by Lisa Childs
“Lars!” Nikki dropped to her knees next to him. As she leaned over him, tears dropped from her eyes onto his face. “Are you all right? I thought you were dead!”
He shook his head, but it took effort. He could feel oblivion threatening as his beautiful fiancée’s face blurred before his eyes. He reached up a hand stained with his own blood and cupped her cheek. “I love you...”
“I love you,” she said, and the tears continued to flow from her face to his. Then she spoke to someone else, giving out the address. “We need an ambulance. Gunshot wound. Units are already en route?”
Lars’s lids grew heavy. But as he closed his eyes, she patted his cheek. “Stay with me, sweetheart,” she implored him. “Help is coming.”
He would be okay. He’d just lost a lot of blood. That was all. “I’m not worried about me. Dane...”
“The man has Dane,” Nikki said. “He called Emilia.”
Lars shook his head. “Dane can’t be alive...” It wasn’t possible. The one thing Dane had said before every one of their dangerous missions had been, They’ll never take me alive.
If they’d taken him, he hadn’t been alive.
* * *
He must have died. For everything was dark...
Dane could see nothing. Could feel...
Only the coldness, the hardness of concrete beneath his face. He moved his head, and pain radiated throughout it. He tried to lift his hand toward it, but they were bound behind his back.
Then he felt the rest of the pain shooting through his body. His shoulder throbbed, not from where Emilia had shot him. That wound was lower on his arm. He had a new gunshot wound.
Maybe two.
And so damn much pain.
He tried moving his legs. Like his wrists, his ankles were bound together, too. Whoever had grabbed him had made damn certain he couldn’t escape.
He’d never felt so helpless, not even when he’d been a kid.
Was this how Emilia had felt? For weeks she’d been held captive in a space that was probably very much like this—cold and dark. She’d been kept alive for those weeks, though. There was no reason for them to keep Dane alive. Maybe they didn’t even realize he’d survived. But then why tie him up? Why not just kill him at the agency?
Of course Lars had been there, too. But he was hurt. Or worse. Had he survived?
He cleared his throat, relieved to discover he had no gag in his mouth. He could speak. He could call out for help. But he called out, “Lars!”
No one answered him. That didn’t mean his friend wasn’t there, lying next to him in the darkness. He forced himself to move, rocking back and forth until he rolled to his side. The concrete ground against his wounded shoulder. And a groan of pain tore from his throat.
If Lars was there, that would have awakened him. If he could be awakened.
Maybe Dane’s makeshift tourniquet hadn’t stopped his bleeding. Maybe he’d bled out.
If Dane couldn’t stop his shoulder from bleeding, he might not make it, either. There was no bandage on it, nothing to stem the flow of blood down his arm to where it soaked into the concrete.
He cursed.
This was why he’d always vowed to never be taken alive. He’d figured death was less painful than torture. But a slow death might be even worse...
Oblivion began to threaten again. He must have lost consciousness at the agency because he had no idea how he’d wound up here. He was about to lose it again.
Then he heard the rattle of a lock, and the creak of a door. His death wasn’t going to be so slow after all. They must have returned to finish him off.
Chapter 25
The car alarm had drawn Nikki away. But Emilia hadn’t stopped talking to the man who’d cloned her phone, who’d tried to ruin her life. He would have, had he taken Blue. If he really had Dane, then he had shattered it, anyway.
“I don’t believe you have him,” she said. That could have been him in the parking lot, setting off the car alarm.
“You think Dane Sutton’s a superhero,” the guy grumbled. “He’s just a man.”
“He took out the four guys you hired to attack him a few nights ago,” she reminded him. “So you really expect me to believe they got him this time?” She glanced around at the shattered glass and blood spatters.
This scene was far worse than the one outside Dane’s apartment. More violence had occurred here. The guy must have hired many more men to do his dirty work this time.
He was quiet for a long moment.
And Emilia realized why. “You don’t know for certain. You haven’t seen him. You only have their word that they didn’t fail this time.”
“They have him.”
“Alive?” she asked as she glanced around at the destruction and the blood.
“They had orders to take him alive.”
What about Lars? What had happened to Lars? Then she saw for herself. Nikki helped him into the office, her arm wrapped around his waist as the big man leaned heavily on the petite woman.
She would have never believed Lars could find a woman stronger than him. But in Nikki Payne, he had.
“I won’t consider a switch,” she said. And that was true. So true. “Unless I hear his voice.”
Lars straightened up and glared at her through eyes that looked glazed with pain. She was relieved he was alive. But she didn’t want him interfering. So she waved her hand to keep him quiet.
“So if you want my son,” she said, “you better find out if your men were really able to take Dane alive. And...”
She paused and gestured at Nikki to check her computer.
Lars seemed impatient, but he held his silence.
The man waited for her, too. He hadn’t broken the connection. She’d kept him on the line for a long time.
Nikki looked at her computer and gave Emilia a thumbs-up signal.
“And you better not try to pass off a recording as his voice,” she said, “like you must have with those wedding vendors.”
Because so many of them had sworn it had been her voice leaving those messages. But since he’d cloned her phone, the man had had access to her outgoing voice mail message.
“I want to really talk to Dane,” she said. “I will ask him questions only he will be able to answer. So don’t try anything.”
Like she was trying. She wanted to buy Dane time, if he were actually alive. She wanted to buy time for Nikki to track him down.
She didn’t wait for the man to agree to her deal. As a kidnapper, he should understand that she needed proof of life. So with a trembling fingertip, she disconnected the call.
Tears burned her eyes, but she blinked them away. “What if he doesn’t call back?”
Then that would mean that Dane was dead.
That he was lost to her forever.
* * *
Nikki’s heart lurched along with her legs as Lars leaned more heavily on her. He was so big. She couldn’t hold him up any longer. She turned back and gestured at the paramedics who’d stood outside the shattered lobby door.
Lars had refused to let them treat him until he’d seen his sister, especially when Nikki had admitted she was on the phone with the man who’d tried to abduct Blue.
Who claimed he had Dane...
The paramedics rushed forward and helped Lars onto the gurney they’d rolled into the office. But he didn’t let go of Nikki. He clasped her hand tightly until she leaned closer to him.
“Don’t let her do it,” he pleaded. “Don’t let her switch Blue for Dane.”
“She won’t,” Nikki assured him. “She was just stalling him so I could track the call.” She glanced at her computer screen. “The call pinged off a tower downtown.” Which wasn’t going to pinpoint the abductor’s location alone.
&n
bsp; She needed to narrow it down. But she needed to be with her fiancée, too. “He’s lost a lot of blood,” she told the paramedics.
“We’ll get him to the hospital right away,” the young African American paramedic assured her.
She had probably met the man before. She and her brothers had been hurt so many times over the past couple of years. “I’ll ride with you,” she said. “He’s my fiancé.”
“No,” Lars protested. “You need to protect Emilia, to make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid.”
“I love you, too,” Emilia remarked. “Can you fix his disposition and his leg?” she asked the paramedics.
The young men stared at her in awe. Emilia was that beautiful.
Nikki had never realized how strong and smart the young woman was, as well. She had survived hell before, but she’d done that for her son. Now she was fighting for Dane.
Nikki had no doubt that she would never exchange Blue for Dane. But she would fight every bit as hard for him as she had to be with Blue again.
Lars clasped Emilia’s hand now. And Nikki could see that he was offering comfort now. “He’s not alive, Emilia. There’s no way they took Dane alive.”
Emilia’s breath escaped in a gasp, like her brother had struck her stomach. Hard.
“You—you saw him get shot?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I saw him shooting. He helped me before going after them, after all of them.”
Emilia shivered now. “He went after them alone?”
Lars nodded weakly. “There were too many, Em. There’s no way...”
Nikki gestured at the paramedics. “You need to take him.” Before it was too late for Lars—the way it sounded like it was too late for Dane. So Nikki started out after the stretcher with her husband-to-be.
Emilia caught her arm and pulled her up short of the shattered door. “You don’t need to go with him,” she said. “Lars will be fine.”
Nikki knew that. She knew her fiancé well. She knew how tough he was. She also knew that his friends were tough, too.
“You need to stay here and track down Dane,” Emilia implored her.
Even though Nikki’s heart ached for the young woman’s desperation, she shook her head. “You heard Lars...”
“I love my brother, but he’s a pessimist,” Emilia said. “He gave me up for dead. You were the one who convinced him to keep looking for me.”
“I knew you were alive, that you would fight to stay alive for your son,” she said. “Blue is too special...” Nikki loved her future nephew so much that she might actually consider having a child of her own—someday. But first she had to make sure she would have a husband.
“He is,” Emilia agreed. “And I would never consider an exchange.”
Lars had been an idiot to think that she would. Nikki knew her better than that. “I know.”
“But I won’t give up on Dane,” Emilia said, “just like you didn’t give up on me.”
“I’ll search for him once I know Lars will be okay,” Nikki promised. “You need to come with me.” Because Emilia did need her protection. And Nikki wasn’t certain when everyone else would arrive.
Hadn’t alarms gone off to notify Cooper of the break-in? Or Mom called and told him? She always knew stuff before the rest of them did.
“No...” Emilia shook her head and drew back. “I can’t go to the hospital. My cell phone won’t even come in down there. And what if Dane calls...”
What if he didn’t? Nikki was more worried about the effect that might have on Emilia. It was obvious she’d fallen for her brother’s best friend. And no matter how much they’d been fighting lately, Dane was Lars’s best friend.
Nikki couldn’t treat Lars’s leg wound, but she could help find his friend. She rushed after the paramedics who were loading Lars into the back of the ambulance; the lights were already flashing. Her stomach lurched at the seriousness of her fiancé’s injury. She should go with him.
But instead she rushed up to the stretcher and told him, “I love you so much. And I’ll get down to the hospital as soon as I can.”
He reached out and cupped her face in his palm again. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For being there for my sister more than I ever could,” he said.
“I’ll protect her,” she promised. “And I’ll find Dane.” She only hoped for both Lars’s and Emilia’s sakes, as well as Dane’s, that he was alive.
“I love you,” Lars called out as the stretcher rolled all the way into the back.
“I love you!” Nikki yelled back at him. Her heart beating fast and heavy with fear for her fiancé, she forced herself to step back from ambulance. She waited until it sped from the parking lot, lights flashing, before heading back into the shot-up building.
Emilia stood near Nikki’s laptop, staring at the screen. But she doubted she could see anything. Tears streamed down her face.
Nikki nudged her aside to start tapping keys. “I’ll see if I can narrow down the location of your caller. And we’ll call in everyone else to help in the search.” She also intended to follow up on the suspect Dane had come up with, the coroner he thought had helped Myron Webber steal babies.
“Thank you!” Emilia exclaimed as she hugged the petite woman.
Nikki pulled back and cautioned her, “Don’t get your hopes up. I was right about you. You may not be right about Dane. We might not be able to rescue him like we rescued you.”
“We have to,” Emilia said.
Nikki shook her head. “We can’t if Lars is right—if he’s already gone.”
Emilia shook her head. “He’s not dead. He can’t be dead...”
* * *
He was dead. Or at least that was what he wanted his captors to think. But then a boot kicked Dane right in his bleeding shoulder. He couldn’t hold in the grunt of pain, couldn’t continue to play dead like he’d been trying since that door had opened.
“You’re not dead!” the young man exclaimed. He kicked Dane again. “Billy’s dead!” Another kick. “And Raul.” Another kick. “And Jerome!”
How the hell many young thugs had come after him and Lars? Dane had emptied a few magazines, and he’d made certain most of his bullets had counted. The gangbangers hadn’t been as trained on firearms as the Marines had trained him and Lars.
Their shots had gone wild. The one that had hit Lars in the thigh had been a lucky one. Unlucky for Lars.
Was his name among the dead?
“You shouldn’t have come after me,” Dane said as he rolled to his side, so he could move his arms even though his wrists were bound.
When the kid kicked him again, Dane moved fast enough to catch his foot and jerk him down onto the concrete. The guy let out a cry of surprise and pain. He must have taken a bullet, too. If Dane could find where the wound was...
But his wrists were tightly bound. Catching the foot had been hard enough. Now he swung out with his legs. His bound ankles made his kick doubly strong.
The kid screamed now.
And the door rattled as someone else stepped into the room. “What the hell, Gonz?”
“Shoot him!” Gonz yelled. “Shoot him!”
A gun cocked. But it didn’t fire. Instead the other kid said, “But what about our money? We don’t get it if we kill him...”
“Then we’ll just take it from the rich guy,” Gonz said.
Dane chuckled. “That rich guy isn’t someone you want to double-cross...”
Another gun cocked. But there was no hesitation. Shots fired. Dane braced himself, and just as he’d feared, he got hit. When he glanced down, he saw it was just with a shard of concrete though—not a bullet.
Gonz lay next to him, his eyes open wide with shock, a bullet in his forehead.
�
�Stupid kid...” he muttered.
“You warned him not to double-cross me,” a deep voice murmured. “Thank you for that.”
There wasn’t much light spilling in from the hall. Dane couldn’t see the guy’s face clearly. Was it the coroner who’d helped Myron Webber?
He didn’t think so. This guy was younger. His hair dark. “Who are you?” he asked.
“My name won’t mean anything to you,” the guy said.
So it was someone he’d never met?
“What the hell do you want with me then?” he asked.
“I am going to switch you for the baby Myron Webber promised us.”
Myron had sold Emilia’s baby to several couples desperate for a child of their own. They’d been victims of his scams—just like Emilia had been. That was why, even though the authorities had talked to them, no one had pressed charges against them for bypassing the proper adoption channels. They’d been hurt, too. Dane hadn’t realized how desperate that disappointment would make them.
“The man was a bastard,” Dane said.
“No, he was getting babies into loving, two-parent households. Emilia Ecklund’s baby is being raised by a single mom,” the man said, “She was going to give him up or she wouldn’t have met with Myron in the first place.”
“But she didn’t give him up,” Dane insisted.
“No, she wasn’t like your mother, who left you in a bathroom,” the man said. “But she’s nearly as bad.”
Dane tensed. “You really checked me out.” Not many people knew his past that well because he hated talking about it.
“I had to know who I was dealing with,” the man replied. “I can’t believe you would help her.”
He wasn’t much help now—to her and even to himself. “She’s my best friend’s sister,” Dane said. But that wasn’t really why he’d helped her. He’d helped her because he cared about her.
“And that baby is ours,” the man insisted.
Dane grunted, more in disagreement than pain. “No, he’s not. Webber conned you.”
