Holden said that the night I left home. Whether he takes it or not, I feel better knowing it’s there if he wants because Fox reversed what he did.
“Do you want to play football still?”
He mulls it over, taking a huge bite from his burger. “I think losing it is what made me realize I don’t love the game as much as I thought I did. I’ve found other stuff I like. Community college really isn’t that bad.”
The corners of my mouth quirk up. I’m relieved to hear Holden found some peace after a year of moping over this. I wonder how much the girl he brought to Thea’s opening day at the bakery had to do with this new leaf he’s turned over.
“What about you?” he asks. “Will you go to Northwestern?”
“No.” I don’t even have to think about it. “I want to know—” Myself “—what the world’s got to offer before I dive into college. If I do at all.”
“That’s good. There’s no reason you have to decide now. Take a year, two. However long you need.”
“I want to go to California.”
“Yeah?” He grins. “Yeah, I can totally see that for you. When?”
“Soon.” The longing in my voice is clear and I know he hears it when his expression turns soft.
We drift into lighter topics and I get to enjoy hanging out with my brother for the first time in so long. By the time we’re finished with our burgers my stomach hurts from laughing so much. I feel lighter. We make plans to grab lunch again.
“Don’t even think about starting your road trip without saying bye.”
“I won’t, promise. See you later.” I wave after I steal Holden’s last fry.
“Hey!”
Laughter fills my voice. “Should’ve been faster then, dude! Bye.”
He waves me off as I head out. A smile lingers as I pull out my phone and find Fox checked in on my hang out with my brother.
Fox: Having a good time?
Maisy: Yeah. On my way home now.
Fox: Home. I like the sound of that. Come back fast so I can show you how much.
Maisy: Are you in the garage? Maybe I’ll spread out on the hood of the Charger for you again.
I’m too busy grinning at the next flirtatious text I’m writing to pay much attention to a guy who leans out of an alleyway when I pass. Hands grab me from behind a beat later and my scream is cut off by his big hand covering my mouth. Panic surges and I try to break free without dropping my phone.
Some part of my brain knows my phone is important, I can’t lose it if I’m taken to a second location.
Don’t drop it. Don’t let go.
My hand hurts from how tightly I grip it. All those times Dad worried about a kidnapping roll through my head. I thought he was paranoid, but I was so wrong.
Pain stings my arm and then my limbs stop obeying, feeling like lead weights. My eyelids weigh a million pounds. Oh shit, I can’t! The harder I breathe, the more difficult it becomes to fight my attacker off.
Everything goes dark. I’m trapped in my mind screaming.
When I crack my eyes open they feel dry. I blink a few times, trying to get my sluggish brain to work through the fog. It’s like I took too much of the cold medicine that always makes me groggy. I scrunch my face up and move, only to find my wrists are restrained by zip ties.
The fuck—?
“Jesus, about time.” Disoriented, my head snaps up at the menacing, slightly accented voice coming from the shadows in the corner. “I only gave you half a dose of sedative.”
“Where am I?” My tongue feels stuck to the roof of my mouth.
As soon as I ask, my stomach sinks. On the wall of the box-shaped room in large black stenciled letters is a familiar logo—SynCom. The shell company Russian thugs are using to pull the strings running Nexus Lab.
They brought me to the abandoned warehouse? Shit. I’m in serious trouble. Fox and I never had time to find a way into this place before Ethan interrupted us.
Blinking rapidly, I remember. I was on my way back to Fox after lunch with Holden. Someone grabbed me. My arm twinges with the phantom pain from where the needle stabbed into my skin. I don’t feel my phone on me, unsure if I won the fight not to drop it or if this thug took it from me when he kidnapped me.
“You’re nowhere special, little girl,” my babysitter informs me.
He’s a rough looking guy with yellow teeth and a barrel chest. Older than me by at least fifteen years, but not as old as my parents. What’s worse, I recognize him. I thought he was Mayor Taylor’s bodyguard when I ran into Mom in town. Sweat beads his brow and his hair is buzzed short. He stalks closer from across the room and nudges his heavy boot against the rung of the metal chair I’m tied to.
Against my instinct to keep him in my line of sight, I tear my gaze from him and take in the room we’re in. It’s dusty from disuse. There’s a single door in the corner and a high window that’s clouded over with grime letting in a minimal amount of light. The ceiling is low, like this is an office framed out of the larger warehouse.
“Why did you take me?” Some of the aftereffects of whatever he drugged me with lingers, clinging to my head like a stubborn cobweb. “And what the fuck did you give me?”
He barks out a laugh and my nose wrinkles at his sour cigarette-tinged breath wafting down on me. “A benzo. Midazolam. You must be a lightweight, princess, that shit’s mild as fuck.”
I grit my teeth and lean back when he bends to my level. He clamps a hand on the back of my neck and it feels nothing like it does when Fox holds me like that. A protest leaves me as he keeps me still while he lifts one of my eyelids, squinting at me.
“Probably still have some of it in your system. Be good and I’ll give you some water in a bit. Can’t have the pretty princess suffering.”
I glance around the room. “And where will I pee? I don’t see a bathroom.”
He snorts and motions to the corner. “Right there.” His eyes gleam and my stomach turns. “I like to watch.”
The breath I draw in through my nose to calm myself is shaky. I squirm, feeling the bite of the plastic zip ties around my wrists and the scrape of rough rope rubbing my thighs raw. How the hell am I getting out of this?
“Why am I here?” I repeat, unsure if I want the answer.
The thug laughs again, like this is a game. “You’re bait to catch your little boyfriend. One of our guys is waiting to catch him when he comes looking for you at that burger joint.”
He turns away to grab another folding chair I didn’t see before. There’s a gun tucked in the back of his jeans. Raking my gaze over him while he’s distracted, my heart sinks. I can’t tell if he has my phone on him or not. Coming back, he pops the chair open in front of me and kicks back in it as if we’re just chilling.
“Besides,” he adds after stretching and folding his hands behind his head. “Two birds with one stone and all that.” The amusement drops away, stripped back to the cruel nature beneath. “We’ll use you to teach your mom a lesson about what happens when orders aren’t followed.”
My pulse races and my palms tingle with the horrible dread pouring over me. I thought my parents would let me go easily, and maybe they would have if I didn’t get involved with plucking apart the threads of their empire, but I didn’t stay away. I took charge with Fox, forcing Dad to resign, getting federal investigators to take a closer look.
Stalenko Corp has built up their operation over the last decade and all it took was Fox and I to make it wobble.
They wouldn’t have touched me if they didn’t think we were a threat.
Licking my lips, I push to see if he’ll keep talking. “What sort of lesson?”
“Ransom. See?”
He digs out his phone and I tense when he pulls mine from his pocket, too. He shoves it away and I pray it’s still turned on. Find me, Fox.
The photo I’m shown makes bile rise in my throat. I’m tied to the same chair as now, unconscious, my head pulled back by this guy while he takes a goddamn selfie angle photo.
It’s sent to Mom’s number. The read receipts are on. The message is marked as seen. No response.
Mom knows I’m here, in danger, but she hasn’t done anything. The last remaining shred of hope she ever cared for me turns to dust. At whatever expression breaks past my mask of indifference, my kidnapper chuckles as if we’re playing a game.
“Your mom was told to bring you to heel when you and your little boyfriend started poking around. Our security detail already knew about him, but we saw you on the surveillance feed sneaking around here. Once we realized who you were, we connected you back to your parents.” He clicks his tongue in disapproval. “Naughty princess.”
“What happens if my mom doesn’t agree to pay the ransom?”
The ugly grin he gives me makes me wish I hadn’t asked.
“Then,” he says, taking a fistful of my hair and wrenching my head back.
I cry out, squeezing my eyes tight. Waiting until they open, his grin widens at the moisture clinging to my lashes. I press my lips together, refusing to let the thousands of protests past my lips like he wants when he forcefully fondles my breast through my tank top. I will not give him more power over me by crying and begging for this to stop, no matter how bad I want him off me. He watches the determination in my gaze and moves his rough touch lower, down my side, plucking teasingly at the waistband of my cutoffs. Disgust bubbles like acid in my stomach at the hunger in his gaze.
“Then you’re all mine,” he promises.
Thirty-Seven
Fox
The last text response she sends cuts off in a string of unintelligible letters and autocorrected phrases that make no goddamn sense. One minute she’s flirting and painting a sexy as fuck picture, the next it’s like a switch is flipped. It immediately twists my stomach with a bad feeling that I confirm as soon as I hack into the CCTV feed for where she’d been.
The street in front of the beach-themed burger place where she met Holden is empty, no Maisy in sight. The Charger is still parked. There’s no way she disappeared. She was just texting me five minutes ago.
I skim back through the recording a few minutes and my blood runs cold. Maisy has her head bent over her phone, unaware of the big burly guy trailing her. He’s good, a professional that knows to keep back far enough that no one would suspect anything. Unless you’ve learned to see this shit like I have.
He goes for her and my heart jumps into my throat as my knuckles turn white from how tightly my fists ball. I gave her my gun to protect herself, but it’s probably stashed in the glove compartment of the car. She gives him hell, kicking out, but his fist rams something in her arm and the fight seeps out of her as he uses his thick muscled arms to trap her against his chest until her body slumps. He pockets her phone and adjusts to distribute her weight.
“Fuck!”
Horror grips me by the throat as I watch the man drag Maisy to a blacked out SUV parked nearby. This can’t be fucking happening. We’ve avoided them so many times and the minute I drop my guard, she’s taken right off the street.
There’s no time to waste. Jumping up, I rush around the apartment, grabbing anything I can that will help. I have to improvise and work with what I have on hand because nothing will keep me from getting her back and keeping her safe.
I send out a prayer to whatever might be listening as I throw my leg over the motorcycle. The gravel kicks up behind me as I tear out onto the road with my phone attached to the mount and a map tracing the location of her phone.
Hold on, Maisy. I’m coming.
Two blacked out SUVs are parked at Stalenko Corp’s shell company warehouse where Maisy and I met Ethan Hannigan. I don’t want to tip them off, so I cut the engine and walk the bike along the tree line. I keep low once I find a spot to leave it, calling on everything I’ve learned from Wren, Colton, and the rest of the Crows in the last few years. My gaze constantly sweeps for any threat. I freeze and crouch low behind a concrete loading slab at one side of the warehouse as a guy comes out of a nearby door, phone pressed to his ear as he slips sunglasses on.
“We’ll make sure she understands what’s at stake. Either she pays the ransom, or we kill the girl. Yeah. Yeah. Got it.”
My heart drums a furious beat in my chest. It takes everything in me to stay hidden as the guy gets in one of the SUVs and pulls out. Hopefully that means they’ve left Maisy with a light detail inside. I will raze this fucking place to the ground before I let them harm her.
It takes more time than I’d like to case the perimeter to check for where the surveillance cameras are, taking their feeds out one by one with a methodical focus. When I make it to a door at the back, I use a knife from my kitchen to pick the lock.
A set of metal stairs leads up to a catwalk. I take them to get a better vantage to find where they’re keeping Maisy. It’s bigger inside than we first thought, but we barely had time before. From the catwalk that wraps around the perimeter and cuts across the middle, I can see they have several uses for this place to keep an eye on their operation under everyone’s noses.
On the lower level, a man smoking a cigarette crosses to a door where the glow of a monitor spills out from the room. I start there, creeping down silently. Pausing outside the door, I listen.
“Is something up with the feed? What’s all over the screen?”
“Dunno. They’re all like that. Bird shit?”
Guess again. I sprayed WD-40 on the lenses. Their cameras will be toast and it keeps the feed blurry. Keeping low, I move into the room. A bank of computers shows the exterior security feed and a sports game on mute. Two guys are at the desk, the one with the cigarette leaning over the one seated.
This would be easier if I didn’t have to take them out at the same time before they alert anyone else. While they’re occupied, I peer around and find a brick propping the door open. Perfect, distraction and a weapon. I heft it and adjust my stance. Taking aim, I fling the brick at the guy with the cigarette and it catches him in the back of the neck.
“What the—”
Before either of them process the attack, I’m moving in. I smash the first guy’s head to the desk to finish what the brick started and catch the seated guy around the neck in a stranglehold. The cigarette drops from the other guy’s lips as his eyes roll back. He crumples to the floor while I clap my hand over the guy in the chair’s mouth, tightening my arm until he goes slack.
Wasting no time, I drag their unconscious bodies to the floor and search them. I take their cell phones and smash them with the brick. On the cigarette guy, I find plastic ties in his pocket and use them to secure their wrists behind their backs, looping them both together. When I step back, I rake a hand through my hair and move to the bank of monitors. Nothing seems out of order. I tap a keyboard shortcut sequence Colt showed me and the monitors cut out, then reboot with blue screens of scrolling computer code.
My insides burn with the need to get to Maisy, but she wasn’t on the screens before I cut them. I slip out of the room and head down a dimly lit hall. I freeze, pulse jumping when a grizzly looking guy with a beard exits a room ahead. He doesn’t see me, turning away to head further into the hall. His head is bent like he’s busy texting.
As quiet as I can be, I rush him from behind and use the momentum to shove him against a doorframe of an open door. At the same time, I sink a fist into his side. The man groans, doubling over where I hit him, instinctively swiping in defense. He lands a hit, catching me in the side with an elbow, throwing my footing off.
While he’s still reeling, I grab the back of his shirt and drive my knee into his gut. He grunts, fingers scrabbling. One more blow to the head takes him down. Panting more from adrenaline than exertion, I catch him and lower him to the floor.
The hall has nothing useful, but inside the open door there’s a room with pipes running up the exterior wall. I drag the guy over to them and pull his hands behind his back before I secure him to the pipes with the zip ties.
My thirst for destruction isn’t over
. It won’t be until I find Maisy and get her out of here. At the end of the hall, I find I’m at the other end of the warehouse. There’s another room built inside the space that looks like an office.
When I silently crack the door, I find Maisy inside and burning hot fury rockets through me. The guy who attacked her on the street is all over her. She’s tied to a metal chair with rope around her legs. His hands lift her tank top while she juts her chin, face turned away.
My grip turns deadly on the door handle. It’s only because he’s within range to hurt Maisy that I don’t charge him like my instincts scream at me to do. If I had my gun, I’d empty every single bullet into him. He’s a dead man.
“Just want to look at what I get to play with later,” he says gleefully, squeezing himself through his jeans. “Gonna bite those perky little tits until you scream, sweet thing.”
She grits her teeth and takes measured breaths through her nose, ignoring his unwanted touches. Searing fire races through my veins. I want to rip this fucking asshole’s head off with my bare hands for touching her.
Look at me. Look here, baby. I’ll make it all better. Just hold on one more minute.
Staying silent, I creep inside. The thug is too busy molesting Maisy to notice me winding a length of electrical wire from my garage around my hands. She notices, though. Tears glisten in her eyes and spill down her cheeks.
It’ll be okay, I mouth to her.
My brave girl gives me a fierce look and nods. The guy all over her chuckles and murmurs to her, assuming she’s warming up to him exposing her.
“Get the fuck off her,” I growl as I loop the wire around his neck and pull hard.
A strangled noise of shock catches in his throat as his spine snaps straight. His fingers scrabble at the wire pressed tight to his neck, but I’m taller and I got the jump on him. I keep my elbows tucked tight as I drag him away from Maisy. His legs kick out and flail.
Savage Wilder: Dark New Adult High School Bully Romance (Sinners and Saints Book 4) Page 32
