House Guest

Tommaso

“Hi,” Paige said breathlessly.

“Hi.” I smiled despite the evening I’d had and the flurry of activity around me as the Egyptians boarded their plane. “How are you?”

“Stressed enough that I’ll kill you if you make me do the small talk thing,” she said. “What happened?”

I laughed. “All right, all right. It went well. Nobody’s hurt. Didn’t even have to fire a shot.”

She exhaled sharply. “Thank God. Okay. But did they agree to help?”

“Eventually.” I glanced in the window of the van at where Gamal sat with his hands bound behind his back. “They wanted to meet another day to discuss details, but I brought them around to my point of view.”

“I thought you said you didn’t fire any shots,” she said wryly.

“I didn’t!” I turned away from my captive. “We’ll just have a house guest for a while.”

“What?”

I took a deep breath. I’d given Paige the run of my house, our house, but there was one locked, hidden door she would never find unless I pointed it out to her. And that door led to the sub-b