“Go downstairs, Remy,” Ryder said suddenly.
“I can help . . .”
“Go back downstairs and help Jack with reconnaissance. No one’s to come up here until I say so.”
She turned to look at him then, and everything was stripped from her face but the truth: disaster and real fear swamped her.
He waited until Remy had gone. “You have every reason to look scared shitless,” he said in a quiet voice, crowding her back into the bedroom and shutting the door behind them, closing them in. “What did they take?”
“Nothing.” It wasn’t even a good lie.
“Don’t even try it,” he said. He was going to make her tell him the truth by any means at his disposal. He kept his voice steady, low, but she had the sense to recognize danger when it stared her in the face. “What did they take,
Parker? Who are you covering for?”
“No one. Nothing!” she cried, looking completely guilty and utterly miserable. “We have to find Soledad. They’ll kill her . . .”
“If ‘they’—whoever ‘they’ are—wanted to kill her, then we’d be finding her body and probably yours as well. You can count it your lucky day that they decided to simply truss you up like a turkey instead of slashing your throat. That would have been effective and quiet, and chances are we wouldn’t have found you until you started to smell.”
She looked at him in horror. “Is that what you would have done?”
“Yes. Which means your enemies aren’t as smart as I am.”
“Aren’t you my enemy as well?” It was said in a small voice, devoid of hope, and he wasn’t about to give her any.
“Yes,” he said again. “Just how much danger you’re in depends on how much you’ve lied. I’m going to ask you one more time—what did they take, and who are you protecting?”
“Nothing . . .” He cut off the word by shoving her up against a wall, his arm across her throat, his body trapping her smaller one. He wasn’t using much pressure, but she wouldn’t know that. To her, in her panicked state, it would feel like she was about to die.
“Tell me the truth. If you think Soledad was kidnapped, then we need to know why.”
“I don’t know why they took Soledad. She didn’t even know I had the . . .” Her voice trailed off, and then she looked up at him defiantly. “The phone,” she said.
Releasing his hold, he took a step back. She looked small and helpless for a moment, but he wasn’t about to make that mistake. Jennifer Parker had more balls than half his men.
He moved away from her, shoving the mattress back onto the bed, kicking a gutted pillow out of the way before he turned back to her. He didn’t worry that she’d try to run—he kept his body between her and the door at all times, and if she tried it, Remy or Wilson would catch her before she made the front door. They wouldn’t like it, but they’d do their duty.
“You mean the phone you had on the boat,” he said in a low, dangerous voice. It wasn’t a question. “I thought you were using it to call your confederate. But it wasn’t your phone, was it?”
She was watching him warily, not certain what to make of him, which was the first smart thing she’d done today. She’d probably never run into anyone as ruthless in her life, even with her family’s criminal background. She didn’t say anything.
“Was it?” he repeated, not raising his voice. He didn’t need to. She shivered in reaction. He was one scary motherfucker when he wanted to be, and right then he wanted her scared shitless.
“No.” Her voice was very quiet.
“Whose was it?” If she was going to keep giving him monosyllabic answers, he was going to have to shift this into high gear, and he didn’t want to have to go there. But he would if necessary. He always did what was necessary.
She looked up at him with a sudden flash of defiance. “I’m not going to tell you.”
“Wrong answer,” he said, and a moment later he’d slammed her down on the bed. There was nothing sexual in it—he just needed her immobilized for what he had to do. “Who are you covering for?”
He twisted one arm behind her back, and he knew it had to hurt, but not nearly as badly as he was about to hurt her if she didn’t give him the right answers.
“No one. It was nothing. I didn’t . . .”
He knew interrogation techniques, and he knew when coldhearted determination could get him what he wanted. He could have seduced her into telling him the truth, but it would take too long, and for some reason he didn’t want to use sex as a weapon, effective as it could be. Not with this woman.
He knew how to hurt her, how to cause exquisite pain without leaving a mark, and he began to exert pressure on her other arm, enough that it cut off her words until she was panting with the effort not to cry out.