His wrists were zip-tied to the chair arms. His face was a roadmap of violence, lip split, jaw bruised. A fresh cut oozed blood from above his eyebrow.
But it was his hand that made bile rise in her throat.
Two fingers on his left hand were swollen, purple, and bent at unnatural angles despite the splint someone had slapped on them.
They’d broken his fingers. The thought made her dizzy with fury.
Oh, Sabin.
Inwardly, she was crying for him. Outwardly, she kept her expression impassive, didn’t let a single flicker of reaction cross her face. The guards were watching, Raines was watching through the cameras mounted in each corner. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
“Fifteen minutes,” the guard said, gesturing to the chair they’d positioned across from him. “Audio is on. No physical contact.”
“Vivi.” Sabin’s voice was little more than a rasp. “You okay, you?”
Always worried about her. She wanted to laugh or scream or break something. Instead, she took the seat.
“Am I okay? That’s what you’re asking me? With your face looking like that?”
His split lip curved into a smile. “Still pretty enough to break hearts.”
Classic Sabin.
“How are they treating you?” The question was absurd given his condition, but she needed to say something, anything to keep from screaming.
“Room service isterrible. No biscuits, no café au lait. Not even a pillow mint.” He shook his head slowly, like a man genuinely aggrieved. “Ça c’est pas des gens, these people. No culture, no manners, no shame about neither one.”
She’d worked hard over the years to erase the Cajun from her voice—she’d found people took her more seriously without it—but not Sabin. He was shamelessly proud of their heritage and leaned into it. The familiar cadence reminded her of long, hot, slow summers on Bayou Lafourche with their dad’s family, and filled her with equal parts comfort and anguish.
God, she loved him.
She’d kill Raines for this. Slowly. Painfully. She’d make him beg before she was done.
“How’d they get to you?” She kept her voice neutral, but she already suspected she knew the answer.
Sabin had the grace to look slightly sheepish. “There was a woman.”
“Of course there was.”
A honey trap. It was the oldest trick in the book, and Sabin had fallen for it. Her brilliant, careful brother, who could spot a security flaw from fifty paces, had been taken in by a pretty face.
“Found her at a gallery in Athens,” he continued. “She claimed to be an antiquities dealer. Said she had a client looking for Byzantine pieces like the ones we’d...acquired in Istanbul. You know I’ve been dying to offload those since we went straight, so I went to dinner with her. Then to her hotel. Woke up zip-tied to a chair with Raines staring at me. Should’ve known better, me. Ma always said pretty women would be my downfall.”
Vivi tried not to wince at his admission. “How much did you tell the fake antiquities dealer?”
“Nothing important.”
But a shadow passed over his face that told her otherwise.
Sabin was a better liar than this, which meant he wanted her to know the truth without saying it aloud. They’d broken him. Not completely—Sabin was too stubborn for that—but enough to get what they needed. She wanted to tell him it was okay, that she didn’t blame him, but the words wouldn’t come.
“They tell you why they’re so interested in Villa Pandora?” he asked. “Because they haven’t told me shit.”
“They want something from the vault under ours and want me to get it for them. Some research called the Lazarus Protocol.”
“Sounds like a bad spy novel.” Sabin shifted and winced as the movement jostled his hand. “Tell me you’re not doing it,p’tite.”
She held his gaze. “They have you.”