“I got a shower. Cold water, no soap, but I feel a million times better. With you sitting there, I realize we both must have stunk to high heaven.”
“Is that a hint?”
She smiled. “Not a hint, Stinky.”
He took her hand, kissed it, then looked at her leg. “That needs to be bandaged.”
“She will. She cleaned it out.”
“It hurts?”
“Yep. I won’t be running any marathons... but I never have run a marathon, so nothing’s changed.”
Lily came back up the stairs, each one creaking as she ascended. She was wiping tears from her face. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “She could come back. She has a gun.”
“Did you see her face?”
She shook her head. “No, neither of us did.”
Kara felt Matt tense next to her, and wondered if he knew something Lily didn’t.
“I’ll find the tools Kara needs. You finish bandaging her leg. We’ll all feel better when Nathan is out of the basement.”
Matt got up, ran his fingers up her arm. There was something else going on, Kara knew. She wondered what he’d learned down in the basement.
Lily handed Kara two Tylenol packages. “They’re expired, but they might help with the pain. Take all four.”
Kara did, and averted her eyes when Lily opened a tube of Neosporin. She rubbed it into Kara’s wound. That hurt worse than the tweezers. Then she wrapped gauze around it, followed by an ACE bandage. “That’s all the gauze that was in there, so I hope it doesn’t start bleeding again.”
“I hope we’re out of here before dark,” Kara said.
“My husband has seen both of them,” Lily said quietly.
“You know that she has a partner?”
“I don’t know what is going on, but she talked about her husband. How Franklin owed her. She—she claimed they had an affair, but it’s not true.”
“You’re sure about that.”
“Yes. I’m not being a Pollyanna.”
Kara wasn’t positive, but she let it slide.
“She sent a photo of herself with my husband. She put a smiley face over her own, but Franklin looked so scared, so shaken. It was her way of telling me that I had to stay here or he would be hurt. And I think... her way of reminding him that she had us.”
Lily looked at Kara, tears in her eyes. “They’re going to killhim, aren’t they? She told me that they wouldn’t if he did what they want and I stayed put, but they’re going to because he saw them.” Now it wasn’t a question.
“Not if we get out of here and stop them. Let’s go downstairs so I can check out the lock and free your son.”
“You can really pick a lock? I thought that only happened in movies.”
“I was an undercover detective in Los Angeles. I picked up some useful skills over the years.”
Kara tested her leg. She could walk on it, but it was stiff and sore.
“Be careful,” Lily said. “Lean on me.”
“I need to use it. It’s just a cut.”
