Chapter 5
Three days passed in a fog. Meg couldn’t seem to focus.
No matter how hard she tried, her thoughts skated away from whatever she was working on and back to that apartment.
To Theo. To Galen. Every shift she pulled at the bar, she half expected to turn around and find Theo lounging against a wall, heat in his blue eyes.
But he never showed.
It was good that he never showed.
She was still furious about the money, her embarrassment and pride and relief all tangled up into a mess inside her.
He might think he was doing her a favor, but all he’d done was keep the wolf from the door for one semester.
In a few months, she’d be right back in the same place, laying sleepless in her bed and staring at her ceiling as she tried to make the numbers add up.
They never did.
She had to cut some of her hours once school started back up, which meant a cut in money that she couldn’t afford. There was never enough hours, never enough money, never enough.
One problem at a time.
If only life worked that way.
Meg cleared a table, going through the motions while her mind was a million miles away.
There was another thirty minutes before she could kick the stragglers out of the bar and close down.
Cara was supposed to be here with her tonight, but her friend had come down with a nasty bug and spent the last six hours hugging her toilet.
Since no one else could—or was willing to—cover for her, that meant Meg was closing alone. Again.
She deposited the empty glasses in the back and went to check on the pair of guys in the corner booth.
They’d been drinking for a couple hours, and if she was the fanciful sort, she would think they were mobsters or something.
They both wore black jeans and shirts, and one had a leather jacket draped over the seat next to him despite how warm and sticky the night was outside the pub’s air conditioning.
They looked normal enough in a blah kind of way, but something about them had her fighting not to avoid their table.
Meg pasted a smile on her face as she neared. “Can I get you two another drink?”
“The check.” His words were flavored with a faint accent she couldn’t quite place.
Thank God. She nodded, making sure none of her relief showed through her expression.
“Sure thing.” Meg walked back to the computer and printed out their tab.
She looked up and went still. The men were no longer in their booth.
One had moved to stand just inside the door, and the other approached her with the kind of intent that sent alarm bells blaring through her head.
She trusted her instincts. She couldn’t afford not to, not as a bartender, and not as a woman living alone.
Meg glanced at the phone farther down the bar and decided that going for it might incite the kind of response in this man that she desperately wanted to avoid.
She kept her smile firmly in place and slid the receipt across the bar to him.
Where he couldn’t see, she palmed her phone and used her thumb to unlock it.
If it was a damn flip phone, she could have texted without looking.
She fumbled for the right app. Jonah didn’t live that far away.
If she could text him for help, he’d come and sit with her until she was able to lock the doors.
The man dropped cash on the bar but didn’t move away. “Your name’s Meg.”
“That’s what it says on my name tag, so it must be true.”
His lips quirked into a smile that didn’t come close to reaching his brown eyes. “Meg Sanders.”
Ice dripped down her spine. He knew her last name. There was no way he could know her last name. “Who’s asking?”
“I’m not asking. I’m telling you.” His smile grew. “It’s important you know who you’re dealing with before we go further in this conversation. I would hate for you to do something foolish and force me to hurt you.”
Oh god.
This wasn’t a robbery. Thieves didn’t bother to learn the names of the people they stole from.
It also wasn’t some druggie wanting to get his jollies off with the bartender and refusing to take no for an answer.
This was something else altogether. Galen’s warning flashed through her head.
She hadn’t really taken him seriously. There were plenty of dangers for a single woman living alone.
It was hard to fathom the kind of threat he’d worried would come for her.
She should have paid better attention.
“What do you want?” She tried to keep her voice even and uninterested, tried to prevent the panic crawling up her throat from bleeding into the rest of her body. Tried and failed.
“I would think it’s obvious by now. We’re here for you.
” He glanced over his shoulder and his partner flipped the lock on the front door.
She knew that tone, knew that look. There would be no reasoning, no rational conversation.
He wanted to hurt her, and he would enjoy doing it.
Several of her mother’s boyfriends over the years had similar expressions right before things went very, very bad.
Meg didn’t hesitate.
She bolted, sprinting through the doorway and into the kitchen.
Twin curses sounded behind her, but the bar slowed her would-be attackers down.
She flew through the back hallway and out the door.
Meg made it three steps into freedom before a rough hand closed around the back of her dress.
Ripping fabric had never sounded so ominous.
Her attacker grabbed her arm and slammed her into the wall next to the door. He didn’t seem disinterested now. No, with the fire in his eyes and breath hissing from his mouth, he looked downright demonic. “That was a stupid thing to do.”
She tried to knee him in the balls, but he easily turned his hips to avoid the blow. He shook her hard enough that her head smacked the wall behind her. “Fool woman.”
“We’re too open out here,” his partner said softly. “Get her back inside.”
She fought. She kicked and screamed and punched.
It didn’t matter. He hauled her around like a child throwing a tantrum, dragging her through the door and back into the bar.
They hauled her to a chair in the middle of the room, where they zip-tied her wrists behind her back.
The chair was icy against her bare back, her dress hanging from her in shreds.
He grabbed her throat, rough fingers digging into the fragile skin there. “Be a good girl or we’ll zip-tie your ankles, too.”
It would leave her completely helpless, far more so than she was now. She nodded as much as she was able to, cursing herself for not being faster. She could have made it if she hadn’t hesitated to run.
He released her and fear gave her words flight. “I don’t have anything to steal. Take what’s in the till if you want, but it’s not much. Just take what you want and go.” Maybe she was wrong. Maybe this really was a mundane robbery.
Liar. This is anything but mundane.
He crouched in front of her, and he was tall enough that it brought his face almost even with hers. “We came here for you.”
The one truth she didn’t want to face. Galen was right. I should have listened. Why didn’t I listen? Her mind went fuzzy with the screams she wouldn’t allow herself to voice. Meg pressed her lips together, fighting to think. There had to be a way out of this. There had to be.
But the zip ties were tight enough that her fingertips tingled, a sure sign that she’d lose feeling in them before too long. The doors were locked. If she couldn’t get away from them with a head start, how was she going to do it while tied to a chair?
Don’t panic.
If only it was that easy to command her body’s response. She lifted her chin, forcing herself to look at first one of them and then the other. “What do you want?”
“You know Theodore Fitzcharles III.”
She stared. This couldn’t be happening. Oh god, this could not be happening.
She hadn’t taken Galen all that seriously when he said being close to them was dangerous.
Of course it was dangerous—to her head and her heart and her foolhardy body.
She never actually thought it would be dangerous.
Even if, rationally, she understood that Theo was the former Crown Prince of Thalania, he was so…
Normal wasn’t the word, but it was the only one she had.
He was just a rich man who made her crazy.
She’d let herself believe that is all he was, because it was all she could handle.
But if that was the truth, then she wouldn’t be tied to a chair right now.
Apparently, he didn’t need a response, because he continued. “And Galen Mikos.”
Meg tried and failed to swallow past her dry throat. “I wouldn’t say I know anything about them.”
He ignored that. “You matter to them.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know if you understand how the hookup culture works, but we just had sex. That’s it. I’m not dating either one of them. I’m never planning on seeing either one of them again.”
“If that was true, Theodore wouldn’t be paying you. We wouldn’t have been sent here in the first place.”
If I get out of this alive, I’m going to strangle you, Theo.
Movement over the shoulder of the second man caught her eye. Meg barely had a chance to register that they weren’t alone when the man hit the floor, his eyes rolling back in his head. Galen stepped out of the darkness like some kind of avenging angel. “Get away from her.”
The man shifted behind her and his hand came down to grip her bare shoulder. “Your father would like a word, Lord Mikos.”
Galen stalked closer, seeming to grow with every step, the menace radiating from him sending panicked thoughts bleating through Meg’s head.
It didn’t matter that his rage was focused squarely over her head.
In that moment, she had no doubt that he was capable of killing someone—that maybe he already had—and that he wouldn’t lose sleep about it afterward.