“Maybe. It sounds like the people who brought us here are still out on the porch, but I’m thinking maybe they’ll go.”
She slid to a squat and put her ear against the door. “I’m going to listen for a bit. See if I can hear him talking to anyone.”
Mo’s shoulders slumped. “They took my purse. I need to fix my face.” She licked her finger and rubbed through the river of mascara beneath her eye. “Where do you think Alain is?”
“He ran,” said Catriona, wishing Mo would stop talking for a minute.
“He wouldn’t leave me here. Would he?”
Catriona looked at her. “By now he probably knows Volkov is out of his league. I imagine he’s...confused.”
“That’s a nice way of saying he left me to die, isn’t it?”
Catriona shrugged. “Or he really might not know about you yet.”
“I would hope not.”
“But not long before I came to talk to you, he was busy carving words into the thigh of a twenty- year-old kid because he’d fallen behind on his bets.”
“So?”
“So he’s not a nice guy.”
Mo shrugged. “The kid should have paid his bets.”
Catriona chuckled. “You two are perfect together. He’d be crazy to leave you behind.”
Mo smiled.
It was the first sign of hope her cellmate had shown. Catriona took it as an opportunity to motivate. “You need to get out of here, so you can kick that twisted little croissant’s ass.”
Mo’s eyes flashed with the fire Catriona had always associated with the woman. “You’re right. I’m going to kill him.”
Catriona smiled and put her ear back against the door, closing her eyes to listen. Her mind drifted to the image of Broch walking out of the warehouse, a gun at his back.
He had turned to smile at her.
Chapter Twenty
“We have to die to go back to LA?” Sean felt his expression fall slack. “You’re kidding.”
Luther clucked his tongue. “Nope. Not kidding.”
Sean shifted back on his bench. His stomach didn’t feel quite right. He could only imagine what bacteria might have been clinging to the side of his ale mug before the beer went in. “I don’t know if I can stab myself in the neck...and the firearms of this period are less than reliable. I could end up a vegetable in eighteenth century Scotland for decades.” He glanced at the tankard. “The food here might work faster.”
“You ain’t gonna have to stab yourself in the neck. I took care of it.”
“Yeah? You brought a gun from home?”
“Not exactly.”
Sean lifted his mug to his lips, smiling, strangely amused by the situation. Finding out he could go home had lightened his mood.
“There’s already rope in Scotland so you wouldn’t need to bring that. Poison...?” Before he could finish his thought, Sean knew the truth. He felt the blood drain from his face. “You said you took care of it. Past tense.”
Luther nodded to the beer.
Sean dropped his mug two inches to the table with a bang, bottom-down, the contents jumping to splatter his face.
Luther guffawed.
“Come on.” Sean wiped at his chin.
“It was in the first beer, so you can finish that one if you like.”
Sean glared at the ale as if it were his enemy. “Thanks. I just wish I knew whether more beer would help or hinder the agonizing pain I’m no doubt about to suffer. Any insight?”
Luther shrugged. “Don’t think it’ll matter either way.”
Sean looked back at the bartender. “What’s Luke going to do when we start writhing around on the floor like we’re possessed? We’re going to scar the man for life.”
“Good point.” Luther finished his beer and stood. “Let’s get out of here.”
Sean glanced at his half-empty beer.
“Screw it.”
He threw it back, gulping the contents and then smacked the tankard to the table. Standing, he followed Luther out the door. He raised a hand.
“See ya, Luke. It’s been nice knowin’ you. Again.”
Luke’s permanent scowl ratcheted down another notch.
Sean followed Luther out the door. “You know, there are people here it might have been nice to visit before you killed me.”
Luther glanced back at Sean. “Sure. I get it. Maybe you want to stay here? Catch up with the famine? Maybe give this guy a big wet kiss?”
Luther motioned to a man covered in a fine sheen of dirt, looking up at them from where he sat, his back against the side of the tavern. He had a festering wound traveling from the side of his mouth to the side of his nose. He smiled at them with blackened teeth and held out a hand. Luther dropped a coin into his palm from a safe distance.
“What was that? You brought money?”
“A quarter.”
“How’d you pay Luke?”
“Tucked a twenty under my mug.”
“Isn’t that breaking some time rule?”
Luther shrugged. “We’ll be dead by the time he realizes it and it will never make it to the future.”
“The quarter might.”
“Nope. I happen to know it doesn’t. A seventeen-year-old kid drops it into the ocean fifty-two years from now.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
Luther grinned.
They wandered around the back of the tavern and Sean felt the first real wave of pain crash against the walls of his stomach.
He burped and put his hand against the side of the building to steady himself. “I think I’m going to throw up.”
“I wouldn’t do that. If I go and you don’t, let’s just say it ain’t as easy for me to get back here as you might think.”
Sean felt another wave of nausea and fought to keep down his ale. “Exactly how much is this going to hurt?”
Luther shrugged. “Eh. You get used to it.”
“You get used to it?”
When the third cramp tightened his insides like a knot, Sean’s eyes
