Free Against the Dark by Carolyn Crane

front of some Rambo—this was never how she wanted to go. And she’d kissed him and liked it. It was almost the kiss she regretted most.
    And how had she missed blood?
    “I just have one question—”
    “Cole’s the name. Cole Hawkins.”
    “That’s not what I wanted to know.”
    He grinned. “A spot on the wallpaper,” he said.
    A torrent of anger flooded her. She should’ve thought to look for blood there. She had to get word to the girls. A simple text— Get out. But they wouldn’t, not without her. Their old connection transcended everything. She wanted to hit something. “You will not take any of us alive,” she said. “And that’s all I have to say.”
    “You’re alive now, aren’t you? And I’d say this qualifies as taking you.” He strolled casually over to her bookshelf and lifted up her safecracking tool. “Quite a playlist you have on here. I didn’t find any ABBA, though.”
    “Screw off.”
    “Is this sonar based? How much storage do you have in this thing?”
    She glared.
    He put it down. “The good news is that you have a choice right now. I’m offering you a deal where you get to choose what happens to you. A choice of two doors, just like in the game shows.”
    She said nothing. She wouldn’t like the choices.
    “Behind door number one, I bring you and your cohorts to Borgola and let him deal with you.”
    She snorted. “You think I’ll help you find my girlfriends?”
    “My guys already have them. Once I had your records, it wasn’t hard to put the three of you together. Now, I’m not finished describing door number one. I bring you to Borgola. You’ll all go down bad. He only wants your hands, but I think he’d be pleased for me to subvert that order when he meets you all.”
    Her heart lurched but she refused to look away.
    “You’ll all have a bad time with Borgola,” he said.
    “I’ll say you were in on it.”
    He flicked his hair aside, all the better to see her through his burning gray eyes. “You do that. That’ll be effective when I’m the guy who brings you in with the stones.”
    “A guy like Borgola is paranoid. And here you are giving me choices. It means you’ve got an angle. You think Borgola doesn’t sense something like that?”
    He gave her a new look. He didn’t expect that, maybe.
    For some odd reason she thought about what Lisa would say if she heard her talking like this. She’d worked so hard to build that life. She’d actually made a few people feel good. “So you have the stones,” she said.
    “Your friends were helpful in that respect. With some cajoling.”
    Angel sat, crushing onto her feet. “You better not have hurt those girls.”
    “They’re fine. Now, you want to hear the alternative to me turning you all over or not?”
    “Can’t wait,” she said.
    “Door number two, you help me.”
    She snorted. “And then you’ll turn me into the perv?”
    “No,” he said. “I’m going to return the diamonds. Then you’ll steal them back. Along with a few other things.”
    “He’ll have doubled down on security.”
    “Exactly.” He went back to the chair and sat again in that loose, elegant way that masked the strength she’d felt.
    “It seems foolish. I can’t think of a worse time to rip him off than right now.”
    “That’s for me to worry about.”
    Angel narrowed her eyes.
    “Look, you want to know why a thing is, or you can’t quite get behind it. I’m that way, too,” he began. He would explain it to her; he wasn’t completely unreasonable. This heartened her. “Here’s the deal. Borgola’s bedroom safe isn’t his only one. There’s another safe in that place, a secret main safe that I haven’t been able to locate, and that’s where the stuff I want is. Now that you’ve broken his bedroom safe, what in the world will he do with the diamonds when he gets them back?”
    “He’ll put them in the secret safe,” Angel said.
    “That’s right, he’ll put them in the secret safe. And I’ll track