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IN THE THREE MINUTES that had passed since Rowe snatched Jennifer Wenn into a vice grip and pulled her away from her husband and a crowd that was active and alarmed, Gia and Carlo had been transfixed. Unable to look away.
“Look at his eyes,” Gia said as she leaned into her scope and scanned Rowe’s face. “He’s coked out of his mind, and it’s worse than it was earlier today. He’s completely lost it.”
“Never mind his eyes,” Carlo said. “Look to the far right of the building. Security.”
“What security?” she said in surprise as she tamped down hard on the impulse to run. “We looked for security earlier—just before the party ended. I scanned that goddamned area myself. There were no signs of security there before.”
“There is now. They likely timed it so they’d leave along with the rest of the guests because they’re there now, Gia. Two men. Both with dark hair. Each as big as me. Each in a tux. Neither with a wife or a girlfriend. Each watching all of this go down and edging closer to the scene. Look at their faces—we both know that look. We’ve worn it ourselves—cold and calculating. Not a trace of fear in either of them, just a determination to shut this down. To figure out how to get this done without allowing Rowe to kill Jennifer Wenn in the process. And good luck to them when it comes to that, because—to be fair to them—Rowe isn’t giving them an inch to act.”
“I see them,” she said. “If one of them shoots him, he could reflexively shoot her.”
“Exactly.”
“The point you tried to make earlier is dead,” she said to him. “He didn’t come back to watch—he came back to end this. Why? Why end his life now? It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Who has ever been able to make sense of the deranged and the drugged,” he said. “But let’s go back in time. He said that he had a plane waiting for him—likely a private plane. What if whoever has been assisting him all this time decided to get the hell out now before Rowe could take them down with him? What if they saw what we saw today—a man becoming unhinged? What if they left him here, and he just decided to end it on his own, and go out with a bang?”
“It’s possible,” she said. “We’ll never know.”
“Does it matter? The fact of the matter is that I agree with you now. We do need to get the hell out of here, because shit is going down sooner rather than later. Soon, the police will be here. Too many people who aren’t in that crowd are aware of what’s going down. It’s already been called in—and Rowe knows it. He’s going to finish this within minutes. Trust me on this—he will kill Jennifer Wenn just as surely as someone will kill him. They’re both going down, but we’re not going down with them. So, get up.”
“By taking the Wenns on his own—or, at the very least, Jennifer Wenn—he’s cheated us of millions,” she said.
“So what?”
“We’ve risked our lives for tonight! And he’s robbed us of what he promised us.”
“We need to leave!”
But Gia didn’t move. The muscles in her jaw tightened in anger and she looked harder into her sites as she quickly weighed her options for how to handle this betrayal.
