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minutes had passed since she had last looked at those glowing numbers.
    No matter how it felt, she couldn’t have been chewing on the tape for longer than a minute or two.
    “Don’t do that,” one of the bad guys snapped, loud enough so that Katharine jumped as if she had come into unexpected contact with a live wire.
    “You got a better idea?” came the growled reply.
    Heart pounding, Katharine quit with the tape for long enough to shoot a nervous glance over her shoulder toward the door. They sounded so close—terrifyingly close. Still, nothing more than the sliver of dining room that she’d been able to see before met her gaze: a corner of the glass-topped dining table, part of an upended gray-and-chrome upholstered chair, the painting of the single lily in a vase lying where it had been flung on the carpet. There was no sign of the men, thank goodness. They were in all likelihood still in the den; obviously, they had no idea what was happening in the kitchen.
    Oh, God, how long until one of them decided to check?
    Fright flooded like ice water through her veins as she arrived at the unavoidable conclusion: probably not very long.
    “Hurry,” Lisa breathed.
    Oh, yeah. Recalled to herself, Katharine attacked the tape with renewed desperation. Her heart thumped. Her pulse raced. Her stomach twisted itself into a pretzel. At any moment—at any second—one of the men could come back into the kitchen.
    Then she had no doubt at all that she and Lisa would die. After all, the bad guys had found the safe. They didn’t need either of the women anymore.
    Hurry. Hurry. Hurry. The word formed an urgent chorus in her brain.
    “Where you going?” The raised voice belonged to the bad guy who had slammed her face into the floor. Even as she nearly had a heart attack, Katharine recognized it without a doubt. There was a roughness to it, a hint of New York or New Jersey street in the accent. He was clearly talking to his partner, who was just as clearly no longer nearby.
    Oh, God, where was he? Her heart thumped like a piston in her chest as her every sense strained to find out. She couldn’t tell; she could hear nothing, no footfalls, no sounds at all, to locate him.
    Please, please, let him not be heading for the kitchen.
    Panic gave her strength. She got a grip with her cuspids, ripped downward. Miracle of miracles, the tape tore. Yes. The moment was electric, and Lisa felt it, too, Katharine could tell by the triumphant clenching of her fingers. It was just the smallest rip, but it gave them hope, made success seem not so impossible after all. She kept at the tape like a terrier, the taste metallic in her mouth. Or maybe that metallic taste was blood. She didn’t know, didn’t care.
    He could step into the kitchen at any second. . . .
    Muscles straining, using short, sharp jerks that caused the tape to snap taut each time, Lisa tried to yank her hands apart as Katharine kept feverishly ripping at the layers of tape. Slowly, slowly, way too horribly slowly, it tore. . . .
    Lisa forced her arms apart and suddenly her wrists were free. As Katharine, panting, let her head sag down onto the tile, their eyes met in a single brief moment of triumph. Then Lisa, loose strips of tape dangling from one wrist, jackknifed into a sitting position, yanked the tape from her mouth, and bent to claw at the tape around her ankles.
    The sound of a flushing toilet answered at least one urgent question: the location of the second bad guy. He was in the powder room off the entry hall. For about half a heartbeat, knowing where he was even made Katharine feel better.
    Then she realized that the kitchen could be his next stop. All he had to do was turn left and walk about a dozen paces straight down the hall. The arched opening that led from the entry hall into the kitchen didn’t even have a door on it. He would be able to see them long before he reached it.
    Lisa moved, and Katharine watched with her heart in her mouth as Lisa scooted on her