Complete Fixed: The Complete Fixed Series: Books 1-5

by Laurelin Paige

  As slow as the ride up had been, once we landed, it seemed like everything moved in double time. The van took us to the address Judith Cleary had given us. Jordan didn’t let us use the driveway, but rather had us park in a nearby cluster of trees, hidden from the main road. His plan was that we’d approach the house through the woods, reducing any chance of being seen before we made it to the house.

  “You should stay—” he began when we started to pile out of the van.

  I cut him off. “Like hell I’m staying behind.”

  For the first time all morning, Jordan seemed to hesitate. “Fine, but you’re not going in the house until we’ve cleared it. You’ll hang back, understood?”

  Again, I had to wrestle with my ego. I wasn’t used to taking orders. I reminded myself what could happen if this went down wrong, what was on the line.

  “I’ll hang back,” I agreed, reluctantly. I wanted mine to be the first face my wife saw when this nightmare was over, but that was far less important than being able to see her face at all.

  It wasn’t too far of a trek through the woods to get to the cabin, though it was one that would have been better made in outdoor wear. I still had on yesterday’s suit and dress shoes, and after sliding on loose dirt for the third time, I began to understand why Jordan thought I might have been better off in the van.

  Finally we were outside the cabin, a dilapidated dwelling that looked like it’s best days had been half a century in the past. David’s car was parked outside, the doors left unlocked. I opened the door and looked inside, searching for some sign that Alayna was all right.

  All I found were her shoes on the floor of the passenger side, a favorite pair of Jimmy Choos that she would never part with voluntarily. It made my stomach drop to see them abandoned like this, and I had to sit down inside the car to catch my breath.

  Jordan and the team went ahead of me, and when I looked up again, they’d surrounded the cabin. On his signal, three of them burst through the front door, their guns aimed and ready.

  I watched them from the car, holding onto Alayna’s shoes, praying like I’d never prayed in my life. Please, let her be safe. Please, God, bring her back to me.

  The men had been inside for only a couple of minutes when movement caught my eye in the woods on the other side of the car, away from the cabin. I scanned the trees, my heart beating in my ears, looking for the source.

  Then there he was—David Lindt, coming toward the car, bent over as though hoping to not be seen.

  But I’d seen him.

  And a second later, he saw me.

  He took off running back to where he’d come from, but I was right behind him, sprinting at top speed. He might have had the lead and been wearing the right shoes, but I had the adrenaline and the will. I had the fury. There was nothing that was going to stop me from reaching him.

  I caught up with him before he’d disappeared into the woods, tackling him to the ground with a heavy grunt. A handgun went flying across the ground, dislodged from where it had been tucked in his belt. He had a fucking gun? The sight of it, knowing he had likely threatened my wife with it, gave me the extra boost of energy I needed to wrestle the larger man’s wrists behind his back.

  “If you touched her,” I threatened, crushing my knee forcefully into his tailbone and using my upper body to smash his head into the ground, “If you laid even a finger on her, I will break every bone in your body right now with my bare hands. Don’t think I won’t do it, you stupid motherfucker. I’ll do it, and I’ll do it in whatever way hurts the most, I swear on my fucking life!”

  David’s response was muffled, apparently he was unable to speak clearly with his face in the dirt.

  “The house is empty!” Jordan announced from the front step.

  Empty?

  The house was empty.

  A volcano of rage burst from inside me. Vile hatred and venom spewed from my pores like lava. “Where is she!?” I screamed at the man held underneath me. “Where is she? Tell me now if you want to live another second! Tell me where my wife is!”

  “I don’t know!” he squealed as he squirmed underneath me. “I was in the woods looking for her!”

  He was fucking lying. There was no way he couldn’t know, and he would tell me if I had to torture it out of him.

  Jordan must have spotted me right away, because all of a sudden he was pulling me off David while a few of his men took over handling our captive. They got him up to his feet, and immediately began asking him all the questions I was planning to ask him, just not using quite the level of violence I wanted to see.

  “There’s a broken window and possible signs of a struggle,” Jordan told me, ever composed. “Some of the pieces of glass seem to have blood on them.”

  David Lindt was a dead man.

  I rushed at him, throwing him against a tree, my hands at his throat. While Jordan once again tried to pull me off, I squeezed until David’s face went red. Kept squeezing until it started to go blue. I intended to keep on squeezing until…

  My phone rang. An unexpected sound here; I hadn’t had a signal when we landed.

  I considered ignoring it. I was in the process of murdering a man with my bare hands, after all, but then, what if…?

  I dropped my hold on David, stepped back as he desperately gasped for air, and pulled my phone out of my pocket. It was a number I didn’t recognize. I pushed Accept.

  “Hudson, Hudson, is that you?” The call was faint and full of static, but it was Alayna’s voice. My darling, my precious.

  “Alayna! Where are you?” I walked around, trying to get better reception. I was missing some of her words.

  “Hudson, can you hear me?” she asked, apparently having as much trouble with the call as I was.

  “Don’t hang up! I’m here. I’m at the cabin. Tell me where to find you!”

  I didn’t seem to be getting through. “Hudson, I love you,” she said, as if I hadn’t said anything. “I’ve always loved you. Kiss the babies for me. Tell them...tell them I loved them...”

  “Alayna?” She didn’t respond. “Alayna, precious, talk to me! Alayna!”

  The call dropped. I’d lost her.

  I’d lost her and, with her, my whole world was lost too.

  21

  Alayna

  I was in pain. So much pain. Every breath I took was sharp, stabbing, blinding pain.

  Dizzily, I staggered through the wilderness, looking for bars on the phone, looking for a place where my repeated call to Hudson's cell would go through.

  And now I had finally gotten to him, finally heard his voice and told him the words I had to leave him with. I'd held out for this, fought against loss of consciousness so he would know before I went.

  "Let them know I loved them.”

  For the second time, I woke up not knowing where I was.

  This room was much brighter than the last one, everything white and sterile. There was a steady bleep-bleep-bleep sound that matched the blip on the heart monitor next to me. Oxygen flowed through a tube inserted at my nose, and another tube connected my wrists to an IV drip.

  I turned my head to look at the other side of me, and there was Hudson in a chair pulled up right next to the bed that I lay in, so close he'd fallen asleep leaning over on the mattress next to me.

  The bleep-bleep sped up, an audible pronouncement of my exhilaration at seeing him again, seeing his face, covered with scruff as though he hadn't shaved in a couple of days, his features worn and tired even as he dozed.

  I reached out to touch his prickly cheek with my fingertips, a movement that hurt more than it should have, and with my touch he jolted awake.

  His face broke into the most glorious smile I'd ever seen him give.

  "There you are," he said.

  Here I was. And I was surprised as anyone about it.

  "I thought I was dying," I told him sincerely.

  He chuckled. "Not dying," he assured me. "You have a concussion, a laceration on your thigh which has alrea
dy been stitched up, a dislocated shoulder, which has been set back into place, cuts on both your hands and feet, and a cracked rib on your right side."

  “Oh.” It wasn’t a short list, but definitely none of it equated to death. “A cracked rib, huh? So that's why it hurts so much to breathe."

  His brow creased in concern, and he stroked my arm. "I'll have them give you more pain medicine."

  A wave of panic surged through me, and even though it was agony to do so, I grabbed on to him. "Hudson, don't leave me."

  He took my hand in his and held it tight. "It’s okay. I'm here. It's just a button we have to push." Still holding my hand, he used his other arm to stretch up to the panel attached to the side of the bed above me, and pushed the icon that said nurse.

  Yeah, I'd forgotten that's how you did things in hospitals.

  It felt like I might've forgotten a lot of things, actually, and now that he'd mentioned it, I realized my head was throbbing, a dull pain next to the one that seized my rib cage, but significant nonetheless. It was different than the headaches I’d had in the past, a haze that somehow also put pressure on the inside of my skull.

  For a few seconds, I tried to piece together the details from what I last remembered and what was happening now, but the effort was too great.

  "What happened?" I asked Hudson instead.

  "I was hoping you could tell me." He rubbed his thumb along my wrist soothingly. "David's been arrested. When we arrived at the log cabin, we found him, but not you. He insisted he didn’t know where you were, but then you called me. Do you remember that?"

  “I do.” I remembered the sweet, distant sound of his voice, and David’s cell phone pressed to my ear, how the connection of the call felt like a lighthouse in a bay of fog.

  Then I remembered before that, too. David. The cabin.

  "I'd convinced David to go to the store, thinking I could escape while he was gone," I told Hudson. "But I hadn't counted on him binding me up before he left. He used duct tape around my ankles and my wrists. I thought it was hopeless. I was sure I’d still be there when he got back and then I'd… then he'd…"

  The sickening words he'd said to me crept into my consciousness, washing me with recollected terror.

  I shivered and shook my head. That wasn't important now. I'd escaped.

  "Then I remembered this thing that Gwen told me about yesterday," I continued. "This trick of getting out of duct tape that she'd seen at her sex club party last weekend."

  Hudson, who had listened patiently, interjected for the first time. "Sex club party?"

  I shot him a warning look. "Don't get any ideas."

  "I have absolutely zero interest," he promised. "Our sex life is adventurous enough."

  Even under the worst of circumstances, the man knew how to make me blush.

  "Anyway. The struggle was getting out of the room. David locked me in this loft at the top of the cabin. The door was not budging, no matter how many times I tried to slam my bodyweight against it. And all that was in the room was a cot and built-in desk and bookshelves. There was a stool too—that’s important. I rummaged through the drawers trying to find something to maybe pick the lock—not that I know how to pick a lock—and couldn’t find anything, but I did find he'd left his cell phone. It was locked so he’d probably thought I couldn’t get into it. But I figured out the password easily enough. Zero one zero two—my birthday. Turned out it didn’t matter if I had the password, because the phone wasn’t doing anything from that room. There was absolutely no reception. I tried over and over to make a call, and it wouldn't connect."

  Hudson continued to stroke my wrist, giving me all his attention, careful not to let on how upsetting my tale was to him, which was impressive. While he could be a very patient man, he wasn’t always patient where I was concerned.

  “That left the window. It was just glass in a frame, not the kind that opens, and it was high on the wall, but I had to figure a way to get out of it.”

  "So you used the stool to break it," he guessed.

  "I gave it away,” I feigned pouting. “Yes. I had to stand on the desk to get the right height, and throw the stool at the glass. It took a couple of tries but it finally hit in the right spot. I brushed out the glass pieces as best I could, then I hoisted myself up.” I looked down at the bandages wrapping my palms. “That’s what cut up my hands.

  “I cut my leg then too, going through the window," I remembered suddenly. "But the biggest problem was the loft was so far off the ground that the fall was more than two stories. I hesitated. It was quite a fall, but then I went for it. I landed on my side and my whole right side blew up with pain. My shoulder, my side, my leg, all of it was throbbing agony. I swear, I almost passed out right then."

  "But you didn't," Hudson said, this part of my story evident.

  "No, I didn’t.” That was something I should be proud of, I realized. “I forced myself to get up and get away from the house. I knew we were deep enough in the woods that I wasn't going to be able to make it to town, especially in this condition, and I didn’t want to be near the roads in case David was the one who drove by and found me, but I thought if I could just get up the mountain enough to get reception on the phone, then I'd be able to call you, and you could come find me."

  I’d been in such a daze, stopping frequently to take breaks and try the phone. The pain coursing through my body had been blinding. My only focus had been climbing upward, guessing at the direction by the feel of the incline as I stumbled along. It had felt like a decade before I’d finally heard the phone ringing at my ear followed by Hudson’s voice.

  “I wasn’t sure if I really spoke to you or if it was some sort of dying mirage,” I admitted. “Though, seeing as how I wasn’t actually dying…”

  “You talked to me,” he confirmed. “You called, and when I heard you…”

  He choked up, a reaction I’d never seen from him before. His eyes had gotten teary on our wedding day and at the birth of each of the babies, but he’d never lost the ability to speak, and seeing him do so now made my heart squeeze and brought tears to my eyes.

  He cleared his throat, which only helped mildly. “Then when you were saying your goodbyes...I can’t tell you what that did to me, precious. I was destroyed.”

  “I know,” I said in a strangled voice. “Me too.”

  We sat for a few seconds, staring at each other, saying nothing. Processing what didn’t happen, but came so close to being a possibility.

  I was the one who finally broke the silence. “But you did find me. You traced the call?”

  He nodded. “Jordan called a medic up to meet us before we even knew where you were. Then the team separated to search the area the trace said you’d be in. You’d managed to get almost a mile away from the cabin, even barefoot and in misery. You were passed out and ragged, but very much alive, thank God. It was a miracle you made it as long as you did before your body succumbed to shock. The medic put your shoulder back in place right there and gave you some morphine, and then we flew you back here to the city.”

  “I sort of remember waking up for part of that,” I said, recalling the strange man who’d massaged my biceps and deltoids, trying to get them to relax so that my shoulder would pop in. I hadn’t been aware enough to realize what he’d been doing, but now that I was, it wasn’t at all like I’d seen doctors fix dislocated shoulders on TV.

  “You were in and out a lot until the morphine kicked in. You were out cold after that. I’m sure you needed it.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  The nurse arrived then to check my vitals and give me more meds. When he left, Hudson told me how he’d discovered it was David who had taken me, the long night he’d had with Celia, and how she’d been helpful in putting the pieces together. He also told me about Judith Cleary and her involvement.

  “I wish I’d been there when you told her off,” I grinned.

  He returned the smile. “I thought you’d appreciate that.”

  The mo
rphine was kicking in, making me feel somber and sleepy. I was happy and grateful to have my husband by my side, but there was still a cloud lingering over me. I’d thought of David as a friend. How could he have done what he’d done to me? How could I not have seen it coming sooner? How would I ever be able to trust people after this? Would I ever feel truly safe?

  “You really got him, right?” I asked. “The police arrested him?”

  “Well, I almost choked him to death first, but yes. It was only your phone call that saved him from me. And after your call, when I thought you were...let’s just say Jordan managed to prevent me from being arrested as well.”

  That was another scene I would have liked to have witnessed.

  Still, I wasn’t completely reassured. “He won’t make bail or anything?”

  “No bail. I have friends in the court who promised to see to that.”

  It was what I’d needed to hear, yet the weight of everything still lingered. A tear spilled down my cheek. “I thought I’d never see you again,” I sniffed, sure I could turn this into a real sobfest if I didn’t contain myself.

  “Hey, hey.” Hudson climbed into the bed next to me and gingerly put his arm around me. “You’ll always see me again. You can’t get rid of me. I stick, remember?”

  I chuckled and immediately regretted it. Though it halted my tears, the laughing sent my side into spasming pain.

  When I’d recovered, I said, “I’m gone for one day, and you’re already stealing my lines.”

  “It was a day too long.” He kissed the top of my head. Quieter, he added, “Never leave me again. Promise.”

  I was getting tired. I rested my head on his chest and closed my eyes. “I’m not going anywhere,” I said, and drifted off to sleep.

  22

  Hudson

  They kept Alayna at the hospital overnight for observation, and the next day when they were ready to release her, I requested they keep her for one more night—just to be sure.