Page 7 of Missile Strike

It had all happened so fast.

Cracks of gunfire.

Men shouting.

She’d been in her room, on her laptop. By the time she’d raced downstairs, two men she didn’t recognize were holding her mother and Annalise at gunpoint. Two others herded her father and brother outside and into a white van.

A fifth man joined them at the harbor, on the yacht.

Their leader.

“What do you think happened to the crew?” The brochure Isabella had read last night said the yacht carried a crew of five.

Annalise’s eyes lit up with desperate hope. “Maybe they escaped. Maybe they’ve gone to the police, and a hostage rescue team is getting ready to storm the boat.”

Isabella stared at her fingers. “Maybe.”

Or maybe they’re all dead.

“We have to be prepared to save ourselves, if necessary,” her mother said.

The engines rumbled, vibrating the floor beneath the bed.

Isabella scrambled to her knees and peered back out the window as the yacht left its slip and passed through the narrow opening of a rough-hewn stone seawall that served as the harbor’s breakwater.

A circular medieval stone tower stood sentry on one side of the channel, a defensive battlement from a bygone age. Water slapped the hull in an angry rhythm, and the boat swayed as it passed from the calm, still waters of the harbor into the open bay.

She’d always wanted to see Greece.

Too bad she’d spent most of the trip on her computer. Not that it was anything new. She traveled internationally a few times a year for work but spent most of those trips inside convention centers and hotels, catching only glimpses of the cities beyond.

She’d been to Paris three times and never saw the Eiffel Tower up close.

“They’re taking us out to sea.”

Their chance to escape was slipping away with every yard the yacht put between them and land.

She had no doubt these men intended to kill her father and brother. What would they do to her, her mother, and Annalise?

Her gaze fell to the baby in Annalise’s arms, his wailing reduced to hiccups.

What would happen to her nephew?

Leaning over to press a kiss to his downy-soft hair, she breathed in the sweet scent of baby powder. “It’s okay, Brooksy.”

Even though it wasn’t.

Her father had wanted one last family vacation before his re-election campaign kicked off in earnest with a fundraising gala in Charlotte and consumed all their lives.

A gala her parents had asked her to oversee.

All that was moot now, wasn’t it?

Unless a miracle happened, her father and brother would be murdered, their deaths internet propaganda, and she, her mother, sister-in-law, and poor baby Brooks consigned to some unknown fate.

The news had made brutally clear what happened to women taken as spoils of war.

She swallowed down the bile that coated the back of her throat.