I had to question that reality, but I kept my mouth shut. “Kind of hard to hide a yacht this size for long.”
“I don’t need to hide for very long. Once I have what I came for, I’ll leave. Whether you’re alive at the end is up to you.”
“What did you come for?”
“My cigars and rum, of course.”
I laughed loudly and shook my head. “I don’t have those, so good luck with that.”
“Maybe not, but you do have the key to unlock where they’re stored. You also have the address. You just don’t know it.” Boots thudded across the floor before I came face-to-face with a ghost.
“Milas?” I gasped, jumping backward as his hands came down to lean on the chair. “You’re dead.”
He nodded, a wicked grin on his face. “Milas is dead. I made sure of it.”
It struck me then. The man before me was Milas’s brother. A twin brother. “Emil,” I hissed, my voice low and scared. “I didn’t know you were twins.”
Emil pushed off the chair and paced to the other end of the galley while I rubbed the knot on the back of my head. It was awkward with my hands tied together, but something was running down my neck. I checked my hand, and it was covered in blood, which explained that sensationandwhy my head hurt. It also explained how he got me out here without me coming around.
“You killed your brother, didn’t you?” I asked since he wasn’t saying anything. “Why would you kill him?”
“I killed my brother because he was an idiot. All he had to do was get the goods here and leave the rest to me. Could he do that? No. He had to get greedy and decide he wanted more than his share. Killing him made certain that didn’t happen.”
My mind was so fuzzy around the edges I was having trouble sorting out the scene. “How did you kill Milas and get off the boat if the waves were bad enough to sink the boat?”
“Milas was long dead before that storm hit. I disabled the communications and GPS on the boat, knowing it would buy me enough time to escape, and with any luck, enough time to get back to Denmark. The storm sinking this boat the first time was pure luck. They probably wouldn’t have found it if Mathias hadn’t sent out the Coast Guard to sniff around.”
“And you’re saying that once you killed him, you couldn’t find where he hid the goods?”
He nodded, tipping his head to the right. “I made an error in judgment there. I took him at his word, but the address he gave me, the one he said held our treasure, was nothing but an empty field. Why would he lie to his brother and business partner? I trusted the little bastard and look what that got me. He had picked me up in Florida, and we had a nice visit as we motored back here, but by the time I realized my mistake, it was too late. That said, I had an ace in the hole. Mathias.”
I had to keep him talking and buy Mathias time to realize I wasn’t home, but my car was. If my phone was still on me, he might be able to triangulate it. I couldn’t tell if it was still in my pocket.
Emil rolled his eyes and leaned on the table. “Honest to God, if I heard the name Mathias one more time, I was going to vomit. Mathias this and Mathias that. I swear Milas would have licked his boots if he thought it would get him further ahead. Once I knew he left Mathias in charge of the estate, it was easy to keep an eye on you while you did the dirty work for me. I told Milas not to make me executor. It would only cause problems with me being in Denmark and the boat being in the States. I thought I had all the paperwork regarding the smuggling, so all Mathias should have had to do was get rid of the boat, but my brother decided to double-cross me.”
“After you double-crossed him,” I said smartly.
The back of his hand came across my cheek so hard I saw stars. “Don’t, you little bitch. Don’t act all superior. The money Milas stashed away in cigars and rum is enough to buy and sell you a thousand times over,” he growled, getting in close to my face.
“What do you want from me?” I rubbed my jaw with my tied hands and forced tears from my eyes. “We don’t know anything more. Mathias can give you the paperwork. You can search the twenty-some GPS coordinates Milas listed.”
He shook his head, a smug look on his face. “That won’t be necessary because Mathias already knows the location.”
I shook my head carefully so the pain didn’t overtake me again. “No, he doesn’t. He’s completely clueless about all of this.”
“Well, he better start remembering. Milas told me how he let it slip to him one night at a party.”
I sucked in a breath, and my eyes widened. “Did he say when that party was?”
He threw his arms up. “I don’t have a clue. I just know it was a little over a year ago. Milas tried to fix the situation by giving him drugs. When Mathias never said anything to him about it afterward, we’d assumed he’d forgotten. Now, of course, I need him to remember.”
“You realize that those drugs are made to make people forget. Those hours are wiped away. He can’t remember a thing.”
He was on me in a heartbeat, a gun pressed to my temple. “Well, he’s going to have to,” he said, his face bright red, “if he wants to see you alive again.”
He let me go and took a deep breath to calm himself while he tucked the gun into the waistband of his jeans. “I say we call him; what say you?” He pulled a flip phone from his pocket. “Can’t be traced. Fun, right?”
“Barrel of laughs.” What he didn’t realize was the display on the front of the phone just told me what time it was. It had only been two hours since he took me from the woods. That meant we couldn’t be too far from shore. The boat was anchored, and he’d been down here with me since I woke up. The motors weren’t running, and that meant the farthest we could be from shore was around the islands somewhere. I racked my brain for a plan, because if Mathias answered, I was going to have to figure out a way to tell him where to start looking.
