The end is only the beginning

I stared hard at his hand, considering if a man with a grip like an unbreakable lifeline could be dangerous. Rephrase. Obviously he was dangerous, he'd whisked me out of a populated restaurant against my will. But, was he dangerous to me?

"You won't believe it. Though you can trust me." His voice cut through the noise of the Escalade's engine revving in reverse, tires squealing with the loss of rubber around a too sharp turn. Paris was like that, full of narrow streets with ridiculous traffic and abrupt intersections. I was surprised the SUV hadn't been snarled in a honking mass of cabbies already.

Keeping an eye on passing landmarks --please, no bridges, I wasn't ready for that future yet-- I played obtuse, buying time, trying to define the situation along with my options. The zealot in the yellow coat had been sent for me, part of a fundamental brigade employed to squash heretic upstarts like myself.

"Trust you with what? Ruining a perfectly good evening?" He didn't need to know how even a bathroom abduction had improved my miserable date, sham that it was. Nobody who knew me, the real me, would ever expect me to date a man like Todd. Not even Todd.

"With the information you're carrying, Sarah." He rolled the vowels in my name with the soft cadence of a Carolina native. It pinged me with a sudden and unexpected homesickness. Huh. Funny that I would run into a fellow Tarheel in a Parisian men's room.

I snorted and Robert frowned, squeezing my hand. "Your ability to predict the future is a valuable asset to particular people in power. People with the resources to own you. Use you."

Tearing my gaze from his, I glimpsed the grand steel arches of a bridge in the distance. Hell. He knew. Too much. Too soon. My mission remained incomplete and here we were speeding toward the end. Of everything.

I guess hand holding time was over.