Page 4 of Bad Girl Dilemma

The voice continues, low and wicked, right in my skull. “But I’m glad you were. I’ve been waiting for you.”

CHAPTER 2

Dahlia

The smell hits me first.

Leather. Oil. The faintest trace of something metallic—blood? No. Don’t go there.

I come to in darkness. Cramped, my arms twisted painfully behind my back, wrists bound tight with some kind of zip cord. There’s a gag in my mouth—thick, padded, invasive. My jaw aches.

I try to scream, but it’s strangled. Pathetic.

My face presses into something plush and cold. The thrum of a car engine vibrates under my cheek, and the realization slams into me like a bullet train. The shadow looming toward me, the leather-clad hand holding the dark cloth.

I’m in the trunk of a car.

I’ve been kidnapped.

A garbled sound pushes against the gag. Had it escaped, I’m sure it would sound a cross between laughter and shocked tears.Hystericry.

In a way I’m glad I don’t get to hear it because…

No. No, no.No.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.

I’ve always been careful. Always five steps ahead. No paper trail. No biometric residue. Every signal bounced through so many proxies it would take a government weeks to catch up. And yet—here I am.

Tied up. Silenced. On my way to what… being disappeared?

Who the fuck did this? Who has the tech—no, thenerve—to turn my own heist on me?

My mind flashes through possibilities like a Rolodex on fire. The Vesper Syndicate? That slimeball senator I bankrupted last month? Maybe it’s?—

Like acid rain, everything I’ve learned of the owner of Obsidian both on and off the Dark Web drizzles through my mind.

And with each recollection, panic claws at my throat, but I force it down.

Think, Dahlia.Think.

But the name my mind keeps circling back to pulses through me like a detonation.

Dante ‘Devil’ O’Driscoll. Triple D.

I hacked him. Livestreamed it. Laughed. I didn’t use his name, but somehow the bastard knew. He was waiting. Here in New York instead of on the other side of the country, and apparently not where my superior surveillance said he should be. Dammit.

God, what will he do to me? Interrogation? Torture? Worse?

A wave of nausea rolls through me, fast and violent. I squeeze my eyes shut.

Don’t cry. Don’t shake. Don’t give them that.

I think of my mother—just for a second. The way her fingers used to dance over her laptop keyboard, fierce and bright and fearless. She was a truth-seeker. Until they silenced her.

The memory slices too close to bone. I shove it away.

What would Dad think if he knew where I was? That his daughter, his little digital prodigy, was bound and gagged in the back of some psycho’s trunk? Will they tell him what happened to me? Do I want them to?

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