t time for you to know.”

Know what?

I thought about our months and years together—years of shared meals, quiet mornings, plans for a future, and passionate nights where I had given him my body and my trust. But the whole time, he’d been lying. I hadn’t wanted to believe Zeke and Anton when they’d told me, but it was true. None of it had been real. Every touch, every whispered promise—it was all a ploy.

Cade saw the devastating realization register on my face and flinched, stepping back as if I’d physically struck him.

“Don’t.” He shoved himself to his feet, pacing the narrow confines of the cabin like a caged animal, violently running his free hand through his hair. His jaw flexed, a dangerous pulse beating in his temple. “Don’t you dare look at me like I’m the villain here. You think I wanted this? Two years, Serena. I gave you two years of my life. I was supposed to get close, keep an eye on you, locate the journals, and extract clean. That was the assignment. But then your father got too close. I had to make it look natural—the arsenic was slow, methodical, perfect! But with you poking your nose into things, you accelerated the timeline. You and Carlo... neither of you knew when to stop! What was I supposed to do? You backed me into a corner!”

Arsenic. Anton had been right about that too.

The memory of my father’s slow, horrifying demise hit me like a physical blow. My brilliant, gentle father, wasting away to skin and bone over six agonizing months while doctors offered empty diagnoses. I remembered Cade standing in my mother’s kitchen in Lucca, smiling warmly as he meticulously brewed my father’s favorite herbal tea. I remembered sobbing against Cade’s chest, thanking him through my tears for being our rock during those final, tragic weeks.

He was poisoning him the entire time. How could I have been so blind?

A hot, acidic wave of bile flooded my mouth. I choked against the heavy gag, forcing it down by sheer strength of will because there was nowhere for it to go. A dark, primal hatred flared in my chest so intensely I wanted to rip his throat out with my bare teeth.

“You never understood the sheer scale of things,” Cade shouted, his pacing growing more chaotic as he turned on his heel. “Their reach extends into rooms you can’t even fathom! High courts! Central banks! Sovereign intelligence agencies! You aren’t just an unknown archaeologist, Serena. Did you honestly believe you could tug on a web that massive, and the spider wouldn’t eat you alive?”

“God, listen to you. It’s pathetic.” Briana’s voice sliced through the cabin—flat, icy, and dripping with profound boredom. She hadn’t even paused her nail care. When she finally lifted her gaze, the absolute void behind her eyes made my skin turn to ash. “She can’t even speak, Cade, and you’re standing there begging her for absolution. Forgiveness. This is exactly why the higher ups don’t trust you. You’re soft. You’ve always been soft with her. Put a bullet in her chest and toss her over the side once we hit international waters. No one will ever recover the body, and we can end this obsession.”

“Shut your mouth!” Cade wheeled on her, the semi-automatic swinging wildly toward the bench.