Page 104 of Crosscurrent

Tom, Owen and Skye.

“We’ve got about three minutes, max, before Cartwright’s people take Owen apart piece by piece,” Gabe announced.

“That’s the play,” Wade added. “No need to come in here after us with the leverage they’ve got in that cabin.”

Cara clamped down on the urge to vomit. Cartwright would work through the hostages, until Cara and the others agreed to whatever she wanted. The stalemate wasn't a stalemate. It was a clock, and it ran her way.

“Ideas?” she asked, teeth chattering, more with fear than cold.

"We breach, they kill the hostages," Wade said. "Tom and Skye for certain."

"Agreed," Gabe said.

Head clearing, Cara eyed the dim cabin. "We don't have to get in. All we have to do is get a message in. Tom and Skye are the two most dangerous people in this swamp, even with their hands tied.”

"Behind a locked door?" Wade scoffed. "In a room full of guns? Nobody’s that good."

Bennion's voice came out of the dark beside them, low and flat and certain. "Their men are out here in the water with us right now. Give them five minutes to work out how to get around behind us without eating a bullet, and they'll do it. Then we're the ones boxed in. The minute they get us pinned, she stops waiting."

"So we make our move first," Cara insisted. It was the only way. Couldn’t they see it?

"How?" Gabe's one word carried the full weight of his belief in her. In their team.

Cara had known the answer since the firing stopped. She just had to make herself say it.

"A parley." Her voice leveled into the calm that wasn't calm at all, the one that came up right before the worst cons. "Cartwright will talk. She's cornered, she's curious, and she's sure she's smarter than the rest of us."

She raked a finger down the crusty edge of the piling at her side. "And while she's busy enjoying how clever she is, I get a message to Tom and Skye. Get them prepped. Any tiny thing they can do to help will put us over the top."

Water surged against the pilings. Somewhere, just out of view, Cartwright’s people were moving into position.

"It has to be me," Cara said. "This is what I was built for, whether I wanted to be or not."

"No." Gabe didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. Cara knew what he was thinking.

An hour ago he had put his forehead to hers in the dark and told her there was no version of this he wanted to walk into without her. Now she was asking him to stand in black water and watch her go through a door he might not get her back out of. "Cara. No."

"It's our only option." She kept her voice gentle, which was crueler than shouting. "You know it."

He knew it. She watched him know it, watched it cost him more than she would ever be able to pay back.

"You get Tom and Skye their opening," he said at last, low and wrecked, "and the second it goes, you put yourself flat on that floor and you stay there. Promise me."

"I promise."

She didn't know if it was a lie.

They worked the signal in thirty seconds. A phrase, a tell, a scrap of the network grammar Skye herself had drilled into Cara for Bennion’s rescue. Something only the family would catch. Then Cara waded out of the black water and up onto the dock, into a gray that was not yet dawn but was thinking about it, and lifted her hands into the open where they could be seen, and walked toward the cabin that held the woman who wanted them all dead.

"Helen Cartwright," she called. Her voice came out steady, which felt like a small theft from God. "My name is Cara. I think it's time you and I talked."

For a long moment, nothing.

Then the cabin door opened.

46

Cara stepped into the lion's den with her hands where they could be seen.