Page 239 of Deep Cover

"Stop it," she snapped at him, and then, "Mark, let go. You're not rescuing me, you're making an ass of yourself."

The expression on his face said he was rescuing her whether she liked it or not, but he wasn't the one trained in various martial arts and when she turned his wrist nearly inside out, he stood down and held one hand out palm down, discouraging the men from doing anything with their weapons.

"Can everyone just take a breath?" Annie asked. She sounded reasonable.

She was a consenting adult. All she had to do was say she was here voluntarily and they'd have to go away. Unless they wanted to be the kidnappers.

All she had to do was say she was here voluntarily and not mention the contract. She had no reason to. They had no way of knowing about it.

Except they did. I had no idea how, but they'd found a contract from a former sub. They must have used hackers and computer techs similar to my team to come up with the information they had.

They had a contract. Unbelievable.

Dark suspicion then. Annie's people had gone months with her "in rehab" and not done anything like this. Who said they decided to act and then found the contract?

What if someone provided them the contract as evidence of what their own beloved might be experiencing and then they decided to act?

What if that someone was Kie?

Kie's dead. I had seen the body.

…hadn't I?

But it had been pretty messed up. It's not like there had been time to do a DNA test which would only be useful if there was a sample to compare it to.

And I was sure she was dead. I had been then and I was now.

"I'm an adult," Annie said, staring at her fiancé rather than her father. Her cheeks bloomed the scarlet I was used to seeing when she was humiliated.

"Lots of adults get subsumed into cults," Mark said. He put his arm around her and she shrugged it off angrily, taking a step toward me.

I shook my head minutely. Not now. For now we needed to let them have what they'd think of as a victory. For me, I needed to know suddenly whether she'd come back if the choice were up to her.

Or rather, since she had in the past, if she would again.

We all stood inside her sunny but largely sterile white suite. Their faces were incredulous. Annie's prison cell had never looked as much like a prison as it did now.

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