Wen tried to go to him, but Junior didn’t let her; he prodded her straight toward the bathroom and only allowed her to close the door partway while she relieved herself. Wen’s maroon dress, which she had bought only yesterday at one of the trendy shops in the Redwater area, was torn at the shoulder and the hem. At the sink, she splashed cold water on her face, trying to shock herself back into alertness.
On the return trip down the hallway, she stopped in the doorway next to Tako and faced Junior, staring him in the face. “You can’t leave him like that,” she insisted.
Junior grabbed her arm and began to pull her back toward her room. Wen clung to the door frame, struggling and shouting that she wouldn’t go until they treated Tako’s wounds. Junior became agitated. “Bitch,” he hissed as he pried her fingers loose, breaking two of the nails. Two other barukan showed up to see what the problem was. One of them was the leader who’d made the call to Hilo and put her on the phone last night—a wiry, unexpectedly short man in camouflage cargo pants, a black T-shirt, and a carved skull pendant of bluffer’s jade around his neck. Physically, he didn’t seem that formidable at first glance, but the jade rings on his fingers were real, and he had a pinched, ferocious face with protruding eyes and a feral stare. Wen thought of him as Big Dog.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Big Dog snapped at Junior, who began to defend himself in Shotarian. The barukan readily mixed the languages when they spoke.
Wen interrupted and addressed the leader directly. “That injured man is a Fist of No Peak,” she reminded him. “He’s no good to you as ransom if he dies. You have to help him. Call a doctor. My husband will be more forgiving toward you if you do.”
Big Dog sneered. “You think you can still order people around like a queen?”
“She’s right,” said the mixed-blood man with the jade nose ring who seemed to be the second-in-command. “We have to do something about that gods-awful moaning.”
Big Dog drew his pistol and before Wen could even scream, he shot Tako in the head, silencing him. “Took care of it,” he said. Second Dog let out a startled burst of laughter, but Junior turned pale. Wen’s vision blurred. Tako had been her bodyguard for years. He had a wife and two daughters. Her fear of the barukan fell apart beneath rage and disgust. They had never meant to let Tako live. They’d only let him suffer.
“You . . . you. . . . dogs,” Wen whispered. “Tako was . . . was a friend . . . of m-my family.” It had taken years of effort to recover her ability to speak smoothly, but now stress and emotion made words stick in her throat again. She hated the sound of her renewed weakness when she most needed to be strong against these animals. “You’re . . . all . . . dead men.”
Big Dog backed her against the wall, putting his brutal face close to hers. Wen flinched at the menace in his eyes. “Do you think we’re afraid of your husband? Just because you’re used to everyone bowing and scraping to him, you think it’s because of his threats that we’re treating you so nicely? He’s powerless here. He can’t find us and he can’t touch us. Think about that before you decide to open your mouth again.”
Second Dog and Junior dragged her back into the room and shut the door.
_______
The Kaul house was a war room. Multiple phones and computers were set up in the Pillar’s study. Lott and Hejo had the clan’s tech wizards trying to trace the location of the ransom call. The perpetrators weren’t careless; Hejo’s analysts suspected they’d attached a moving cellular phone to a two-way radio, so there was no way to pinpoint where the call had come from. All they could say confidently was that it had originated in Leyolo City, so Wen and Shae had not been transported far.
Federal police might have superior technology to narrow the search further, but Hilo quickly decided against involving either the Kekonese or Shotarian authorities. He could not risk Leyolo City cops getting involved and putting Wen and Shae in greater danger, and he wished to prevent, or at least delay for as long as possible, word getting out that the Pillarman and Weather Man of No Peak were being held hostage by lowly foreign criminals. Already, whispers of concern were circulating in the clan over the Pillar’s abruptly canceled appointments.
Hilo wanted to get on a plane with an army of the clan’s best Fists and go to Leyolo City himself. He would make it known that he was on the hunt. He would offer a staggering reward for anyone who led them to the kidnappers, and he would spread the word that if Shae and Wen were not returned safely within twenty-four hours, he would tear the city apart, kill every barukan member he could get his hands on until he found the men who’d done this, and they and their families would all die.