“On your knees,” Victor Lang said from behind me.
I was trying to understand what had just happened. Obviously the delay was too much for him, because the noose tightened and twisted.
I gagged.
“On your knees,” Victor repeated.
I dropped. I was still wearing my boxing gloves. I couldn’t use my fingers to claw at the noose. Even if I could, I doubted it would help.
Still, I had to try. I brought my gloves to my mouth and used my teeth to snap the Velcro loose on the right glove.
“Stop right there,” Victor said. The noose tightened again, so tight this time it cut off my gag.
“Ease off,” Jennie told her brother. “You don’t want to kill him.”
“Maybe I do,” Victor said. But the pressure eased. I could breathe again. It didn’t help the pain of my knees pressed against the floor.
“Impressed?” Jennie asked. “We decided on an animal snare. Because that’s what you are. An animal.”
Now, at least, I could picture the situation. Victor was holding an aluminum pole with a noose at the end. While they talked, I started working my right glove loose again. My only chance was to get my fingers free, maybe try to spin and jerk the pole out of his hands.
“Animal?” I said. I wanted to keep the conversation going, distract her.
“You’ve bullied my brother from the beginning.”
“I’ve bullied him?” I snorted. “Do you have any idea what he does to the younger—”
I gagged again as Victor jerked on the noose.
“Not so nice when I’m the one in control,” he said, “is it?”
He was right. It wasn’t so nice.
“Here’s the deal,” Jennie said. “Leave us alone. Completely. Or I will put your real identity out there. Got it?”
I thought about the implications. She must have taken my silence as resistance to her demand.
“Victor wants to strangle you and bury your body,” Jennie told me. “Just so you understand, I believe that’s easily done. We could march you out of here, put you in my car, strangle you in the backseat, drive somewhere into the mountains and dig a hole deep enough to hide the evidence. Even if someone found your body, who would ever link you to me and Victor?”
At first that sounded ridiculous. But then I realized it wasn’t that impossible to carry out. An animal snare allowed someone to control huge dogs. If I didn’t walk along with the noose, they’d strangle me here in the gym and just drag my body to their car.
As if reading my thoughts, Victor jerked the noose again.
“I told Victor we didn’t need to go that far,” Jennie said. “We just had to convince you to stay out of our lives.”
“Victor,” I said with gritted teeth, “was the one to invite me into your life.”
“Yeah, about that,” Jennie said. “I don’t think it was a coincidence that Victor received an anonymous email telling him about Team Retribution and strongly suggesting he reach out to them.”
My muscles were cooling, and I shivered.
Jennie’s eyes gleamed with triumph. “Thought so,” she said. “It was you.”
Yeah. It was.
“Did someone else ask you to step in to bother us?” she asked. “Is that how Retribution got into our lives?”
I imagined how it might sound, telling her that I was her older brother. And that I was trying to find a way to help their family. My family. But how do you tell someone that everything they know to be true just isn’t?
“Answer,” she said, sudden fury in her voice.
“I sent the email because of your missing brother,” I said. This, at least, was absolutely true. That I meant me as well as Elias when I said missing brother was something I still didn’t know if I should ever reveal.
“Elias?” she said.
I nodded.
“Where is he?”
Before I could think of an answer that might make her happy, two large men walked out of the shadows and directly toward us.
Each carried a baseball bat.