I stand and I walk to the door and we go down the corridor and Renzo adds quietly, "I contacted the hotel owner. He's given us the room. As long as his business isn't affected, he doesn't want to know."
I nod.
The VIP room smells like wine, some of my men that Renzo had called are standing at the door, and the two who drugged her zip tied to chairs facing the table.
The boy is slender and dark-haired and his face is a mess and there is a rag stuffed in his mouth. The girl beside him is fair,well-dressed with her mascara destroyed. Her mouth is stuffed and her eyes red and going wider as I walk in.
I sit down.
Renzo produces a phone and sets it on the table. "The girl is Nathalie's cousin," he says, keeping his voice level. "The man is her fiancé. From what we can piece together they planned the drugging together. The intention was intimate photographs, maybe a tape. Blackmail most likely."
I look at them both and I nod at my men. They pull the rags out of their mouths.
The boy pulls in a breath and says immediately, loudly, "Do you have any idea who I am? You need to release us right now!"
"You'll regret this," the girl says, her voice cracking on it. "Both of you. You have no idea what you've just?—"
"Did you touch her?" My voice comes out very quietly.
They both stop.
"She's my fiancée," he says, but the loudness has gone out of it. "Why wouldn't I?—"
I stand up. "Which hand?" I ask.
He pushes back in his chair as far as the zip tie allows. "Don't— stay back, just stay?—"
I bend down in front of him and I look at him from that level and I ask one more time, very quietly, "Which hand did you touch her with?"
He stares at me, jaw shaking. "You're insane," he gasps.
I stand up and I turn to Renzo.
"Break both his legs," I say. "Strip them both and put them on the road."
"What?" The girl lurches forward in her chair. "What, no— who are you? You can't— who are you?"
I pick up Nathalie's purse from the table and I leave the room. I walk back down the corridor and push open the door of the room. I sit on the chair beside her bed and I take her hand, parting her hair from her face with my free hand, gently.
"Why do you keep haunting me?" I ask her sleeping face.
"I don't think," I say, "that I can let you go again."
I sit with my hand in hers, listening to her breathe.
Chapter Twenty
Nathalie
The phone is what wakes me. It is ringing from somewhere beside my head and my head is a block of pain. I am lying down and the ceiling above me is unfamiliar and it takes me several seconds of blinking to assemble these facts into anything coherent.
I groan and push myself upright, which my body objects to strongly, and I pat the surface beside me until my hand finds the phone.
I accept the call without looking at the screen.
"Miss Keller." Gerald's voice comes. "Where are you at present?"
Before I can answer there is a rustling and a sharp intake of breath and then my father's voice fills the phone so completely that I have to hold it away from my ear.
