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“You need more control, Pete.” Robby said the words accusingly, and Sarah almost snorted at his hypocrisy.

Robby had shown no control on Monday either, when he’d beaten the old man who currently lay in the corner of the room on an old mattress, pretending to still be out of things.

Robby’d been the wild animal, then.

At least the little dog had bitten him.

Robby had kicked it away, though, and Sarah had heard it make a sound of pain before it ran away, and she hoped it was all right.

She glanced at the old man surreptitiously. It was a good sign that he was so still, listening for all he was worth. It meant he was recovering from the hiding Robby had given him. So far all he’d done was sleep, and shuffle painfully to the bathroom and back.

She felt hollowed out by grief, stripped down to nothing with her father and Stephen both dead, but she still felt sick that the old geezer had gotten caught up in her mess, just trying to help her when she’d tried to escape.

She wished now she’d waited just a few minutes more, and let him go on his way before she made a run for it. She’d thought having a witness would help her. Instead, it had dragged him into her hell with her.

“Did you have to knock the jeweler unconscious?” Robby admonished. “You can’t get the location of a hidden safe from a man who’s out cold.”

“I know that, Robby. I was defending myself and hit him too hard. After that, I was trying to be efficient, getting on with the front of the shop while he was lying there dazed. I planned to go back to him when he’d come to. The chances of someone being right there as I broke through to the front, looking in the window, was tiny.”

Sarah hoped Alessandro was all right, because it sounded like Pete had hurt him badly. When they’d come to her with the blueprints of the safe they’d found in her father’s desk when they’d searched his office, she’d tried to downplay the whole thing, but she realized afterward that that had only made them keener.

The idea of a safe that they knew was full of gems, and for which they had the code, had been too tempting for them.

“It should have been easy.” Robby shook his head. “So should the Trellis job have been, but then—” Suddenly aware he was stepping into dangerous territory, he cut himself off and shot her a look.

He didn’t want to remind her that Pete had killed her father on the Trellis job. Had shot him in the head.

It was laughable that he thought she might have temporarily forgotten that her father had been murdered two days ago.

They hadn’t told her exactly what had happened, but she’d pieced it together. Pete had lost his cool, and now they were trying to use her to salvage the situation.

She hated both men with such a strong passion, it sometimes felt difficult to contain it in her body, and then she turned her mind to ways to make them pay. Them and Jackman, the mastermind. There were other peripheral characters, but these were the main three.

“Jackman is going to be so pissed.” Pete lifted his shoulders as if to dislodge the fear.

“We need a win,” Robby said. “We’ve got the counterfeiting plates. And we’ve got someone who knows how to work them.” He glanced at her again. “But we need the right paper, and while Jackman’s getting that sorted, we should do something lucrative.”

She’d told them she could work the counterfeiting plates because it looked like they were going to kill her after they got the information about Alessandro’s safe out of her.

She’d already heard them shoot Stephen and then had seen his body in the spare room as they’d taken her out of the house. On the way to Robby’s mother’s house, in the van, she’d found out they’d also killed her father.

If they thought she could print money for them, they had a reason to keep her alive and well, and she had time to work out her revenge.

Her father had always said it was a good idea to have something that looked really valuable in a well-concealed safe, so whoever was robbing you thought they had found your ultimate treasure.

And these jokers had thought just that.

Not only had they looked no further, but the bogus plates had given her a lifeline, a way to keep breathing until she could save herself.

“Jackman wants to know what those notes we found inside the safe mean,” Pete said.

“Why would I tell you, even if I knew?” Sarah asked. As she spoke, an idea came to her, a complex, tricky idea that hit every revenge fantasy she’d had over the last three days.

Pete’s absolute balls up of the robbery on Alessandro’s shop was giving her a road map.

She tried to keep the excitement from coming through in her tone. She had to hug herself to keep from moving too much, and she hoped it came across as nerves.

“You tried to help the old man,” Robby said, and looked over to where he was lying for the first time since he and Pete had entered the room. “Tell you what, I’ll let him live if you tell us what you know. If you don’t, I’ll take a nice long time to hurt him, right in front of you, until he croaks it.”