BABY FOR A PRICE

by Kathryn Thomas

“You alright?” I couldn’t help but giggle at her tipsiness. For someone who used to drink wine for a living, she sure had a weak constitution. We had only had one bottle between us, but I couldn’t talk. I too was feeling a little giddy around the edges. The good stuff was stronger, I assumed, but dangerously easy to drink.

  I watched as Lily made her way down the stairs to the wine cellar, then turned to look out at the view again. Now, with a couple of glasses of wine in me, I could appreciate it for how beautiful it really was. The booze had helped lift the sense of gnawing discomfort that had been trailing around my brain since we arrived, and it was lulling me softly, keeping me calm. Lily’s presence was also a huge help - bigger than she probably could have imagined. Despite the circumstances that had brought me here, her being around made it feel normal as if we might roll up our sleeves and head back to the restaurant at any minute. I let my eyes droop half-shut, and smiled. The expression felt good on my tired muscles, and I realized how long it had been since I had felt genuinely at ease.

  Of course, that was the moment the lights chose to go out. My eyes snapped open, and I looked around, panic gripping my system once more. I couldn’t see a thing - my eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the light, and it was almost completely dark outside - and I didn’t know the apartment well enough to get around without being able to see anything.

  “Lily?” I called, wondering if this was just her goofing around. Maybe she’d hit a main switch when she went to turn on the light for the wine cellar? But this place was so deftly put together - there was no way a mistake like that would have slipped by. My voice echoed eerily against the walls around me, bouncing back to surround me completely. I shivered, and got to my feet, groping around to feel where the furniture was so I didn’t topple over.

  “I’m here,” Lily replied nervously. It sounded as though she was at the other side of the room, and I tried to make my way over to her.

  “Here, let me-” I heard her place the wine bottle down, and a few moments later, she had switched on the flashlight on her phone and lit the space between us.

  “I’m sure it’s just a power outage.” She took my hand as I approached, but I could hear the waver of discomfort in her voice. I wasn’t stupid. She knew as well as I did that something was happening here, and it likely wasn’t anything close to good news.

  “Did you see anyone down there?” I asked hurriedly. “Anything out of the ordinary?”

  “Nothing.” She shook her head. “Should I have been looking for something?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I… I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Shit,” Lily muttered as her phone ran out of charge and the light dimmed. “Fuck.”

  “I don’t know what to do.” Fear enveloped me, and I was on the brink of freaking out big-time when I heard someone at the door. I clutched Lily to me, standing stock-still, as I heard someone fiddling with the lock. It wasn’t Anthony - it couldn’t be, not when he had the keys. And he would have noticed if the lights were out, and wouldn’t have come in the front door and wound up in the middle of what was going down.

  “Who’s-” Lily began, but I shushed her without thinking. While it was still dark, we could theoretically steal away, but I needed to see who was here first. I needed to know what we were up against.

  Just as the door swung open, the emergency generator must have kicked in, as the room flooded with a dim red light that illuminated everything just enough for us to get around. The bad news? It gave whoever had just come in the door a direct line to us too.

  I realized I had been holding my breath as the lights came on, as I suddenly found myself gasping for air. Lily tightened her grip on me, the bottle of wine sitting a few inches away, completely forgotten about. Neither of us could take our eyes off the woman who had just come through the door.

  I didn’t recognize her - she didn’t look like anyone I’d laid eyes upon before in my life. She stood a good few inches taller than me, her red hair scraped back into a messy ponytail on top of her head. Her clothes were loose but not so loose that I couldn’t make out her incredible body underneath. My eyes widened. This woman had to have something to do with Anthony. She just had to. She oozed sex and danger and violence, everything that he had been all wound up in only a few years ago. And more disconcertingly, she was staring at Lily and me with a tiny smile on her face. As if she was proud of herself.

  She quickly made her way across the room towards us, and I wondered why no alarms had gone off. Maybe Anthony had rigged a silent alarm, or maybe this woman had disabled them before she broke in? If she was related to Anthony and his old job, there was no way she hadn’t thought of that. I shifted myself so that I was standing in front of Lily, shielding her slightly. Lily, despite her usual bravery and loud mouth, gripped my waist, and I could hear her labored breathing as the woman strode in our direction. Her footsteps somehow made no sound, and I wondered how many years of training it had taken to achieve that little trick.

  “Who are you?” I demanded, finally finding my voice again as she came to a halt about five feet away from us. She picked up the bottle of wine, glanced at the label, smirked, and placed it back down again before she replied. She was entirely in control of this situation, and she knew it - and she wanted me to be sure of it too.

  She pulled out a gun, and I heard Lily suck in a frightened breath behind me. I covered her hand with my own, silently comforting her. We were going to be okay.

  “Get in the seats,” she ordered, using the barrel of the pistol to gesture to a couple of the chairs that were clustered around the dining table. I looked back up at her, to the gun, and then across to the seats. We had no way of fighting our way out of this - we’d have been stupid to do anything other than what she said. I held my hands up and slowly moved towards the chairs. Lily did the same, following my lead, and when we were sitting down, the woman produced a thin roll of rope. She quickly bound us to the chairs, and it clear that this was far from her first time restraining someone. Before I knew it, my hands were tied behind my back, so tightly that I couldn’t even reach over and take Lily’s hand to comfort her. The woman stepped back to admire her handiwork, pulled out a phone, and took a picture of us. I winced as the flash momentarily blinded me, and watched through my hazy vision as she presumably texted the picture to somebody. Anthony? I assumed so, but then, it could have been to her boss - proof that she had us where they wanted us. I felt a clamp of fear in my stomach. I remembered what the text they had sent me had promised. Sure, it was a woman standing in front of me now, but what if they sent their guys along and had them finished off the assault they started all those days ago? I shivered at the thought.

  “Who are you?” I demanded again. I posed no threat to her now - we were unarmed and restrained, and Lily seemed to have given in entirely, letting her head droop down onto her chest as tears poured down her cheeks. I couldn’t blame her. After all, I had half-expected something like this to go down. She was just here, looking out for me, the way friends were supposed to, and now she’d had a gun jammed in her face and was tied up to a chair by a psycho we knew nothing about.

  “My name doesn’t matter.” She waved her hand. She had barely spoken since she arrived in the apartment, and I noticed that her voice was low and throaty - it sounded as though she had smoked a thousand cigarettes and drank more scotches than necessarily recommendable on a night out.

  “Then why are you here?” I pressed. I knew I was pushing my luck, but I wanted an answer. If I could at least come out of this encounter with some information - and hey, my life might be nice too - then it wasn’t a complete loss. I also figured that as long as I could keep her talking, she wouldn’t be as keen to wave that gun around as much.

  “I used to work with Anthony,” she sighed as if it should have seemed obvious. My eyes widened, even though I had guessed that was probably the case. She was a hitman. Well, hitwoman. I had, to be honest, half-expected her to be decked out in a full leather catsuit, no matter how
ridiculous and impractical that actually would have been.

  “And I’m not here to take care of you two.” She skimmed her eyes across us. “Though I’m still waiting on my full orders for the evening. One of our guys failed to get rid of Anthony, so I’m finishing the job. And if I know Anthony, I know that he won’t be able to resist the sight of two women in peril who need saving.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I shot back. Just keep her talking. Her words lingered in my head - someone had been sent out to kill Anthony tonight. Surely he had to have known that. Why did he head back into town if that was the case? Or had he gone back knowing that to intercept the guy and keep us safe? All I knew was that he was alive, and that was all I gave the remotest shit about. And if he was alive, that meant he was coming back here. Even if he was being baited, the thought of having him close by again made me relax a little. He would know what to do. Me on the other hand? I had no fucking clue. I tested my restraints, but they were stuck fast. I wasn’t going anywhere.

  “In his line of work, it is,” she snapped back and began pacing back and forth. Suddenly, her ears pricked up - it took me a couple of seconds to figure out what she was hearing, but eventually my ears tuned in too. It was the sound of a vehicle pulling up to the house, and it didn’t sound like Anthony’s purring sports car. No, this was spluttery and ugly, nothing like Anthony’s ride, and I felt my chest tighten once again. Seriously? Another one of them? I wished there was some way I could warn Anthony as to what was going on - I wanted to send out some kind of psychic message straight to him, to let him know what and who to expect when he came through the door. I mean, I was pretty certain he had that picture of us bound to the chairs, but what if that made him panicky and lax? I knew that whatever happened in the next minute was going to be important. I just prayed that it was going to go our way.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  As I put my hand on the door handle, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I jumped at the sound, and grabbed for it quickly, praying that it hadn’t alerted anyone to my whereabouts. I twisted away from the door, hoping that whoever was inside didn’t take a look out the window and spot my shadow lurking by the door. Who the fuck was texting me at this time of the evening, anyway? Well, my signal was bad in the city, maybe it was just some stupid service provider text that hadn’t bothered to make itself known until now. I clicked on the message to open it, and my stomach dropped to my shoes as I took a look at what was in front of me.

  “Shit,” I hissed through my teeth. This night just got better and better. It was a picture, sent from a number I didn’t recognize, of Sabrina and Lily bound to chairs I recognized as the ones in the dining room of the apartment. I had to fight the urge to kick the door in right there and then and deal with whoever was sending me these photos, but I knew that wouldn’t achieve anything. No, if I wanted to get them out alive, I would need to be a little sneakier about this. I didn’t know who was in there, but I had a feeling that it was Saffron. Leo had a twisted sense of humor, and it would be just like him to send my ex to take out the woman I loved.

  Loved. I was frozen by the word in my brain. It had been a long time since I had thought that about anyone, let alone acknowledged it. I tried to shake it from my brain, knowing that I had more important things to worry about at that moment in time. I couldn’t get stuck on the fact that I was falling for Sabrina, and hard. I scurried back down to the car as quickly and as quietly as I could, hoping my training would have kicked in and reminded me to move as silently as I could.

  My mind raced as I got back to the car. Why did they send someone out here? Was the plan to take out me, and then Sabrina and Lily? Was Sabrina’s friend just collateral damage, or was this all planned out this way as Lily co-ran the restaurant? If they intended to kill the two of them, why send me a picture of them all tied up, knowing I would come after them? Shit, and if they were texting me, that meant that they probably knew I was alive too. That I had escaped the wreck that killed Taylor. I closed my eyes and pressed my head up against the wheel for a second, trying to still my brain and failing. I didn’t know why this was happening; I just knew that it was happening and that I had to put a stop to it as quickly as I could.

  I looked up at the house again. Squinting, I could see that it wasn’t in darkness as I had initially assumed, but rather lit by the dim red light of the emergency back-up system. Okay, so whoever was in there had cut the lights out, and that’s why I hadn’t been alerted by the alarm system going off. Whoever was doing this obviously wasn’t an idiot - they had done it before. Broken into houses, held hostages, hunted people down. So they’d been at this for a while. This must have been Leo’s backup plan in case Taylor failed to take me out. Hell, maybe he’d been counting on me finishing Taylor off and tying up another loose end for him, I had no idea. All I could think about was the fact that I needed to save Sabrina, and I didn’t know how I was meant to do it without kicking that door in and blasting the place apart.

  And then, it hit me. Yes… when I’d first moved in… they’d been installing the security systems, and one of the guys working on the project had made some flippant, offhand remark about how far I was going with this. What, you expecting to be fighting off a lot of bad guys? I had replied with a cock-eyed yes, not expecting anything to come of it, and then to my surprise, he’d suggested something. A little extra, something they didn’t normally do for their clients. It was probably overkill, he warned me, but it could come in handy if I couldn’t get into the house but needed to neutralize the people inside. I had considered turning it down, but at that point, I had the money to pay for anything I wanted. Why would I have passed up the chance for another piece of ridiculous over-the-topness in my life?

  I got out of the car and made my way back up to the house, but this time, instead of approaching the door, I slipped off down a tight side passage that ran along the length of the building. It was the kind of thing you wouldn’t look twice at if you were making your way into the apartment, the kind of place you had to know was there to find it. But it led down a back passage and a few steps to a door with fingerprint recognition. I pressed my palm against the relevant pad, held my breath, and listened for the soft “click” within. I’d had it specifically set up so that it wouldn’t attract any attention if I needed to use it. I had pictured James-Bond-esque situations where I’d need to take out scores of enemy hostiles who’d somehow infiltrated the house, not a backup for when I needed to take down whoever was in there along with the woman I loved and the woman she loved most in the world. I pressed on the door, praying it wouldn’t creak, and slipped inside the tiny control room.

  As soon as I was in there, I felt my heart beat faster against my ribs. Did I really want to do this? I didn’t know how bad it could be - bad enough to take down whoever was in there, obviously, but what if it did Sabrina or Lily some serious harm too? What if they turned out to be allergic or some shit, and wound up dying on me just when I’d been trying to save them? I placed my hand on the lever, then drew it back again. I took a deep breath. I never thought I’d have to use this, but now I wish I’d tested it out before hand to see just how much damage it could do. But there was no time for recriminations, no time to back out - this was the only way I could guarantee to take down whoever was inside without kicking that door in myself. I didn’t know what they were armed with or what their temperament was like. What if they started firing and wound up hitting one of the women I’d promised to take care of? No, there was no option for me here - I had to do this.

  I gripped the lever, and with an almighty shove, pushed it into the “on” position.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I wasn’t sure how long we’d been sitting there when it happened. It could have been minutes, hours. Fuck, if it weren’t still dark outside, I’d have said it might even have been days. The woman, Saffron, was pacing back and forth, occasionally heading over to the window and cupping her hands around her eyes to peer outside. I assumed she was looking for Antho
ny, and a part of me prayed that he wouldn’t show up. This woman meant business, and I wasn’t sure if Anthony knew anything about what was going down.

  There was also a little nagging feeling in the back of my head. What if, after Anthony did arrive, the woman took the opportunity to take us all out? Maybe she was just waiting on him, holding off so she could finish us off in front of him as the final piece of torture. Would making Anthony watch us die be part of her plan? I felt a shiver snake up and down my spine at the very thought of it. Jesus, it made me ill. I looked over at Lily, but she had slumped down in her chair, her body limp and useless and she sat there. It was as though all the life had been drained from her before that woman had even fired a shot.

  As we all waited in silence, it was hard not to pay attention to the person who had us at her beck and call. I stared at her as she paced back and forth across the room, her loose clothes clinging to her in waves as she moved. She was gorgeous - even despite everything, I could admit that. She oozed sex just as much as she oozed danger, and it was hard to imagine that Anthony hadn’t been involved with her at some point. She seemed like his type. Well, what his type had been, maybe. I wasn’t going to get all up in my head about their relationship - not when there was so much else to focus on - but she had to have some kind of special connection to my man. Why else would she be here? Maybe she’d requested this job to take me out so she could get near him once again, or maybe he’d fucked her over and she wanted to be the one who pulled the trigger on him. Whatever it was, I doubted it was good news for any of us.