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Of course they hadn’t. They valued their lives too much to risk my wrath.

“I want to be notified the second she is seen getting in her car, and heads will roll if they lose sight of her. Not for one fucking minute of it. If that car stops anywhere at all between her street and my gate, your man gets out and walks. Not the van. A man, on foot, close enough to put a hand on her shoulder, you understand me.” There was a single pause taken before he replied,

“Understood, but I have to ask, what if she doesn’t come out?”

“Then she has made a different choice, and you will not need me to tell you what to do about it, nor will I need to remind you what will happen if they touch her,” I warned in a tone he knew and knew well.

“That will make it more difficult.”

“Then I suggest they get inventive, or I will be collecting fingers.” He released a sigh but conceded,

“Understood.”

I put the telephone down on that desk and looked at the man still sitting behind it.

“You are free to leave.”

He didn’t move, probably because it looked like a trap.

“This office is mine for the time being.” I took the arm of that chair and swung it, with him in it, out of my way and into the filing cabinet.

“Go and be useful somewhere else. And nobody comes through this door until I am ready to go back to my cell. Nobody.”

The warning in my voice was enough to get him rushing out of the room, without so much as a word of protest.

Then once I was alone, I did something I hadn’t done in a long time.

I paced the room.

Twelve feet one way and twelve feet back the other, past the window and the empty space in that parking lot. A space I knew I would not settle until her car was sitting in it.

Something I knew would happen within twenty minutes, the moment four words appeared on the screen of my phone.

Your girl is moving.

“Good girl,” I said out loud with a grin on my face. And I stood in the middle of that office and found, with some surprise, that I didn’t want to frighten her when she came through that door. I didn’t want to punish her like I thought I would.

In fact, all I wanted was to see her face. To see how she would look at me after yesterday. To get the idea of running out of her head for good.

Yakov called when I had about ten minutes left to wait and before I could even ask, he informed me,

“She stopped at a supermarket, one of the big ones. My man is out and walking. Do you want him closer?” I released a sigh and thought about why she would do it. Insulin, perhaps, if she was low and had a script waiting. Glucose, if she was lower than that. Or food, which was the likeliest of the three, because she was frightened enough to run and I doubted very much that anything had passed her lips since yesterday.

“She probably hasn’t eaten, and she’s diabetic, so her sugar will be on the floor. She’s most likely stopping for food,” I told him confidently.

“What do you want me to tell them?”

“One of them goes in behind her, on foot, but tell him to give her space. I don’t want her spooked. No contact and no conversation. He doesn’t let her know he’s there unless he has no choice. And nobody touches her. Not a hand, not a sleeve, not by accident.”

“Nobody touches her,” he agreed, in the voice of a man who has heard an order twice and would rather not hear it a third.

“Then let her eat but keep me informed. I want to know the second she is back in that car and if anything happens before then.”

“Understood.”

I ended the call again. Then once more my feet started moving, and as the minutes ticked by, a thread of dread started to knot tighter and tighter in my gut. Which was why I was just about to call when the phone started ringing.

“Boss.”