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She turns to look at me then, slowly, and she isn’t angry. She’s looking at me the way you look at a room you don’t remember walking into. “I was relieved when you kidnapped me. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I negotiated a business arrangement to sleep with you. Both of you. And then I went through with it. And after, I made you a frittata. My mother is in a hospital bed, and I’m here, cooking for the men who took me, and I don’t know what kind of person that makes me. What kind of person does that? What the fuck does that say about me?”

Her voice doesn’t rise on the last part. It goes softer. Which is worse.

“It doesn’t say anything about you, and it doesn’t make you any kind of person except the person that you are.” I cross the kitchen and stop just short of touching her, because I don’t know if touching her right now is the right move. She’s not braced for a fight. She’s braced for an answer. “Listen to me carefully, Anna. Patrick is the villain in this story. Not you.”

“I need to call my mom. I want to talk to the doctor or a nurse or something to make sure she’s okay. So she knows that I’m okay.” Some of the tension goes out of her shoulders. She looks up at me with an expression I have not seen on her face before. Not pleading, exactly. Just tired.

This moment isn’t going to last. Not when I’m about to be the bad guy.

Fucking Mark. Why did he have to pick today to go into town? If he was standing next to me right now, he could be the one to tell her no. “I’m sorry, Anna. I really am, but I can’t let you⁠—”

“You’re not going to let me call my mom?” The tired look on her face gives way to something colder in the space of a single breath.

She takes a step back from me. Then another one.

“I can’t let you call her. No one can know where you are. Not even your mom.”

“Right, because I’m just a pawn in this twisted game of revenge you’re playing with Patrick.” She wraps her arms around herself again, tighter this time. “Well, you know what, screw you. Screw your plans. I’m calling my mom.”

Anna’s gaze flicks to my cell phone on the end of the counter, then back to me; a silent dare to stop her swirling in the blue depths of her eyes. She takes a step to the left. So do I. Her muscles tense. She’s coiled tighter than a viper ready to strike. She’s quick when she wants to be. She almost got the better of Mark yesterday when she tried to run. Rather than let her get the jump on me today, I swing my arm out and swat the phone off the counter.

It skids across the hardwood and comes to a stop against the base of the fridge. Wiggles, still sitting on his newspaper, watches it go by with mild interest. Anna stares at the phone. Then at me.

“Are you serious?” she says.

“Anna—”

“Are you serious, Jax?”

The front door opens.

“Hey.” Mark stumbles in, a grocery bag hanging from one hand and a shopping bag from a clothing store in the other, stopping short as he sees the phone on the floor, and Anna and me on opposite sides of the kitchen.

He catches my eye before dropping his gaze to the phone at his feet and then snapping it up to Anna. In a matter of seconds, he’s reading the room and diffusing the tension.

“Right.” Mark sets both bags down carefully on the entry table. “How about we go for a walk? Get some fresh air. I picked up some hiking clothes for you. Figured you’d want to actually see the property. Boots too. I guessed on the size.”

Fresh air? What we need is a fresh start. A do-over for a conversation that went off the rails faster than a runaway freight train. But I get where Mark’s going with this. We can’t let Anna call her mom, or have any contact with the outside world. Not yet.

We’re not the monsters, and she’s not our captive. But there is no clean way to explain that to her right now, standing across a kitchen from a phone I just swatted onto the floor. A walk isn’t going to fix that. Nothing is going to fix that in the next twenty minutes. What a walk can do is get us out of this room, get some air between us and the phone, and buy the three of us enough time to figure out what happens next.

Anna’s looking at Mark, and at the shopping bag. Then at me.

She nods once, short and hard. “Fine,” she grunts. “A walk. Let me change.”

She crosses the kitchen, picks the phone up off the floor, sets it face-down on the counter with more control than I would have managed in her position, and picks up the shopping bag on her way to the stairs.

Wiggles, having decided the newspaper is no longer worth defending, trots after her.

Mark waits until she’s out of earshot before he looks at me. “What did you do?” he asks quietly.

“My job.”

He doesn’t answer. He just picks up the grocery bag, walks past me into the kitchen, and starts putting things away.

8

ANNA