The words died on her tongue as I held the knife to her neck. “The key card, now.” I held out my hand.
Shaking, she pulled out a key card and handed it over.
“Thank you.” I offered an apologetic smile. “And I’m sorry.”
She nodded, her lips trembling.
When I turned, Chase was behind me. In an instant, he maneuvered around me and knocked the maid out with the back of his Glock. “No loose ends.”
“Right,” I huffed, feeling all sorts of horrible that she was going to wake up with a headache from hell.
“Besides,” Chase took the card from my hands, “the less she knows the less danger she’ll be in.”
I gave a firm nod and followed him as he walked back to the door and slid the card into the slot. The green light blinked, the door swung open and in we all strolled, guns raised… waiting.
A black desk chair had been dragged to the center of the room. Sturdy yellow nylon zip ties wrapped around the arms and legs of a frantic-appearing woman, binding her hands and her feet to the chair. Her hair was matted to her face with blood. The bruises left on her chin made her appear deformed. Her head hung slightly to the side, and then her eyes flashed open. Dread turned my blood to ice. My mother stared directly at me. And I knew, it was over before it even began.
“Ma!” I tried to push through Nixon and Tex but was jerked back against Chase’s chest. “Let me go!”
“No.” He growled. “We don’t know if it’s a setup.”
Tears streamed down her face as her head moved back and forth… in warning? What?
“Tanya Campisi?” Luca said in a low voice. “Did she do this to you?”
My mom shook her head no.
Luca swore and took a few steps closer to my mom’s chair. She screamed like she was in pain, moving her head back and forth over and over again.
“Ma.” I choked as Chase held me tighter against him. “Let me go!” I elbowed him in the stomach and tried kicking his shins, but he didn’t release me.
“Mil.” Nixon looked back at me. “You need to calm down. We’re not untying her yet.”
Ma’s eyes looked wildly around the room, landing finally near the TV. She kept staring at that point. I followed the direction and gasped.
A homemade bomb was neatly tied next to the flat screen, right on the bar, as if someone had left it behind by accident. I swallowed the bile in my throat.
“What type of explosion?” Luca asked as Frank walked over to the small device.
Frank leaned over and pulled out a pair of spectacles. “Let’s just say it’s a big enough boom to level half this floor.”
“Trigger?”
“I don’t see one. If it was the door or on some sort of timer, it would have gone off by now.” Frank’s mouth twisted into a firm line as he leaned in closer. “Believe me, whoever did this would not have wanted to wait for our murder. My guess is it’s a pressure trigger. Not the floor, perhaps an object or—”
“Person,” Luca finished, looking from my mom to me. “Well, it seems we’re finished here.”
“No!” I screamed. “We have to get her out.”
“It’s us or her,” Nixon said quietly, as the room fell into a tense silence. My mom started sobbing all over again, this time nodding her head. So she knew. She knew it was us or her.
“Do you know who it was? Who did this to you?” I asked. My breathing was so uneven I was afraid I was going to pass out.
Ma shook her head sadly.
“Ma—”
She closed her eyes.
“Ma!” I yelled
Her eyes stayed closed.
“Mil,” Chase said from behind me. “We have to go.”
“Ma, open your eyes.” My voice sounded so weak, so small. I felt like a little kid again, weak and confused. She opened them.
“I love you.”
She nodded and then gasped as her eyes rolled back. Blood began pouring from her chest. She’d been shot. The glass from the window shattered on impact as my mom fell forward.
“Everyone out!” Nixon yelled pushing us toward the exit.
Chase yanked me against him and opened the door all within a second. We started running down the hall toward the stairs. I counted to three, and then Chase covered me with his body as the hall exploded, sending us to the floor.
Alarms rang in the distance, but I couldn’t tell if it was my ears ringing or actual fire alarms. Chase asked if I was okay, or at least it felt like that, but I couldn’t hear him very well. Ringing pounded through my muffled ears. I nodded while he helped me to my feet and pushed me out the door to the stairwell. We didn’t even wait to see if everyone was okay; we just ran down the stairs, down twenty-two flights of stairs. Legs like lead, I was so numb I didn’t even feel the pain or the burn in my muscles. I had to keep going — I had to keep running. When we reached the bottom, Chase turned.
The rest of the group looked better off than I felt. Most of them were covered in dust with some scrapes and bruises.
“They’ll evacuate the hotel,” Luca said in a detached voice as people began flooding the stairwell, “I know a place. Grab your things.”
“Where’s the guy from before? William? And the maid?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer to the question.
Luca ignored me.
Which meant one thing. The maid had been caught in the explosion’s line of fire, and they’d left the man they’d tortured earlier behind — to either get implicated or die.