Chapter 277: Self-Rescue Is the Only Way
Kade visibly recoiled at Vance's outburst, his neck pulling back instinctively like a man bracing for impact.
At the worst possible moment, he had managed to be every bit as reckless as Luca. He addressed Vance carefully, his voice stripped of its usual confidence.
"Vance, Ella's waiting for me at home. I promised I'd bring her back a souvenir from Seaside City..."
Before the sentence was out, Vance spun around and leveled a look at Kade that could have drawn blood.
"Are you a damn idiot too?"
Isabella's legs were bound again.
This time, Luca yanked the ropes twice with deliberate force, leaving no question of whether they would hold.
"I have a daughter too. Five years old, the most wonderful thing in my world. You probably saw her." Isabella let her voice soften into something disarming as she worked to build whatever fragile bridge she could.
"You're all fathers. You should understand how I feel. My ex-husband cheated on me, and now we're getting divorced. The woman who hired you to kill me is my ex's mistress."
"The two of them want me gone, not just out of the picture, but dead. My daughter cannot lose me. She is five years old. What kind of life would she have in that household without me? I am begging you — all of you — please let me go... I can give you everything I have."
At the precise moment her voice broke, a single tear traced its way down her cheek — perfectly timed, utterly convincing.
Luca studied her expression and let out a quiet, reluctant sigh.
"There's no point telling us all this. The person who hired us had only one requirement—that you never appear in front of her again. And what's the only way to make sure you never show up? Kill you, obviously. But don't worry—when the three of us do the job, we'll make it quick and clean. You won't feel a thing."
Luca had barely continued when Kade's hand connected sharply with the back of his head.
"Vance called you stupid, and you're out here proving him right in real time!" Kade's glare swung toward Isabella with barely restrained hostility, as though her very existence offended him. "This woman knows exactly how to work people. Only someone as thick as Luca would sit there and swallow every word of it!"
Luca turned on Kade, his expression curdling with indignation. "What gives you the right to talk to me like that? Fine if Vance says it, but you? Who exactly do you think you are?"
"I'm the one who found this job! Without me, you'd spend the rest of your life doing odd work and never see fifty thousand dollars in one place!"
The argument between them escalated rapidly. Before it could spiral any further, Vance drove his foot into the table with enough force to rattle everything on it.
"Go ahead, keep arguing! Soon you'll be arguing in prison, and then you'll both be real happy. What's all this talk about kids? None of us will ever see the outside again!"
Kidnapping carried a minimum of ten to twenty years. Given the premeditated nature of what they had done, the circumstances were about as damning as they could be.
Vance had run through every consequence long before any of this began.
This was not a job they could abandon halfway. They had committed, and now they had to see it through completely.
"Your daughter's young and needs you. Our kids need us too. What's that saying?" Vance settled himself onto the edge of the dusty table, his gaze falling on Isabella with cold, unhurried contempt. "You can be as pitiable as you like. What does any of that have to do with us?"
"I looked you up while we were sitting here. I genuinely cannot work it out — beyond the obvious, what is it about you that justifies that kind of income in a single year?"
Vance exhaled slowly and nudged Luca with his foot. "Go watch that window. Tell me how close those two are getting."
With Luca dispatched, Vance turned his full attention back to Isabella.
"The three of us—we all dropped out of middle school and came here to work. People in our village said big cities had more opportunities and better pay. We put everything we had into it, broke our backs trying to make something of ourselves here."
"We were willing to do any dirty, exhausting work. We even worked construction. After busting our asses all month, we barely made enough to feed our families. Even now, Luca hasn't been able to afford a wife. How am I supposed to face our dead parents?"
He reached across the table, lifted the knife without urgency, and pressed its tip beneath Isabella's chin, tilting her face upward until she had no choice but to meet his gaze.
"Now look at you. Same as us, two eyes, one nose, one mouth. So why is the distance between your life and ours so vast? We could work for someone else until we're old and broken and never touch fifty thousand dollars. You pull in a hundred million in a single year." He let the number hang in the air. "Explain that to me?"
With a blade at her chin, no answer came.
"...You not making money isn't my fault. There are plenty of people in this world who make more than you. Are you planning to murder every single one of them?" Isabella's chest tightened with a fury she had no outlet for.
She had done nothing wrong.
Laura's envy, nothing more than that, was the reason she was sitting here with a rope around her wrists?
Vance let out a short laugh and set the knife back down. He reached for the nearby rag, pinched Isabella's jaw open with two fingers, and forced the cloth into her mouth.
"So I don't blame you, and I don't blame anyone else. You shouldn't blame us either. If you want to blame someone, blame your own bad luck. In your next life, make sure you're the one hurting others, don't let others hurt you."
The rag was rank and coarse, pressing against the back of her throat until her eyes watered.
"Vance — those two didn't come up. They're heading outside. Looks like they came up empty and they're pulling out!"
Vance and Kade crossed to the window in unison, positioning themselves at the edge, watching in silence.
Only when the two distant figures had diminished to nothing did the tension in the room shift.
"Perfect! Get ready. Grab this damn woman and let's go find our employer."
Vance shook the dust from his clothes, his voice sharpened with renewed urgency.
"We have to go back into the city? We worked so hard to get out here!"
"No choice. That woman hasn't paid us yet. Kade, contact that guy who makes fake plates again. We'll swap them out and head back in!"
Isabella's fingers found the box cutter she had managed to conceal during the earlier confusion.
She had no understanding of why her rescuers had retreated, and she had no capacity to dwell on it.
The only person she could count on now was herself.
The only path forward was her own.
Isabella set her jaw and held onto the last thread of resolve she had left, refusing to release it.
The box cutter was old and corroded, its blade dulled by neglect.
Isabella wrapped her fingers around it with a grip so tight she felt the faint, sharp sting of it cutting into her palm.
There was no time to acknowledge the pain. She directed every last fragment of her focus toward the blade — working it in slow, careful strokes against the ropes binding her wrists, one fiber at a time.