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“Because they want to use her for political leverage.”

“How?”

Stein bent over the computer and touched a couple of keys. The photo of the embassy guy being executed appeared onscreen.

“The shooter, the guy who calls himself the Deliverer—Well, he isn’t one of the bandits that captured the bridal party.”

Dec got a bad, bad feeling. “Then who is he?”

A bearded, narrow face filled the screen. The eyes were cold, filled with evil.

“Fuck,” somebody said.

They were looking at Altair Amjad, the leader of one of the most vicious terrorist groups on the planet.

CHAPTER THREE

Her Royal Highness, Princess Anoushka of Qaram, the woman who had once been Annie Stanton, sat shivering on the dirt floor of a wooden shed high in the mountainous no-man’s-land that stretched for miles along the border between Qaram and its neighbor, Tharsalonia.

She was hungry, thirsty, and worn out.

Except for a cup of rancid-tasting water and a greasy glob of something that might have been goat, she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink in the two days since she’d been captured. Dehydration, lack of food and her useless struggles to break free of the handcuff that shackled her to a wooden post, had finally exhausted her.

She was also angry as hell—and even in her present state, she almost laughed at the irony of that phrase because it was surely not one a demure, obedient Qarami princess would ever use.

The thing was, she was neither demure or obedient, and she had long ago stopped thinking of herself as a Qarami princess.

She was Annie Stanton, which meant that instead of sitting here in subservient defeat she was wracking her brain in an effort to come up with an escape plan—not easy to do when you couldn’t focus all that well thanks to the lack of food and water.

Thanks to the cold.

The cold, the fact that she was shivering, that her teeth were banging together, worried her. She knew how debilitating it could be, that it could make it hard to think straight, that it could steal what little energy reserves she had left.

Then she would never escape—and no, she was not even going to consider that possibility.

A gust of wind sent its chilly fingers clawing through the cracks in the shed. Annie used her free hand to draw her tattered silk gown around her.

It was all she had.

She’d been wearing it beneath a hooded cashmere cloak—the proper outfit for a bride, one of her so-called ladies-in-waiting had said—but the cloak had been torn off her when she’d tried to fight against the rough hands of her captors as they’d dragged her from her limousine.

Her limousine.

As if anything to do with what her uncle had put in motion today was connected to her. And, yeah, that was the good news. That she was chained up in a shed while a bunch of outlaws drank themselves into a stupor meant that at least his horrible plans for her had suffered a setback.

But that was all it was. A setback, unless she found a way to escape these men, these mountains, this part of the world.

“Dammit,” Annie said, and jerked against the handcuff for maybe the hundredth time.

Getting free of the cuff was impossible. She’d tugged and pulled, she’d banged her wrist against the post. She’d even chewed on the disgusting piece of fatty whatever one of her laughing captors had called food, trying not to gag until she had a mouthful of the slimy stuff. Then she’d licked her cuffed wrist until it was as slippery as she could make it and tried to work herself free.

Tried for what had seemed forever.

What she’d ended up with were cuts and bruises, but her wrist remained trapped.

Trapped, same as she was trapped.

She could stand or sit, but that was it. She was at the mercy of those who’d captured her, even when it came to emptying her bladder. Twice, a woman with missing teeth and a milky eye had wrapped a rope around Annie’s neck, unlocked the handcuff from the post, and led her to a filthy bucket behind the small building.