by Callie Rose
As I pulled up the drive toward his family’s sprawling mansion, I found myself craning my neck to stare at it, as if the outside would somehow give away a hint of whatever secrets were concealed inside.
I pulled up outside and moved quickly toward the front door, excitement and nerves jangling through me—I hoped like fuck Cole wouldn’t get in trouble for helping me, but if we were smart about it, his dad wouldn’t even know we’d gone looking through his shit.
Digging my phone out of my pocket, I checked for messages as I reached the door, but didn’t see any. I wasn’t sure how often the other guys were able to check their phones, although they obviously had access to them since Finn had texted me earlier.
I rang the bell and waited for a few beats, and when the door opened, I looked up quickly.
“Yes?” Mr. Mercer stood in the doorframe, his brows furrowed.
Fuck.
“Um, is Cole here? I’m—he invited me over.”
I knew Cole wasn’t allowed to stay on campus most weekends, but I didn’t know if he was supposed to have guests at the house, and I kicked myself mentally for getting him in trouble already. I hadn’t been expecting his dad to open the door.
Actually… why is his dad opening the door?
Every time someone unexpected came to my grandparents’ house, one of the staff greeted them. They only went to the door themselves if they were expecting someone.
“Oh.” The dark-haired man smiled, nodding in understanding. “Yes, he’s here. Come on in.”
An alarm bell had been chiming softly in my head ever since the large man had opened the door, and now it began to grow louder. My feet didn’t move, and I glanced down at my phone, checking for any new messages from Cole.
None.
I pulled up his contact and started typing out a hasty text, trying to find out where he was, when Mr. Mercer cleared his throat in annoyance.
“What are you doing? Aren’t you here to see Cole?”
I glanced back up at him, my heart picking up speed with every beat.
“I’m—” My voice caught. “You know what, I think I got it wrong. I’ll just call him. It’s fine.”
As I babbled, I stepped away from the door, and Mr. Mercer’s expression grew even more annoyed. He held the door open wider. “You don’t want to see him? You came all this way just to call him?”
“No. It’s not important.”
I was white knuckling the phone, and after two more slow steps backward, I gave up trying to be subtle entirely, turning and limping at a fast pace toward my car.
Mr. Mercer was big.
But he was also quick, and so fucking silent I didn’t even hear him coming until his body slammed into mine from behind.
“You just can’t do this the easy way, can you?” he grunted.
A wet cloth pressed against my nose and mouth, and I let out a muffled shriek, struggling against the strong bands of his arms. His grip tightened like a vise as I thrashed and jerked, trying to break his hold.
I dropped all my weight, stomping on his instep, and I heard him curse behind me.
Then I didn’t hear anything at all.
Chapter 22
Consciousness filtered in slowly.
My head felt like it’d been filled with cement, too heavy for me to lift, too sluggish to form a single coherent thought.
And my leg hurt.
Not horribly, but worse than it had in a long time.
I vaguely remembered twisting, writhing, kicking, struggling against arms that felt like steel. That had been what’d hurt my leg, I thought. The twisting motion had tweaked something in my ankle.
A low murmur sounded nearby. Voices, maybe, but the sounds were too muddy and indistinct to make them out.
I wanted to sleep more. To sleep forever. To go back to sleep until Doctor Garrett woke me up and told me I’d had a horrible dream, that I’d never been in an accident and my leg was fine.
But I’m not in the hospital now… Am I?
Why was it so fucking hard to remember?
I let my head hang limply, chin on my chest, and focused all my energy on sorting through the pieces of fuzz cluttering my mind. Whatever had made me so tired and loopy was fading slowly, and as my mind grew clearer, something else rose inside me.
Fear.
Panic.
Terror.
“…was I supposed to do? She texted Cole. She knows too fucking much.”
The deep voice sounded like the speaker was underwater, but even through the distortion, I could hear the anger in it.
Cole…
Cole’s father.
Memories returned in a rush, and my entire body tensed as if I’d been thrown into ice-cold water.
“I’m not saying we don’t need to deal with it, but is abducting her in the middle of the fucking day really the solution here? Jesus, you’re going to make everything worse.”
I didn’t recognize that voice, but when I pried my sticky eyelids open and tilted my head slightly, I knew the man immediately.
Edward Van Buren.
Mason’s dad.
“You already botched this once,” a third voice drawled. “And then we agreed to leave her alone.”
“Because you thought she didn’t know anything, and you didn’t want to risk drawing attention. But did you or did you not hear me say, she knows? She knows too much, and she was texting my goddamn son about it.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Mr. Van Buren muttered, and for a second, he sounded so much like his son that my stomach turned over. “Well, how do we know she hasn’t told anyone else?”
“Because she trusts Cole.” Disgust sat heavy in Mr. Mercer’s voice. “She told him she’d just found out. Something about a lawyer being sent from my household, goddammit. And something about Adam. I invited her over and deleted the messages, then sent Cole out with Penny. I’m telling you, if we stop this here, it ends. Everything’s fine.”
“Where’s Whittaker?” the third voice asked.
“He refused to come, the goddamn pussy. Fuck!”
There was a clatter that seemed to echo, as if we were in a large space and someone had knocked over a piece of furniture or something. I cracked my eyes open again, doing my best to keep the rest of my body still and limp, even though I could feel all my muscles bunching up tight with fear.
We were in something like a storage building. It was big and mostly empty—run-down and dirty, as if it hadn’t been used in a while. Fluorescent lights ran along the ceiling, and there were no windows that I could see, so I had no idea if it was light out or not. It’d been mid-afternoon when Mr. Mercer had attacked me outside his house, but I wasn’t sure if minutes or hours or days had passed since then.
Not days. Can’t be days.
I would be hungrier, thirstier, and weaker if that were true.
Besides, why would they keep me here for days when this wasn’t that kind of kidnapping? Not one where they would hold me for ransom and give me back if my family paid up.
From the way Mr. Mercer was talking, that wasn’t why they’d brought me here at all.
They’d brought me here to kill me.
The other two men had stopped talking at Mr. Mercer’s explosion. They watched him silently now, as if waiting for him to regain control of himself again. He paced back and forth a few times, running a hand through his dark hair, and when he glanced back toward me, I snapped my eyes shut before he could see me staring, trying to hide the sudden hitch in my breath.
No one spoke, and he moved as silently as he had when he’d come after me in his driveway, but I felt the fucking atmosphere change as he approached. My skin prickled as if spiders were crawling up and down my arms, and I held as still as I could—
Until a large hand grabbed my chin, forcing it up.
“I know you’re awake, sweetheart. Have a nice nap?”
His face was so close to mine I could feel his breath ghosting over my skin, and I forced my eyes open, forced myself to meet his ga
ze. I was tied to a chair, my hands bound behind me with what felt like duct tape, and more tape wrapped around my chest, pinning me to the rickety metal folding chair. There was nowhere to go when he leaned in even closer, his blue eyes narrowing.
“What do you know about Adam Pierce?”
“He’s my… dad…”
The words slurred out of my mouth, and I felt a little like Adena must’ve on prom night. I was still woozy and disoriented, and the truth had come out before I’d had a chance to clamp my lips around it.
Or at least, what I thought was the truth.
Mr. Mercer made a face, shaking his head in what almost looked like disbelief. “Fucking Hildebrands. Always in the wrong place at the wrong time. You couldn’t just let it go? Couldn’t just leave well enough alone, could you?”
“For God’s sake, Richard. Stop talking to her,” the third voice said. It was smooth and aristocratic, and although I barely remembered the sound of it from the one time we’d met, I was positive it belonged to Elijah’s father. Charles Prescott.
I flicked my gaze back to Cole’s dad, trying to shove down the panic that was doing its best to shut off my brain. I needed to think. Needed the cobwebs out of my mind, needed time, needed help.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Shifting in my seat, I pulled at the bands of tape around my arm, testing the strength of the restraints. My leverage was all wrong, and the tape was wrapped around my wrists too many times for me to budge it at all, and I stopped trying quickly, not wanting to give away any movement to the man looming over me.
“Where… where is he? Where’s Adam Pierce?” I slurred, trying to split my groggy brain into two halves as I questioned Mr. Mercer and simultaneously ran my fingertips over the back edge of the chair I sat on.
Come on, come on…
Something.
Anything…
There!
My fingers grazed over a small, jagged edge where one of the pieces of the backrest met the seat. Trying to keep the movements small, I hooked the edge of my binds on the jagged protrusion and tugged, tearing at the tape.
Cole’s dad stepped back, chewing on his lip as he gazed down at me. I made my movements even smaller, afraid he’d notice what I was doing now that he wasn’t right up in my face.
“Adam Pierce? He’s dead.”
He spoke like he was exhausted, as if he was bored of this topic already—as if I, or my mother, or the Hildebrands in general, had inconvenienced him beyond what a reasonable man could endure.
His words were so matter-of-fact that it took me a second to absorb their meaning, and when I did, the tiny motion of my hands stopped momentarily.
There was no real reason to grieve. I hadn’t even known Adam, only knew him through a few pictures I’d seen and a barely sketched portrait of his personality from Jacqueline.
But maybe that was why grief bubbled up so intensely in my chest now. I hadn’t known him. And I never would.
“How?” I whispered, forcing myself to resume scraping the tape over the jagged piece of metal even as I asked. “When?”
Mr. Mercer opened his mouth to respond, but before he could say anything, Mason’s father threw up his hands.
“For fuck’s sake, Richard! You don’t think we know what you’re doing? Tell her any more and we’ll have to kill her, just like you want.”
The dark-haired man growled, turning and stalking back over to his friend. “She already knows too much! That’s why I fucking brought her here today. Goddammit, we should’ve finished the job before she even went back to school.”
“We can’t—” Mr. Prescott started to say, but Cole’s dad wheeled on him too.
“What do you want to do, huh? Let her go? Make her swear to fucking secrecy? You want to spend another four years like we did after Charlotte left? Wondering when she’ll finally crack and spill everything?” He pressed his lips together, tension vibrating under his skin. “It’s cleaner to just end it. No loose ends. It’s the only way to be sure.”
The other two men didn’t respond to that. They stared at him in silence for a few beats, and I worked the tape harder against the sharp edge of the chair, taking less care to disguise my movements.
He was winning them over.
I still didn’t quite understand what they were talking about, but whatever they’d done in the past, whatever had happened between them and Adam Pierce and my mother, they hadn’t let my mom walk away from it.
Or at least, not for long.
Mr. Mercer wanted there to be no loose ends, and right now, I was a loose end. I could see the two other men coming to that realization, grudgingly acknowledging that their friend was right.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
The single word became my mantra, my motto, my prayer, as I tore desperately at the binds on my wrists, feeling them start to give way as the sharp edge weakened them.
The men were still talking, but I forced myself to tune out their debate, to focus on one thought, one goal.
Get out of here alive.
When the binds on my wrists snapped apart, my whole body jerked slightly with the shock of it, and I glanced up, my heart in my throat.
They hadn’t seen. Hadn’t noticed.
I was still bound to the chair by the tape wrapped around my torso, and my hands shook so hard I could barely use my fingers as I bent my elbow awkwardly behind me, peeling the thick band of tape away from the chair and inching it slowly upward, leaving it wrapped around me but not the metal chair.
My shoulder burned, and my head ached from trying to keep the lingering fuzziness at bay. My lungs felt constricted and too small, like they had shrunk inside my body, no longer able to hold all the air I needed.
I wanted to cry, wanted it to be over, wanted more time, wanted—
The last section of tape slid above the back of the chair, and I was free.
My gaze shot to the three men, and before I could hesitate, before I could let fear or doubt slow me down, I surged to my feet and ran.
I didn’t look back, didn’t take my eyes off the door at the far end of the room, but my ears tracked every sound behind me.
“Motherfucker!”
“Goddammit. Grab her!”
Pounding footsteps rang against the hard concrete floor, heavier than mine.
Faster than mine.
My healing ankle screamed with pain as I sprinted flat out, mouth locked open in a silent, terrified cry.
I was close, so close, even though my gait was uneven and my breath was coming in short gasps.
The door might be locked.
It might not lead anywhere.
But it was the best hope I had.
I was four yards away, my hand already reaching out toward the shiny metal knob, when a body hit me from behind. The floor rushed up to meet me, and I hit the cement hard, two hundred pounds of muscle landing on top of me. My wrists bore the brunt of the impact, but my chin hit the floor a second later, and the coppery taste of blood exploded in my mouth.
My lungs seized from the impact, and even though my mind kept yelling at me to get to the door, get to the goddamn door, I could barely move.
The weight on top of me lifted, and rough hands grabbed my ankle, dragging me backward as I screamed in pain. My fingernails scrabbled against the hard, rough surface, but there was no traction, nothing to grab onto.
Then shiny black shoes appeared in front of me, and the man behind me dropped my leg.
“Enough.”
Mr. Mercer’s voice was hard. Unyielding. I spat out blood and craned my neck to see more of him, my gaze catching on the gun he had aimed at my head.
The barrel was dark and shiny, the hole at the end so small it was hard to believe it held death inside.
“This is enough. No loose ends.”
“No loose ends.”
I didn’t know which of the men behind me murmured the words back to him, or if they both spoke at once, but it was all the permission the dark-haired man seemed to need.
He adjusted his grip on the weapon, raising it just slightly, and I knew I should look away, but I couldn’t.
When the loud bang came, I expected to feel pain—or maybe nothingness.
It took me a heartbeat to realize that the sound had come from the door bursting open, and by the time I registered that fact, Cole was already launching himself at his father.
He hooked his father’s arm and pulled, and the gunshot meant for my head went wide, hitting the cement floor next to me and making sharp particles of concrete fly like shrapnel.
I screamed, the sound wheezy and ragged, as the slivers dug into my skin.
Cole and his dad grappled for control of the gun, and when the black-haired boy shoved the older man hard with his shoulder, they both went down. The gun flew out of their grasp, skittering across the hard floor with a metallic sound.
Get it. Get it!
I hauled myself up to my hands and knees, but before I could even try to stand, rough hands were grabbing me around the waist, pulling me back. I yelled again, driving my elbow backward as hard as I could. The man behind me dropped me, and I collapsed to the floor again. I could feel blood coating my lips; I practically choked on it as I gasped for breath.
A hand closed around my ankle again, but before the man behind me could drag me away, three more figures appeared in the doorway.
“What the fuck?”
Mason’s voice was soft and low, barely audible over the sound of Cole and Mr. Mercer’s grunts and yells.
A dozen different emotions filtered across his face in a split second as he took in the scene before him—but the one that rose most strongly to the surface was one that didn’t surprise me at all.
Betrayal.
The three boys darted forward, barreling past me as they charged toward Mason and Elijah’s fathers. Cole and his dad were crashing around the room, and I realized with a sick twist of my stomach that this was what it would’ve looked like if Cole had ever fought back when his dad hit him before.
It was awful and horrifying.
They were evenly matched, like I’d always thought they would be, but that just meant they both delivered their punches like swings of a baseball bat—hard and heavy, nothing held back. Cole’s face was bloody, the first time I’d ever seen that happen in a fight, and his features were set in an almost psychotically blank mask as he launched another flurry of punches at his dad.
