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“I think they want to kill you.” I burst his bubble. “Sorry, honey.”

He studied my face.

“What?”

“I like it when you call me honey.”

“Seriously, we’re about to be killed here. You get that, right?”

“Not today.” He smiled wide, his eyes scanning the room. “But you go upstairs, see if there’s anybody up there, and I’ll find something to disable the key card entry with.”

It seemed reasonable, so I bolted up the short, winding staircase to the second floor.

No one was there. Since we hadn’t been shot at when we came in, I was pretty confident there wouldn’t be. But the wall of monitors on three sides was impressive. If, as we’d been told, there were fifty bungalows—adobe-style casitas or whatever—then it looked as though each one had four cameras. Others monitored the grounds. Sitting down at the console, I saw digital controls for everything.

“Aaron!”

“I haven’t found anything yet to disable this door with!”

“It’s okay,” I called to him over my shoulder. “I can do it from here.”

He was up the stairs and sitting down beside me in moments. “Where’s the lock?” he asked me.

I showed him the manual override, tripped it, and then flipped on the exterior camera so I could see the door. There were easily thirty men there, guns drawn, half with rifles, and they certainly would have stormed in if there had been a way for them to do so. But the door was seamless, and once triggered, it swung in, not out. It had no handle, and when I hit the override, metal bars slid across to secure the door from the inside. The outside of the tower was steel as well. Not one window anywhere, and basically, it was like being inside a grain silo. We were safe. They couldn’t get in. Unfortunately, neither could we get out.

“Check and see if there’s water or anything else in here,” I said, feeling my head start to pound.

While he went to look, I tried to figure out where the search function was. I had to see what I could find on Evan Polley before Clay Wells figured out a way to get in. By the time Aaron joined me, I could barely see. Even the light from the computer monitor was painful, and I had more than a headache.

“Hey,” Aaron said softly, returning with two bottles of chilled water. “There’s a small refrigerator downstairs, but there’s only water in it. And the storage room has cables and things like that, probably for the TVs and computers at the front desk. There’s also a plethora of cleaning supplies for whatever reason.”

“Plethora?”

He squinted at me. “Yes. I would have said myriad, but they seem to be of a different variety, not all the same, and there do seem to be far more than one would ever need, even for a resort of this size.”

“Thank you for explaining,” I said, chuckling, even though it hurt my head. I realized I was squinting at the monitor.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t give me that. Your coloring is leaning toward gray, and your pupils are absolutely—baby, you need to lie down.”

“I can’t lie down,” I snapped. “I have to⁠—”

“Let’s just trade places, and you can put your head down, all right? You can stay right here with me.”

“I know more about this than you do.”

He scoffed. “Oh, I doubt that. This is surveillance. I have corporate security, and I have spies who do some serious hacking.”

I twisted around to face him. “Are you breaking the law?”

“Yes.” He smiled at me. “Now move.”

“That’s bad,” I said, sliding over into the other chair as he took my spot.

He scoffed.