by Kelsie Rae
“Ah,” I cry as I pull my knee to my chest in hopes of inspecting the damage.
Dragging me back to my feet, he pushes me again, and I wince as an excruciating pain shoots up my calf.
“Don’t make me tell you again,” he growls.
My arms feel like rubber as I grab the rope and rappel down the side of the house. When my feet hit the ground, I run like my life depends on it, ignoring the way my injured ankle throbs with every step. If I can just outrun him, then I might have a chance of escaping.
But it hurts. It hurts so freaking bad.
A curse rumbles through the air, followed by a quiet thump behind me.
Glancing over my shoulder, I find Sei. On the grassy landscape beneath the balcony. My heartbeat skyrockets. He’d jumped off the ledge and is limping after me, closing the distance between us one step at a time, gaining speed as his veins fill with adrenaline while mine seems to be running out.
Panting, I pump my arms back and forth and wait for the sound of a gunshot to ring through the air. But it doesn’t.
Instead, I’m gifted with the sound of footsteps pounding. And they’re getting closer. I feel like I’m in a dream. The one where I can’t get my legs to work. Where I can’t get my muscles to obey. Where I’m running in quicksand. Where my world is spinning out of control, and I can’t stop it.
Then I’m hit from behind and tumble to the ground.
“Hmph,” I grunt as the air whooshes out of my lungs. He climbs on top of me, caging me in with his weight.
“Please,” I beg.
He backhands me with all his strength, making my ears ring and my head snaps to the side.
“I told you”—he squeezes my neck with one hand then searches in his pocket for something with his other one—“not to run.” A syringe comes into view, and he pulls the yellow lid off the needle with his teeth before spitting it onto the grass.
“Please––”
Plunging it into my neck, I flinch away from him. But it’s too late.
My eyelids flutter.
Then the world fades to black.
31
Diece
Gun in hand, I search the north side of the estate, scanning the premises for anything out of place.
But it looks…fine.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I pull it out then press it to my ear. “Yeah?”
“Get back here. We have a problem.”
“What is it?”
“Q’s missing.”
I freeze. “Where is she?”
“We don’t know—”
“Fuck!” I scream at the top of my lungs.
A voice continues echoing through my cell, but I don’t hear a single word as I rush to the entrance of Kingston’s house then barrel up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Q’s bedroom door is cracked open, but it slams against the back wall as I shove it open with too much force. As my pulse races even faster, it doesn’t stop the truth from hitting me square in the jaw.
She isn’t in the bathroom. She’s not hiding under the bed. Her closet is empty too.
She’s gone.
Shoving aside the terrifying truth that’s glaring at me, I stalk toward the security room and find everyone already there. They’re surrounding the monitors while Lou plays back every second of footage that’s been recorded over the past twenty-four hours.
Unfortunately, they don’t tell us shit.
“Where is she?” I growl.
“We don’t know,” Kingston returns, though his attention stays glued to the screen.
“How do we know she’s gone?”
“He took her,” a quiet voice announces. Huddled in the corner of the room is the kid. Will.
Within three steps, I grab the neckline of his T-shirt and drag him to his feet before shoving him against the wall.
“Where. Is. She?”
“I don’t know. He just…he took her,” he cries.
“How do you know?”
The smell of piss permeates the air before Dex wrenches me back and shoves me away from the kid. “Back the hell off, Diece. He doesn’t know shit.”
“He knows she’s gone.”
“Because she snuck into his room to check on him,” Dex returns. “We found a rope hanging off the balcony. We think Sei climbed the trellis then hid the rope in the vines to use for a quick escape before searching for Q. When he found her, he threatened to kill Will if she didn’t go quietly.”
“Fuck!” I yell again, slamming my fist against the wall.
Grabbing the neckline of my shirt, Dex shoves me against the wall. “Listen to me. You have every right to be pissed right now, but we’ll find her.”
“When?” I spit back at him. “How? We’ve been searching for weeks to find Sei but haven’t turned up shit. How the hell are we going to find him before he touches her? Before he tortures her all over again?”
He shakes his head back and forth. “I don’t know. But we will.”
“Get the kid out of my sight. Now.”
Dex’s booming voice yells, “Regina!”
The pitter-patter of footsteps follows his demand before a disheveled Regina rushes into the room with a silky, black robe clinging to her skin.
“Go get Will some milk or something,” Dex finishes. “And clean him up. We’ve got shit to do.”
With a gulp, Regina pulls Will into her arms then ushers him out of the room without a single word.
“It isn’t his fault,” Lou mutters while continuing to search for answers on the monitors.
My fear for Q feels like it’s strangling me, but I drop my chin to my chest. Q would kill me if she knew I took my frustration out on a kid. It was unacceptable. Shame fills my lower gut fighting for dominance over my anguish as I mutter, “I know.”
“Go search the south side of the property. See if you can find anything. I’m going to keep looking for any footage, but he cut the power and jumbled our connection.” He pauses before adding, “The bastard knew what he was doing.”
I feel like spiders are crawling along my skin. Like I’m being dragged to the damn shed. Like I’m drowning. Like I have a gun pressed to my forehead, but there isn’t anything I can do about it. I gotta try, though. For her.
Rocking back on my heels, I announce, “I’m gonna go see what I can find.”
Kingston steps in the way and forces me to look at him. “We’re gonna find her, D.”
I nod, then step around him and walk down the silent hallway, lost in my thoughts.
He’s right. Even if it’s the last thing I do, I will find her.
I just don’t know if it’ll be too late by then.
32
Ace
“Hey,” I greet Regina and Will as I enter the kitchen. His hair is still wet from a shower, but his eyes are wide with fresh fear.
He looks like a different kid than the one I’d slowly been growing accustomed to. Hell, he looks like the one that showed up on our doorstep, cradling his arm to his chest like an injured animal.
Q’s missing. And the only witness we have is the scared little boy in front of me.
Regina sets a warm glass of milk in front of him before acknowledging me. “Hey.”
“How are things down here?”
“About as good as can be expected.” Her fear is simmering just below the surface. I can see it. I can feel it. I can almost smell it. She’s just as terrified as the rest of us.
“Any luck upstairs?” G asks, trying to keep her tone even. It’s funny. She might be Regina to everyone else, but she’ll always be G or Gigi to me.
I shake my head. “Nope. Hey, Will, I was wondering if I could ask you a few more questions?”
“I don’t know anything. I swear!” he bursts out, his lower lip quivering.
“I know,” I answer carefully. “And that’s okay. But sometimes we know something, and we don’t even know that we know it. Crazy, huh?”
His little eyebrows pinch in the center as he stares at his glass of milk. “Then how
do we find out if we do?”
“We talk about it. Even when it’s hard,” I tell him before inching closer to him. The chair next to him scrapes against the hardwood floor as I pull it out and sit down.
The defeat in this kid breaks my heart as he drags his finger up and down the outside of the glass like a nervous tic while staring blankly at the white milk it holds.
“I don’t know what to talk about,” he whispers.
“Maybe you can just tell me about how long it felt like you were driving when you were blindfolded.”
“You mean when I was with him?”
“Yeah. When he brought you here from the apartment,” I clarify.
“I dunno. A while?”
Well, that’s useless.
I try again. “Okay…what about your room? What did it look like?”
“My room at home?”
“No. The one at Sei’s place.”
“Oh. It was nothing special. Just a bed and a brown thing to hold clothes.”
“A brown dresser?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Okay…were there any paintings? Anything unique about the room?”
“Not really. I found a baseball bat under the bed, but he took it out of the room.”
“Keep going.” Regina encourages him. “You’re doing great.”
With his head in his hands, he closes his eyes. “Umm…the kitchen was small. There wasn’t a lot of food in the cupboards. It looked like no one had lived there for a long time. There was some broken glass next to the fridge, but Sei never cleaned it up or anything.”
“What about outside? Was there a window or anything?” I press, trying to hide my disappointment. I have no freaking clue where she is. All I’ve learned so far is that Sei doesn’t mind living in abandoned apartments and doesn’t like to clean or hang up paintings.
Will shrugs. “Yeah. There was one in my room and another one in the main area where Sei would sleep.”
“So, Sei would sleep in the family room?”
“Yeah,” he answers.
I look at Regina. “So, it’s a one-bedroom apartment.”
“Sounds like it.” Her eyes glimmer with hope as she stands on the opposite side of the island and leans on her elbows.
“Okay.” I take a deep breath and turn back to Will. “Did you usually walk up the stairs? Or take an elevator?”
“Stairs. They smelled funny,” he adds as his nose wrinkles in disgust.
I laugh. “That makes sense. Were you blindfolded in the stairwell, or would he take it off by then?”
“He’d take it off.”
“Okay.” Grasping at straws, I try another question. “What was outside? Do you remember anything?”
“There was a fence around the parking lot. You know, the ones made out of chains or whatever.”
“A chain-link fence,” Gigi answers for him. “Okay. That’s good. What else?”
“I dunno? There was this homeless guy that always slept next to this dumpster.”
I jerk back. “A homeless guy?”
“Yeah.”
“What did he look like?”
“I dunno? Homeless? I only got close to him once, and I was blindfolded so I couldn’t see. But he kept cursing at Sei, telling him to leave me alone. Sei threatened to kill him if he didn’t shut up, though. He kind of talked funny. But every time I’d look out the window, he was always next to the dumpster.”
My breathing is erratic as I start to piece all the information together before realizing the truth. “I think I know where Sei’s been hiding.”
The sound of my bare feet slapping against the hardwood floor muffles out Gigi’s voice, but I don’t stop and ask her to repeat herself.
There’s no time for that.
“King!” I yell. “King!” The hallway feels never-ending as I race toward the security room where the guys are still gathered.
King grabs me and pulls me into his chest. “What is it?”
“I think I know where she is.”
“Where?”
“My old apartment.”
Confused, he tilts his head to the side. “What?”
“I think Sei’s been hiding in my old apartment,” I repeat. The pitch of my voice rises higher and higher as the truth practically blinds me.
“What? Why?”
“Because it’s the perfect place to hide. He knows it’s abandoned. He knows we would never look for him there. And he knows that it’s in a shitty enough part of town that he can get away with dragging kids to and from the place without anyone batting an eye. Except for Eddie.”
“Eddie?”
“The homeless guy. He always looked out for me. He was my friend. Will said there was a homeless guy outside of the apartment complex who would talk shit to Sei every time he saw him. That has to be Eddie, which means they have to be hiding there.”
His expression remains indifferent, but I can see the wheels turning inside Kingston’s head before he turns to Lou. “Tell Diece to get his ass back here.”
“Sure thing, Boss.”
Then Kingston presses a kiss to my forehead. “Good work, Wild Card.”
“Are you gonna save her?”
“Yeah. We’re gonna save her.”
“Good.”
33
Q
Stomach rolling, I peel one eyelid open while my consciousness fights to slip back into oblivion.
Where am I?
Every muscle in my body feels like it’s been injected with thick, slurry concrete. My brain feels like it has a heartbeat. And my mouth tastes like ass and feels like sandpaper.
Upper lip curling in disgust, I attempt to roll onto my side and search for water, but the cold bite of metal claws at my wrist.
What the hell?
I force my eyelids to stay open and inspect the handcuff that’s attached to the bed frame. My other hand is attached to the opposite side, spreading me into a T. Both keep me in place while the room continues to spin. I’m trapped. Again.
“Morning, Peach,” a dark yet almost giddy voice greets me.
The flicker from his lighter makes his face glow as he lights up another cigarette.
My blood runs cold, then the panic sets in. Arching my back, I wrench my arm away from the metal headboard, but my only evidence of victory is a consolation prize in the form of raw skin circling my wrists. I tug at the restraints again as my desperation envelops me.
I gotta get out of here.
I can’t be here again.
Please, don’t make me go through this again.
“Shhh,” Sei coos, enjoying his front-row seat as I struggle with my restraints. “Haven’t we done this already, Peach?”
The rattling from the cuffs against the metal headboard ceases. Then what’s left of my newfound courage sparks, and I finally look him in the eye. The star of my nightmares. My stalker. My abuser. My captor.
There are bags under his eyes, and his hair is longer. Stringier. He looks even more terrible and rundown than he did before.
“Welcome home.” His arms are raised from his sides as he showcases the tiny, rundown apartment, then takes another puff from his cigarette. He’s always sucking on those. If only the toxins would kill him quicker. He exhales, and the smoke swirls through the dimly lit room. My nose wrinkles at the familiar scent before my stomach rolls again.
No wonder I feel like I’m going to puke.
“Where are we?” I croak. My throat feels like it’s been shredded by razor blades, making me wince as the words slip past my lips. I’d give anything for some water. But I know he won’t give me any. Not unless I do something for him first.
That same maniacal laugh greets me as he reads me like a book. “Thirsty?”
I glare back at him but don’t miss the way he doesn’t answer my question. I’m not surprised.
“Come on, my sweet Peach. You love this game, remember?”
My lips pull into a thin line while I shove down the fear that overwhelms me. Because he f
eeds off that fear. He savors it like a fine wine and loves to watch it ferment over time until there’s nothing left of the original fruit. Which is exactly what he’s done with me in the past. And what he’s trying to accomplish all over again.
“Baby….” His voice trails off as he inches closer to me before running his fingertips along the side of my cheek. “You know the rules. Give me what I want, then I’ll give you what you want.”
He’s right. We’ve done this before, and I didn’t come out the victor the first time. So how the hell am I gonna survive a second round?
“How did you find me?” I ask while silently praying he’ll take the bait and let me change the subject. The blood is slowly draining from my arms, making them tingle in protest.
“You thought I wouldn’t recognize you? You’ve been traipsing around my streets in your little shorts and your flimsy tank tops. You’ve been in my bars, my grocery stores. Yet you weren’t sleeping in my buildings, which meant you were trying to lure me out. Isn’t that right, Peach?”
His eyes dance with amusement before he sits next to me on the edge of the dingy mattress.
At least it doesn’t reek of urine.
“You know, if your bear hadn’t intervened at the bar, I probably wouldn’t have noticed you. I was trying to lay low. But I guess luck was on my side, wasn’t it?” He blows out another plume of smoke, making me cough as it taints the air around us.
“I almost took you back there,” he continues. “To the basement. For old time’s sake.” My eyes widen with fear. “But first, I want to know if you popped that little cherry between your thighs. The one I was ordered to let you keep.” His voice is calm, collected, but there’s a slight flare to his nostrils and a dark glint in his eyes. The beast inside of him is begging to come out and play. To use me as his toy.
“Answer me, Peach,” he growls.
My panic rises, but I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure I could find my voice even if I tried.
Cocking his head to the side, his gray-tinted tongue darts out between his lips before he runs it along his yellow teeth.
