“Bait? For what?”
“Where is your boyfriend?”
He was waiting for Carl? What did he know? Oh God, had Bartolli sent him? What was he going to do to her? What if Carl didn’t come back?
Nausea had her heaving.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Under other circumstances, she might have found the panic on his face amusing. But these were not those sorts of circumstances.
“Are you going to vomit?”
“Yes!” she managed to get out.
“That looks like it hurts,” he observed.
“It does!” For some reason, his matter-of-fact words helped her push back the nausea. Tears leaked from her eyes at the effort as she heaved in a breath, the pain in her ribs making the room spin. Dark spots danced around.
“You’re here for me,” she said once the room stopped spinning.
“Yes.”
“Who are you? Who do you work for?”
“I was hired to find you and retrieve the information and money you and your boyfriend stole. Where is your boyfriend, Carl Kansas?”
Hired by who? Bartolli? But he said he was supposed to retrieve her. Surely, if it was Bartolli, he’d want her killed. Did that mean he was hired by the Iron Shadows? She guessed that was the best-case scenario. Maybe. Perhaps it would just be better to take a bullet to the head, get this miserable life of hers over with.
Fuck. Is this what she’d come to? Where she was welcoming death? Where was her fight?
“Retrieve me? Not kill me?” she rasped.
“Those weren’t my orders, no.”
“Do you always follow orders?” she asked.
“Almost never.”
She swallowed heavily. “So you might still kill me?”
“There’s a possibility,” he replied casually. Either he had a good poker face or killing her really meant little to him. “I don’t usually kill bound and injured prey, though.”
Prey? Was he for real? First she was bait and now she was prey?
“I’m not prey,” she told him.
“I tracked you down, caught you. Prey.”
“You didn’t catch me. I was already trapped.”
“True. Makes it less fun for me.”
“I’m so sorry for taking the fun out of it for you,” she replied sarcastically.
“Good of you to apologize.”
“I wasn’t apologizing!”