Maybe he’d been having a nightmare.

  Now the world around him lightened. Darkness receded to the corners of his mind. His surroundings sharpened.

  He squinted immediately. Fluorescent lights glared overhead, and around him were rows and rows of shelves, each filled with identical metal canisters secured inside heavy crates.

  Some part of his mind recoiled at the sight, recalling the images shown to him in Panacea’s headquarters.

  Paramecium.

  He squeezed his eyes shut again. The glare from the lights danced behind his closed lids. The dreamlike quality of the last few hours—days? He wasn’t sure—left him feeling unmoored. A place like this didn’t match at all with what had just happened at the party—unless he’d hallucinated that, too.

  There had been a party, right? He’d hurried into the royal gardens and walked along the pool with Penelope, had spoken to her in a low, urgent voice. She had stared up at him with those wide eyes and braced herself and gone forward anyway into the pavilion, had stood beside him. He’d felt the shock from a bullet rocketing him backward, had hit the grass hard.

  That was no dream. He had been shot right there and taken away in an ambulance with the crowd’s screams still ringing in his ears.

  None of that seemed accurate, though. If he had really been put into an ambulance, why hadn’t they taken him to a hospital?

  He moaned as pain shot through him again, setting him trembling.

  And with that movement, he realized he was tied down.

  Suddenly, he sensed the presence of another person beside him. With all the strength he could muster, he turned to his side and looked over to see Penelope Morrison sitting in a chair next to him, her body haloed in light from a door slightly ajar behind her. Half a dozen guards stood spread out around the room. She observed him as he struggled once more against the bonds that held him down.

  “I wouldn’t move too much, if I were you,” Penelope said. “That was a glancing blow, but you’ve got enough damage in your shoulder muscles to bleed more than you can handle. You might be dead before we even reach open water.”

  Open water? Were they out at sea?

  His mind continued to clear. Now he was aware of the rough cut of rope against his wrists and ankles, and the feeling of a hard table underneath his body. Beyond the slit in the ajar door, he could see a sprawling deck lined with stacks of shipping containers, the metal grid holding them in place rising eight stories against the blue sky. A lone seagull perched high on the edge of the structure. The unmistakable smell of salt and sea wafted inside. Waves crashed in the distance.

  “You’re on board my cargo ship,” Penelope explained, guessing what he wanted to ask her. She glanced back once at the open door, her eyes as wide and innocent as he remembered from their first meeting. The contrast with her words was jarring. “The North Sea is quite choppy at this time of year. Forgive the unsteady ride.”

  On board a cargo ship. Winter was headed with Morrison’s shipments to Cape Town.

  “No one will be looking for you here,” Penelope added.

  He struggled to understand what was happening through his clearing mind. There was nothing on Penelope Morrison. She had a blank slate, a public image so sparse and clean that not even Panacea had suspected her of being anything more than a young heiress unfortunate enough to have a late mother and criminal father.

  Wasn’t that who she was? Just an unfortunate young heiress? Who was this girl sitting beside him, observing him in his wounded state with a calm face and a cold voice? It made no sense.

  He gritted his teeth as the pain washed over him again. “Who—” he managed to ask after the agony ebbed slightly. His voice came out hoarse and broken. He tried again. “Who are you?”

  “Penelope Morrison,” she answered matter-of-factly.

  “You’re not the Penelope I knew yesterday.”

  “I’m exactly the same.” She blinked at him, almost shyly, as she did when they first met. “You just didn’t notice.”

  His mind swam at her words. This version of her didn’t match her previous self at all. Who had been the girl who’d been such a fan of his that she could barely look him in the eye, who’d quoted Shakespeare with him, who’d curled up on the sofa beside him and confessed her insecurities, who’d fought back tears over her father’s death? Was that all an act?

  “Wait.” He closed his eyes again before opening them. “Last night in your apartment. The bullet.”

  She gave him a nod. “The bullet through my window was meant for you, Winter, not me.”

  Of course it was. The entire reason why Penelope must have led him back there was to take him out.

  His muscles trembled from the exertion of having been held in place for hours. The pain in his shoulder throbbed. How long had Penelope known about their entire plan? How had she kept everything hidden for so long? He looked at her now and wondered how he could have ever thought she was a shy, excited, blushing fan, someone anxious and naïve. The girl staring back at him had the calm demeanor of a killer.

  Of her father.

  His gaze went again to the canisters of chemical weapons around them. Paramecium. The hackles rose on his neck.

  He could still feel the subtle weight of the tiny vial of toxin in his pocket that Panacea had given him. Could now hear the echo of Sauda’s voice, telling him he might need it someday. Well, would it be today? If he managed to twist his arm enough, he could pull it out and bite it open, could drink the contents. The possibility made him tremble.

  “Why would you want me dead?” he croaked out. “Why are you doing this?”

  She turned her eyes down, and for a second, he saw a flash of real grief in her. “Why do you think you were really invited to my birthday celebrations?” she said quietly.

  “All I came here to do was to put on a private concert for a fan,” he responded.

  She gave him a penetrating stare. “Is that so? Because I was under the impression that a covert organization called Panacea sent you and another agent here to take down my father.”

  Winter stared back at her, frozen in disbelief. Penelope knew everything. She had been aware from the start.

  She sighed. “If Panacea were responsible for the death of my father, then I wouldn’t be, right?”

  All along, Penelope Morrison had been the one orchestrating everything behind the scenes—the invitation to her party, the planned execution of her father, the seizing of his shipments. She had known about Panacea’s recruitment of him even before he did.

  “You let me give the ring to Connor,” he said.

  She looked evenly at him—and he realized that she’d purposely led him into the private party room with Connor so they could meet, had probably planted false documents in Connor’s hidden museum vault. If he and Sydney were silenced now, then Panacea would look responsible for what happened to Eli Morrison, and remain empty-handed in terms of evidence to convict him. Penelope would get away clean again, the good daughter horrified by what happened to her father.

  They had thought they were using her as their pawn, when she was using them all along to cover her own plans.

  How did she know?

  “Why would you want the publicity of my shooting around you?” he said hoarsely.

  One of the guards near her handed her a pair of gloves. She took them and started pulling them on. “Maybe a fan crazed with jealousy wanted you dead. Maybe someone couldn’t stand the idea of you being close with anyone, being my private guest.” She smiled, somehow still wearing a naïve expression on her face. “Whatever the reason for a random person to shoot you from a crowd, your story will generate such a firestorm of interest that any news about my father’s death would be reduced to a footnote.” At his expression, she shook her head mournfully. “I’m a true fan, if that’s what you’re wondering,” she said. “And I’m sorry it has to be like this. I regret this is how we’ll say goodbye.”

  He had been brought here to be assassinated. He thought of his hazy memories in the ambulance, the way the driver had acquiesced calmly to Penelope’s directions. She’d arranged for him to be taken here, when the world probably thought he was at a hospital.

  “I know why others would want your father dead,” he ventured. “But why do you? Why all this effort?”

  Penelope stayed silent as she pulled on her second glove.

  “You murdered him because of something he did,” Winter continued. “Was it something done to you?”

  Still no answer.

  “To someone you loved?” he pushed.

  There was the faintest tremor on her face, and in that tremor, Winter saw some sense of loss, some memory of a broken family, that felt familiar to him. His instincts stirred. “Your mother?” he guessed.

  This time, Penelope looked away for a split second before settling back on him. He had hit true.

  “I heard she passed away from an illness,” Winter said.

  At that, anger sparked in her eyes. “My mother didn’t die from an illness,” she answered coldly. “She died because my father killed her.”

  Winter felt a chill ripple through him. So this was it.

  Penelope turned away from him, walked over to one of the shelves, and gingerly took one of the canisters in her hands.

  “She met my father during her side job,” she continued in a soft, quiet voice. “Catering one of his parties. I watched him hit her for years. It was my earliest memory. She always told me that he didn’t mean it. He isolated her, cut her off from her family, refused to let her speak to them, ignored their pleas. The day he finally killed her in a rage, I was five. I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life of what he did to her.” She looked at him, and this time all her innocence was gone, replaced by the expression of someone haunted beyond her years. “I watched his power protect him, how it allowed him to sit there with a team of detectives and police who all quietly understood that they were to erase the evidence. I promised myself then that I would kill him someday.”

  Her words swam in Winter’s mind. So that was the reason behind it all. He pictured the charismatic smile of her father, then his elegant hands stained with the blood of his late wife.

  Attending parties to make her father happy. Being the nice girl. She had hidden herself away so well.

  “You grieved his death,” he said, “even though you ordered it.”

  For a moment, he saw a glimmer of the softhearted girl he thought he knew. She looked away. Her fingers ran lightly across a phrase in Italian tattooed on her wrist. “He was still my father,” she said.

  “But you’re not going to stop his endeavor,” he said, his eyes darting around the room. “This ship’s still sailing for Cape Town with its illegal haul.”

  Penelope opened the top of the canister and reached in. She pulled out a small cube that looked like it was made of glass, its translucent surface a very faint tint of blue.

  “Think, Winter Young. What does someone like me have to lose if you and your agency successfully convict my late father of how he built his empire?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Money.”

  The fragile part of Penelope’s heart retreated behind a hard shell. “Do you know what happens to all of my father’s wealth if you finally get evidence against him? Frozen. Confiscated.” She held the cube carefully as she walked over to him. “And I’ll be damned if I see all of that end up with some government instead of me, all the money that should have gone instead to my mother.”

  “So you took matters into your own hands.”

  “It was the deal I made with the Corcasians, in exchange for their cooperation in helping me.” She shrugged. “It’s my inheritance. My right. I want the ghost of my father to know that all the money he’d hoarded so zealously will now go into everything my mother had ever dreamed of. A fund in her name. An estate that belongs to her side of the family.”

  Penelope’s inheritance. It made sense. This wasn’t the first time authorities had trained their eyes on Eli Morrison, and even if they couldn’t succeed this time, the evidence was steadily mounting against the man. It was only a matter of time before his assets would be seized.

  But Penelope was clean. She hid her tracks even better than her father did, and if she got to the money before authorities could, it’d be hers. And somehow, he knew she would get out of all this without a single shred of evidence tying her to any of his criminal doings, to his death, or to Winter’s.

  Or Sydney’s.

  “I understand why you’re doing this,” he said. “Truly. But please don’t go through with it. You’re giving your mother’s family blood money.”

  “I don’t think this is your call to make,” she replied coolly.

  “This isn’t who you want to be,” he pleaded. “I know you meant it genuinely when you said you desired meaning in your life.”

  “This is meaningful to me,” she replied.

  His gaze fell onto the cube in her hands. A chill rippled through him. “You’re going to ship tons of this chemical weapon into the hands of terrorists.”

  “I’m working with Connor Doherty for a reason,” she replied.

  He narrowed his eyes. “Then why am I still alive at all? Why am I here?”

  “Because you took something from my flat that didn’t belong to you.” She folded her arms. “And I want it back.”

  Her bejeweled hairpin. The encrypted data that Sydney had pulled from it and given to Panacea. In a flash, he realized that it must be incriminating evidence of Penelope’s involvement in everything.

  “I don’t have it,” he said.

  “You know where it is. Or maybe who has it.”

  The sound of footsteps against the deck made Winter turn. Penelope looked over.

  “Finally,” she muttered.

  A man stepped out from behind the nearest row of shipping containers, walking with a calm, easy gait, dressed as properly as ever, his eyes hidden behind a pair of shades. Connor.

  Immediately behind him came two men that Winter recognized as former bodyguards for Eli—except this time, they were dragging between them a slight, slender figure, her short blond hair bobbing weakly with her bent head.

  Winter couldn’t see the girl’s face, but he recognized her instantly. Terror jolted through his body.

  Sydney.

  30

  Trapped

  Sydney looked up as they stopped in the room. Paramecium canisters everywhere, secured against the shelves.

  Her gaze darted to Penelope, then to the cube she held in her hand. Images flashed through her mind of Eli Morrison’s death, the way foam had dripped from his mouth as the chemical destroyed the inside of his body. The Paramecium was everywhere now, all around them, as if death had been manufactured and packaged for the shelves and now waited for a chance to be freed. Her skin crawled, and everything in her wanted to pull away from the cube.

  Her gaze darted to Winter.

  Shot in the chest, a good few inches shy of his heart, with a bullet slender enough to leave a small wound. She could tell just by the bloodstain dotting the white bandages wrapped around his bare chest. Judging from the way he was breathing, the injury hurt but hadn’t pierced his lung cavity—in all likelihood, it had torn into his chest muscle and lodged deep in there.

  He’d need attention soon. All that blood loss had made him weak; the coloration of his face was ghostly pale, and a sheen of sweat glistened against his skin. If he went into shock out here, in the middle of the ocean, he’d die even before Penelope’s interrogation could really begin.

  It took every bit of Sydney’s willpower not to scream and lunge right there, to direct all her strength at reaching the young woman. Instead, she sank into the calm of her mind and lowered her head again. Let herself go slack.

  No one with a bad hand ever won by revealing it early.

  They stopped abruptly before the table. Sydney heard Penelope rise in a smooth motion, then looked up to see her holding out the cube.

  “Where’s the hairpin?” Penelope asked Sydney now.

  “I lost it,” Sydney lied, glancing toward Connor.

  Penelope glanced at Winter. “Maybe you gave it to him. Shall I ask?”

  Winter stayed quiet.

  Say something! she screamed at him in her head. Tell any lie! By the time Penelope figured it out, Winter could have also worked out a way to escape.

  But he didn’t speak.

  “Be done with him already,” Connor said to Penelope with a sigh. “Everyone still thinks he’s at the hospital, anyway. Tell them to send out word that he succumbed to his fan’s gunshot wound. We can get intel out of the girl instead.”

  Sydney met Winter’s eyes, could see him trembling from the strain of his bonds. How could they have missed the clues about Penelope? How had she hidden her true self so well?

  Penelope turned her hardened gaze back on them, then gestured again at her guards.

  Sydney felt the two men holding her shove her violently forward. She fell hard to the floor, curling instinctively inward as if to protect herself, and forced her head to stay down.

  She heard the restraints on Winter’s wrists pull taut above her and knew that he must have seen her fall.

  “Let me ask again,” Penelope said. Her voice seemed to stay the same, but Sydney could hear the slightest hardening of the words. “Where is it?”

  Thoughts raced through Sydney’s head. By now, Sauda and Niall would know of their predicament—her brief signal to them should have done that much. She knew Panacea would be doing all they could in order to get them out. But they still had no way of knowing where Winter and Sydney were being kept, especially now that they were on board a moving ship. Their devices had all been stripped from them. They were off the grid, and still on their own.

  Their only saving grace was the fact that Winter’s body was missing from a hospital. News about his being shot onstage should have hit the newswires already. That meant every fan on the planet was searching desperately for updates on how Winter was doing. If Panacea couldn’t find them, then maybe the rest of the world could.