“Do you know where we are?” she asked.
“About twenty-five miles from Newcastle. Maybe a little farther.”
“And do you have any idea of how we’re going to get back to town?” Because the idea of being stuck on the side of the road while three gunmen hunted them was terrifying.
“We’re not. At least, not until my coworkers arrive to offer backup.”
“I hope that’s not going to take too long, because I don’t think we’ve got a lot of time to spare.”
“It’s going to be okay, Ella,” he responded, turning onto a side road and turning off the headlights. No houses. No streetlights. Nothing but the grayish asphalt and moonlight. Even that seemed dimmed, the landscape dark and uninviting. The thumping sound of the blown tire and the whoosh of air through the back window filled the silence.
She had nothing to say. Because she wasn’t sure it would be okay. She didn’t know how they were going to escape this, and all she could do was pray silently as Sam maneuvered the dark country road.
“Do you think they saw us exit the highway?” she finally asked.
“I don’t know. Let’s assume the worst-case scenario. If we’re wrong, no harm done.”
“Assuming they saw us exit, what’s the plan?”
“Stay a step ahead of them, and find a place to lay low until my backup arrives.”
“Hopefully we manage that soon. The tire isn’t going to keep rolling for long.”
“It’s not rolling. We’re riding the rim.”
“And?”
“We’re not going to make it much longer, but we don’t have to.” He turned into a gas station, the once-brightly-lit sign dark, tall grass and weeds growing through cracks in the blacktop.
“I hope you’re not thinking that we can get the tire fixed here,” she said, scanning the lot and the darkened facade of what had probably once been a mini-mart. “The pumps are gone. This place has probably been closed for a decade.”
“Exactly.” He drove to the back of the building and parked so close to the brick wall that the bumper almost touched it. He flicked his wrist and the engine died; the truck suddenly plunged into silence.
She eyed him through the gloom, nervous and on edge, because she didn’t trust him, shouldn’t trust him, but she’d gotten into his car and allowed herself to be driven to a deserted location. Wasn’t the number one rule for avoiding abduction not to allow yourself to be put in a vehicle?
She’d broken it.
She’d probably broken a dozen more safety rules, and now she was sitting in the darkness, looking at a stranger, wondering if he planned to take out his gun and shoot her. If she screamed, no one would hear. If she ran, she’d have to pray he couldn’t catch her before she found a place to hide.
“Don’t look so scared, Ella,” he said, reaching into his back pocket.
She scrambled away, opening the door and trying to throw herself out of the vehicle. He yanked her back, his hand fisted in her jacket. She turned, ready to fight for her freedom, then saw the cell phone in his hand and froze.
“A cell phone,” she said, and he glanced down at it.
“Yes. Did you think it was something else?”
“You’re carrying a gun,” she replied, and his lips quirked in what she thought might be a smile.
“Ella, if I’d wanted to shoot you, I could have done it while you were tied up and helpless. If I wanted to harm you, I’ve had a million opportunities to do so. I don’t. So how about we agree that the safest thing for both of us is to stay in the truck, stay quiet and try to avoid attracting attention?” He reached across her lap, his forearm brushing her thighs as he closed the door.
He didn’t seem to notice the contact.
She sure did.
It had been a long time since she’d been this close to a man. Three years since she’d allowed herself to be alone in a room with one. She’d been to a couple of therapists. She’d worked through the trauma, but she still had the fear. Way down deep, tucked away in the smallest room in her mind, she still had memories of the way fists sounded when they hit flesh. She still knew how much more painful a beating was when it came from someone who was supposed to love you.
She shuddered, and Sam frowned.
“Are you cold?”
“Yes.” It was the truth. With the back window blown out, cold air was seeping into the vehicle.
He tightened his jacket around her shoulders without any fuss, muss or emotion.
“You must be freezing,” she said, realizing she was still wearing his coat.
“I’ve got an extra jacket behind the seat. I’ll grab it in a minute.” He punched a number into the phone and lifted it to his ear.
She thought that she should tell him she didn’t need the coat and return it to him, but she hadn’t realized how cold she was until she was warmer. She burrowed deeper, inhaling the scent of pine needles, soap and something unmistakably masculine. There were no memories in that scent. Good or bad. Jarrod had always worn cologne, his hair groomed, his nails buffed. He’d been her financial advisor before they’d begun dating, helping her invest the inheritance her grandmother had left her. Rosemary McIntire had been frugal, and she’d known how to save. When she’d died, she’d had over a million dollars in stocks and bonds, another hundred thousand in bank accounts and two-hundred acres of prime real estate just outside Charlotte.
The land had been in the family for generations, and Rosemary had left it to Ruby and Ella. She’d split her money equally between them, and she’d left each a beautiful heartfelt letter.
The letter had meant more to Ella than the rest. She’d already had a job that paid the bills. She’d been living comfortably in a house she’d bought using her writing income. She’d never needed more than what she had, and she’d have rather had her grandmother for a few more years than a dime of the money she’d been left.
She’d told Jarrod that a couple months after they’d begun dating, and he’d told her that sentiment never made a person rich.
That should have been the red flag that sent her running, but she’d been smitten with his charm and charisma, excited by the passion he had for teaching classes at church, happy to have finally met someone who shared her faith and her life goals. She’d ignored that red flag and all the others that came after. When he’d proposed six months after their first date, she’d almost cried with happiness.
That had been the beginning of the end.
Jarrod didn’t love, he owned. He didn’t care, he controlled. All the little red flags became big ones as they’d planned their wedding. Eventually, it had all imploded. All the lies and the pretending and the gentlemanly facade had been swept away in a rage that forced her to see the truth. She’d broken up with Jarrod in person, because that had seemed like the right thing to do, and then she’d gone home.
Relieved instead of sad.
Celebrating rather than mourning.
She’d gone to bed feeling lighter than she had in weeks, and she’d woken to him yanking her from her bed, demanding that she tell him who the other man was.
Because, of course, there had to be one.
In Jarrod’s mind, there was no way she’d have broken up with him otherwise.
She’d demanded he leave, and she’d called 911, but he’d been beyond reason, his rage and his fists leaving her beaten and bloody.
It had been terrifying. It had been horrible. She’d been hurt physically and emotionally. He’d gone to jail, stood before a judge, claimed that he’d lost his mind when she’d broken up with him, that he couldn’t remember entering her house through an unlocked window or dragging her from bed.
She pushed aside the memories. Dwelling on them wouldn’t change things. She’d made a mistake. She’d let her desires cloud her common sense. She wouldn’t repeat the mistake. Ever.
Sam said something
, his voice so soft she barely heard.
She glanced his way, realized he was talking on the phone. She heard bits and pieces of his side of the conversation. Something about the team and backup and trouble. An address. A question about arrival time.
So maybe he’d been telling her the truth.
Maybe he really was with the FBI, and he really had come to Newcastle to bring down an organized crime ring. Maybe he’d been in the right place at the right time and stepped in to help.
Maybe.
Probably?
She closed her eyes, trying to focus on his words, hear more of the conversation. The quiet cadence of his voice and the warmth of the jacket wrapped her in a false sense of security, and she could feel herself drifting away.
She wasn’t safe.
Not with gunmen chasing after her.
But she couldn’t make herself open her eyes.
She couldn’t force away the lethargy that suddenly overwhelmed her. She’d been drugged by the men at the clinic. She knew that. She’d felt the sting of the needle, and then nothing. Now that the adrenaline was gone, her heartbeat slowed to normal, she could feel the aftermath. Her thoughts were fuzzy, her muscles weak.
Fabric rustled as Sam moved, and even then, she couldn’t open her eyes.
He tucked his jacket a little more tightly around her.
“I’m fine,” she muttered, but she didn’t push his hand away or give him back the jacket.
“I know,” he replied. “Go ahead. Rest. I’ll wake you if there’s anything to worry about.”
“If? I currently have more to worry about than I’ve had in all twenty-seven years of my life combined,” she replied, her voice thick with fatigue.
She thought he chuckled, but she was already drifting on velvety waves of sleep, and the sound was as muffled and distant as her fear.
* * *
Sam glanced at his watch for the tenth time in as many minutes. It had been two hours since he’d spoken to Wren. Two hours since she’d assured him that she was sending backup.
Two hours with no sign of The Organization’s men.
Two hours of waiting for something to happen.
He didn’t like waiting any more than he liked sitting still.
He shifted in his seat, eyeing the empty lot.
He wanted to think he’d lost the men who’d been following them, but The Organization was currently the largest crime syndicate in the US, its tentacles stretching as far south as Florida and as far west as Ohio. It may have expanded farther than that, but the FBI had no current information on West Coast operations.
What they had were dozens of small cells that had been busted by hardworking agents. As fast as they shut one down, another one formed.
Up until five months ago, Sam had known nothing about The Organization. Sure, he’d heard rumors. He knew it existed and that other federal agents were working to shut it down, but he’d only been vaguely aware of how it functioned. And then he’d heard about a similar case in Boston.
There, a social worker had contacted the FBI asking for help in locating several missing teenagers. They were kids the police said were runaways. She believed they’d been harmed. Seventeen foster children between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. Mistreated. Abused. Neglected. Removed from bad situations and, often, placed in worse ones. The social worker had known most of them for years, and she didn’t think any of them would want to disappear so thoroughly. No contact with friends. No sign of them for weeks and then months. All of them just...gone.
She’d approached the Boston police and her concerns had been brushed off, so she’d brought the files to the FBI. One year. Seventeen supposed runaways who’d disappeared without a trace.
The agent she’d met with had agreed it didn’t add up, and he’d passed the case on to the Special Crimes Unit.
That had been the beginning.
Then a guy named Bo Williams contacted the FBI to report a human trafficking ring. At first, the accusations were ignored. Bo was a small-time criminal with a history of drug dealing and weapons violations. His testimony was suspect, but he’d insisted he had proof. When he’d mentioned foster kids being preyed on, it raised an alarm that rang clear and loud right to the Special Crimes Unit.
Wren had invited him to visit the Boston field office. Her meeting with him had been informative. She’d gathered enough information to know he’d been on The Organization’s payroll for a couple of years. He’d laundered money for them through a pawnshop he had in Newcastle, Maine. The pay was good, but his contacts in the crime ring were pushing him to get involved in something darker. They wanted him to offer jobs to certain teenage runaways. They had lists of names that he thought had come from a medical clinic in the area, and when three of those kids showed up looking for work, he’d hired them.
Four months.
Three kids.
They’d all been hard workers who’d been happy for employment, and every one of them had walked away from the job before their first paycheck was issued.
In Bo’s mind, there could be no other explanation—The Organization was trafficking humans. If his suspicions were correct, someone at the clinic compiled the names of potential victims—young people who were drifters and runaways, who had no family looking out for them, no network of support that would be concerned if they suddenly disappeared. They were using private medical information to prey on unsuspecting kids. Bo hadn’t been willing to be part of that.
He also hadn’t been willing to die.
Which is what would have happened if he’d defected from The Organization. Leaving, running, trying to hide could only end one way. His death. The Organization didn’t let members quit. Ever. He knew that, and so he’d approached the FBI, determined to stop whoever was calling the shots in Newcastle.
Wren had agreed to help him do that. She’d met with the team, gone over the information and outlined a plan that would help them obtain everything they needed to shut down the Newcastle Organization cell.
Sam had been that plan. Bo had offered his name to a few contacts in The Organization. Within a month, Sam had been offered a job as an IT specialist at the medical clinic. Sam wasn’t the computer expert on the team, Honor Remington was, but he had a Southern accent that matched Bo’s. That would make the story Bo told easier to believe—they’d grown up next door to each other in a small town on the Mexican border. They’d been drug-running buddies while they were in high school, and they’d broken the law together more times than they’d kept it.
Honor had coached him in the weeks prior to his move to Newcastle, giving him a crash course in computer networking. Her main job, though, was to trace the origin of the emails Sam had been receiving. The unsolicited job offer. The communication back and forth from that. None of those had come from the medical clinic, but a week after communication had begun, the HR person had called and asked him to report for work the following Monday. Once he’d agreed and moved to Newcastle, there’d been other emails. One of them had been a request to install specialized software into the clinic’s mainframe. Someone had sent those things. Once they knew who, they might be able to find out why. If Bo was right, they’d take the perpetrators down.
Like Sam, Honor was in town, but she wasn’t trying to infiltrate The Organization. She was teaching tech classes at a local community college, keeping it low-key and using software she’d developed to try to go in through the back door of the computer that had sent the emails to Sam.
Thus far, she hadn’t been successful.
Whoever the person was had his computer and accounts well guarded. Honor wasn’t letting that stop her. She’d been a hacker when she was a teen, busting down firewalls and infiltrating school and government systems. Not to cause trouble. To see if she could. Every system had weaknesses, and now she got paid to exploit them.
Sam knew she loved what she did.
He also knew that she’d eventually find a way into the anonymous emailer’s computer.
He wasn’t sure how close she was. They were no-contact in an effort to keep The Organization from making connections between them. Any information Sam had about the work Honor was doing, he’d gotten secondhand from Wren during their weekly check-ins.
Now, with his cover blown and The Organization’s thugs coming after him, no-contact was out the window. Wren had called Honor and asked her to make the drive from town to Sam’s location.
She should have arrived over an hour ago.
He glanced at his watch again and frowned, pulling out his phone and dialing Honor’s number.
She answered almost immediately.
“I was wondering if you’d call,” she said. “I would have contacted you, but I didn’t want to buzz your phone. Distracting you in the middle of an epic gun battle wouldn’t have been a good thing.”
“How often do we have epic gun battles, Honor?” he asked, amused by her the way he always was. She was the youngest member of the unit—recruited just after she’d completed a PhD program at MIT. She had no background in law enforcement, but what she lacked in experience she made up for in eagerness to learn.
“I can’t remember there being one since I joined the unit, but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen. Statistically—”
“Statistically, you should have been here an hour and a half ago,” he cut in, knowing she’d give him every statistic about gunfights and law enforcement that she’d ever read. Knowing her, that would be a lot. She had a photographic memory and a serious yen for trivia.
“Statistics mean nothing when an agent is faced with a police blockade. I’ve spent the past ninety minutes sitting on the state highway in a line of traffic two-point-three miles away from the exit I’m supposed to take.”
“There’s a police blockade?”
“I’m pretty sure that’s what I said, Sam. I can’t see it from my position, but a trucker in a semi next to me walked to the front of the traffic line and checked things out.”
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