Page 69 of Rescuing Tobias

With no other obvious solutions, Tobias had to pray she was right.

Nodding, he focused on his screen and brought up one of the cameras around the college, and got to work. Slow and tedious though it may be, a far cry from the work he used to do in Delta Force, Tobias used the skills he had and hoped it would be enough.

April 27th

9:09 A.M.

“Shh.”Isabella soothed the woman who was moaning in the bed. “You're going to be okay. What I gave you should help with the nausea. Make you feel a whole lot better.”

At least that’s what she hoped.

Despite her own throbbing headache and the heavy weight of exhaustion pressing down upon her, she’d been up all night trying to help the newest victim of the organ trafficking ring. The woman had had some sort of adverse reaction to whatever sedatives her abductors had given her, and for a while there she hadn't even been sure the woman would survive.

There had been talk from the guards of just killing her outright, and the doctor who had overseen her care seemed toagree. Isabella had pleaded for the woman’s life, asking them to give her at least twenty-four hours before deciding to kill her.

While she’d go along with nursing these people to save her baby’s life and give Tobias and Prey time to find her, she was still going to do everything within her power to help them in whatever small ways she could.

Starting with keeping the woman alive.

Since she was no doctor, she’d had to rely more than she would have liked on the one in charge of the poor woman’s care, but she had enough medical knowledge to help on her own once the doctor decided he was done and wanted to go get some sleep. Now it actually looked like the woman was improving. She’d been in and out of consciousness, not enough to properly talk or become aware of where she was or what was happening to her, but enough that Isabella no longer feared the woman would die.

Well, at least not yet.

Not until their captors had sold off every last one of her organs.

“It’s going to be okay,” she soothed as she wiped a damp cloth along the woman’s sweat-dotted brow.

“Like you care,” a soft voice muttered, and the woman’s eyes blinked open, shooting daggers of rage directly at her.

“You remember what happened?”

“Yeah, I remember how your friends grabbed me off the streets and shoved me into a van. Stuck me with a syringe to knock me out.” The woman had an accent that she thought sounded Australian, and she appeared to be around Isabella’s age or maybe a little younger. Her auburn hair was matted around her head, lying limply on the pillow, and freckles stood out on the woman’s otherwise pale skin.

“Can you tell me your name?”

“As if you care what my name is,” the woman snarled. Well, weakly snarled, but still Isabella was impressed by her attitude, and an idea began to form.

“Please,” she pressed. If this was going to work, she was going to need the woman’s cooperation, her trust. It was a big ask, she totally got that, but they could work together and maybe both of them would live.

“Why are you asking? Didn't your friends tell you?”

“They’re not my friends,” Isabella told her, pointing to the collar around her neck. “And I don’t want to be here anymore than you do.”

“You say they’re not your friends, but I'm the one tied to a bed.” The woman tugged on the binds at her wrists and ankles for emphasis.

“They’re organ traffickers and I'm a nurse. They kidnapped me almost nine months ago while I was working in Cambodia. They held me for seven months before I was rescued. Then they came for me again. I can assure you, I hate them every bit as much as you do.”

A flicker of hope ignited in the woman’s hazel eyes, but it was quickly smothered by mistrust. “Then why do you do what they want? I remember bits and pieces, and I know you’ve been taking care of me.”

“Keeping you alive,” Isabella corrected. “Because they wanted to kill you when you had a bad reaction to their drugs. Right now, I have to pretend to do what they want because I'm …” Glancing around to make sure no one was listening even though they were alone in the small room, when she saw no one else, she leaned in closer. “I'm pregnant and I know my baby’s father is looking for me. I’m sorry, I don’t want to help them, but if I don’t, they’ll kill my baby.”

When she fingered the collar again, the woman’s brow furrowed. “What is that?”

“Shock collar. They have their ways of forcing my compliance. I’d take the beatings and the electrical shocks, but when they started threatening to withhold anesthesia and pain relief to people like you, I mostly did what they wanted while I bided my time.”

“Bided your time?”

Giving the woman a scrutinizing once-over, Isabella debated whether this was an achievable goal or whether she was going to shoot too high and fall. While she had no doubts the guards would torture her into miscarrying her baby, she also knew that wasn't their primary goal. They wanted the baby. It was valuable to them in a way that was completely different to the rest of the adults they kidnapped.

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