Crazy Beautiful: a Redemption novel

by Prince, Jessica

  Spots were dancing in front of my eyes as I blinked, trying to clear my vision. Movement from the corner of my eye caught my attention. I looked to the side and let out a muffled scream from beneath the gag as the man who’d taken me came into my line of sight, his face obscured by one of those creepy clear masks that distorted your features.

  He bent at the waist, bracing his hands on his knees and grinned in a way that scared the hell out of me. “Well hey there, welcome back.” He extended his arm back and pointed at a table across the room. There was a phone propped up against an old, rusted coffee can full of nails pointed right at us. “Smile for the camera.”

  My gaze bounced back and forth between him and the camera, my eyes huge with fear.

  He stood tall and moved, pulling that knife he’d held on me earlier from the sheath on his belt and placing it on the table near the phone. Next, he reached to the small of his back, lifted his shirt, and unearthed a gun from the waistband of his pants, setting that down beside the knife. “Time to play, Red. How do you think we should start?”

  Tears began spilling from my eyes. I shook my head frantically, begging and pleading from behind the rancid gag in my mouth.

  He placed his hand on his hips and studied me with a thoughtful expression. “Yeah. You’re probably right. Those’ll cut our time too short.” He lifted his hands to chest level and cracked his knuckles. “Might as well start old school. Whaddaya say?”

  He came toward me, flexing and curling his fists. I fought my restraints, thrashing in the chair as I screamed through the tape covering my mouth.

  But it was no use.

  * * *

  Jase

  It had been an hour and a half since Cannon and I found Poppy’s car on the side of the road. The whole town was out in force, looking everywhere for her, but so far there’d been no sign.

  The cops were currently canvasing the area around where Poppy’s Jeep had been found, and Cannon and I were scouring the woods nearby to see if she’d maybe taken off on foot.

  Jensen, Gage, and Laeth were doing their thing, and Cannon had called a guy he knew in Virginia who worked at an investigations firm on a much larger scale than Jensen’s. As soon as Cannon had explained the situation, he and some of the guys he worked with had hopped in their cars and were currently on their way down.

  But none of that settled the fire raging in my blood, because there was no sign of her anywhere. Not a single goddamn thing.

  “Poppy!” I bellowed as I trapesed deeper into the woods, dead leaves and twigs snapping beneath my feet. “Poppy!”

  Cannon was a few yards away, doing the same, but so far, there was nothing.

  My phone vibrated from inside my pocket just before the sharp chime shot through the air, alerting me to a new text. I came to a dead stop and pulled the phone from my pocket, my heartrate skyrocketed when I saw it was a video file that just came through.

  I hit play and started watching. The camera angle shifted from side to side rapidly before coming into focus. A man wearing a transparent disguise mask entered the frame, moving back like he was checking the angle before shifting to the side. I bellowed Cannon’s name when the image of Poppy came into view, bound to a chair, tape over her mouth, and blood trailing down the side of her face.

  The masked man in the video started talking just as Cannon reached my side. “Well hey there. Welcome back.” His hand came up, his finger pointed at the screen. “Smile for the camera.”

  The fear on Poppy’s face was clear as day. Those blue eyes were wide with terror as the man rose to his full height and moved closer to the camera. From the corner of the frame you could see him pulling a knife and gun from his waistband, lining them up side by side on the table.

  “Fuck,” Cannon grunted. “Jesus, fuck!”

  “Time to play, Red,” the man said, moving back toward her. “How do you think we should start?”

  I could see Poppy start to cry as she screamed and thrashed around in the chair to no avail.

  The man went quiet for a few seconds before speaking again. “Yeah. You’re probably right. Those’ll cut our time too short. Might as well start old school. Whaddaya say?”

  “No,” I wheezed out. “Fuck, no!”

  The air around Cannon and me went still. My hands began to shake so hard I nearly dropped the phone as we watched the man in the mask punch Poppy over and over. Her face, her stomach, her chest. Each blow landed with a sickening thud. I squeezed the phone so tight I thought I might crack it. Her muffled screams and cries were going to haunt me for the rest of my life. The image of her being beaten would be burned into my mind forever.

  My woman’s face was a mangled, bloody mess by the time he was done. She was slumped over in the chair as he moved closer to the screen.

  He crouched down so his upper torso was in frame as he spoke. “By the time you finish this video, you’ll have exactly two hours to transfer ten million dollars into an offshore account. The number will be sent to you via text. If you involve the cops, she dies. If you miss the deadline, she dies. Do what you’ve been told, and she’ll be returned to you without harm.”

  He grabbed the knife off the table by the handle, waving it in front of the camera before pointing the tip of the blade at the screen. “For each minute over those two hours your late, I’ll take a piece out of your pretty little wife, so I suggest you get moving.”

  The screen went black.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Farah

  Shane and I sat huddled together at the dining table in Poppy’s kitchen, rocking and shaking as the activity swirled around us.

  Another crash sounded as Jase sent a chair flying across the room. The roar he let out as he heaved was so feral, so agonized it shredded me. The chair had slammed into the wall across from him so hard it exploded on impact, raining splinters and wood everywhere, joining the rest of the mess that started in the living room and spread into here. Jase had destroyed anything he could get his hands on before the guys had stopped him.

  “Son, you need to calm the hell down,” Bennett ordered as he, Cannon, and Jensen’s man Gage closed in on him.

  “Don’t you fucking tell me to calm down!” Jase yelled in return. “I need to be out there looking for her! Not sitting in this goddamn house waiting! That piece of shit has her, Ben. He has her, and he’s hurting her! He gave me two hours. That was a fucking hour ago. If I don’t find a way to transfer that money in the next hour, he’s gonna kill her!”

  Shane let out a quiet whimper and buried her face in her hands. I clenched my arm around her tighter as the hot tears started pouring down my cold cheeks faster.

  I’d never seen Jase like this. Never. The anguish was written into every line etched into his hard face. He looked positively wild, a caged lion so desperate to get out that he swiped his claws at anyone who came near him. He’d lost it. I couldn’t blame him one bit for that, but it was the very worst kind of pain to witness someone I loved, someone so damn strong, crack the way he had.

  We had to get Poppy back. We just had to. It would destroy him if anything happened to her. It would destroy all of us, but it would kill him. He’d never make his way back from that loss. He’d be obliterated.

  “You gotta keep your shit together, boy,” Bennett continued, reaching up to wrap a hand around the back of Jase’s neck, using the hold to pull him in closer. “You don’t, you’re doin’ your woman no favors. When we get her back, she’s gonna need you. Won’t do if you can’t get to her ’cause we had to lock you down after you lost it.”

  “If you think for one goddamn second I’ll let any fucking one of you keep me from getting to her, you’re wrong. I’ll go through you, Bennett. So help me God, I’ll go right . . . fucking . . . through you.”

  “I understand what you must—”

  “That woman is my world, Ben,” Jase spat, his expression twisted with so much pain it hurt to look at him. “She’s my everything. She’s my goddamn reason for breathing, Bennett. There’s no o
ther option here. I have to get her back, you understand? Because I don’t fucking exist without her.”

  “We will,” Bennett said gently while I sat quietly, my heart breaking in two for my big, strong brother. “We’ll get her back, I swear to you.”

  “Guys.” My head whipped around at the sound of the masculine voice. Gathered around the island, were a bunch of men who looked like badass commandos. There was Jensen, Gage, and another guy name Laeth who apparently worked together. But that wasn’t all.

  When everything first went down, Cannon had put in a call to his childhood friend, Sage’s husband Xander. I wasn’t sure what it was exactly that Xander did, all Cannon told me was he worked for a company called Alpha Omega in Virginia, but he’d hightailed it to Tennessee, and he’d brought members of his ‘team’ with him. I’d quickly been introduced to the men named Lincoln, Hunter, and Marco.

  They hadn’t hesitated in getting to work as soon as they came through the door, setting up a bunch of laptops and coordinating with Jensen’s guys to try and track down any information they could.

  “Think we got somethin’.”

  Oh thank God.

  * * *

  Jase

  I clenched and flexed my fists over and over as the SUV rolled down the old dirt road as fast as the potholes would allow.

  It’s almost over, I told myself, repeating those three words in my head over and over.

  While Laeth and Xander were tracking the money, Jensen had been pouring over the video sent to me, frame by frame, looking for any clue to help point to where Poppy was being held.

  He’d finally found it in a still-frame at the very beginning of the video. While the guy who had Poppy was setting up the camera, there had been the briefest flash of a faded, blurry sign on the wall. He’d recognized it instantly as being an old abandoned lumber mill about twenty miles outside of town that had been closed down for more than two decades.

  While they were forming an extraction plan, Laeth and Xander had traced the money back to a dummy corporation set up under aliases that belonged to my parents.

  My own parents. My goddamn flesh and blood had paid a man to take and torture my woman, all for money. And if I didn’t pay up, they’d thrown in extra to have him kill her.

  “This is it. Kill the engine, we walk from here.”

  Jensen’s voice pulled me from those agonizing thoughts, and I came back to reality as the car came to a stop beside a copse of trees, concealed by the shadows and the darkness of night.

  I reached for the door handle just as Jensen’s hand grabbed hold of my forearm and stopped me. “You good?” he asked when I twisted my neck to face him.

  “I’m good.”

  He pulled a second gun out and handed it to me. Where he’d been stashing it, I didn’t have the first fucking clue, and I also didn’t care. “You know how to use that thing?”

  I wasn’t as well versed as the men in the car with me, but I knew my way around a gun. I ejected the magazine, checked the number of bullets, then popped it back in before racking the slide to make sure there was one in the chamber. I flipped the safety off and reached behind me, tucking the gun in the waistband of my pants. “I know how to use it.”

  “All right then. Let’s move out.”

  Hunter, Jensen, and I climbed out of the back as Lincoln and Marco alighted from the front.

  We gathered at the front of the SUV, Jensen repeating the plan. “We go in quiet. Jase, you’re at the back. From the video, it looked like that one gun was all he had, but we can’t afford any surprises. You don’t enter that buildin’ until the four of us have. You got me?”

  I lifted my chin in silent acknowledgment.

  “Okay,” Marco said, keeping his voice low. “Then let’s get this done.”

  I took one step when Jensen’s hand came down on my shoulder. “Just breathe man. Keep breathin’ and keep your cool. This is almost over.”

  With that, we started toward the derelict building off in the distance.

  Toward Poppy.

  Toward my only goddamn reason for being.

  * * *

  Poppy

  “Clock’s tickin’ down, Red. Doesn’t look like your man’s gonna make it.”

  I managed to peel my eyelid open enough to look at the man through the narrow slit in my right eye. The other was swollen completely shut.

  At some point, after beating the hell out of me and having a little fun with that knife of his, he must have decided there wasn’t any risk of me running, so he’d untied me from the chair, letting me fall to the dirty floor in a heap.

  He twisted his arm, looking at the watch on his wrist before shifting his gaze back to me and smiling that smile that made my whole body quake with fear.

  “Sent that video to him with clear instructions. Less than ten minutes. Think he got held up? Or maybe you’re just not worth it.”

  It hurt too much to cry. It hurt too much to speak. It hurt too fucking much to move an inch, but I somehow managed it anyway. I lifted my head just enough to spit the blood in my mouth onto his shoes.

  “You stupid cunt!” He grabbed me by my hair and yanked me off the ground. I cried out when he held me up with an arm around my waist while pressing the knife to the side of my neck with the other. “These are brand new shoes,” he hissed, his breath fanning across my face as he dragged the razor-thin tip of the knife down my neck from chin to collarbone. Fire bloomed as the skin opened open.

  “You wanna know how I was able to afford these? Huh? I paid for them with the cash your in-laws handed over to take you out if your man didn’t give them what they wanted.” He let out a bark of laughter, squeezing me so tight I screamed in agony from all the damage he’d already done.

  “Gotta say, girl, you married into the wrong family. I mean, that’s some twisted shit. Maybe I should just do you a favor and off you now.”

  Tremors wracked my whole body as terror seeped into my bones. He dragged the knife lower, bring it to a stop at my chest, right above my heart. “You know, so you don’t have to bother dealin’ with those awful people any—”

  His words were cut off when the door crashed open, followed by the sound of men shouting as they rushed into the room.

  “What the fuck?” He’d been so caught off guard that his grip on me loosened, sending me back to the floor, and I had just enough time to look up as he went for the gun still resting on the table before shots rang out from everywhere.

  * * *

  Jase

  “Down! Get down! Don’t fucking move!”

  The few seconds that followed happened in the blink of an eye but felt like they moved in slow motion.

  “What the fuck?” The man who’d been holding Poppy moved, reaching for the gun several feet away, but it was pointless.

  Jensen, Lincoln, Hunter, and Marco all fired at once, riddling him with bullets.

  He was dead before he finished dropping.

  I rushed in, rounding the guys who were still standing there, keeping their guns trained on the dead prick who’d taken my wife.

  Poppy was lying only feet away, all that red hair fanned out on the filthy floor around her.

  “Baby. Jesus Christ!” I rushed to her, going to my knees. I rolled her as gently as I could to her back, propping her head on my thigh. “Open your eyes, Flower. Come on, open your eyes for me.”

  Her eyelids fluttered, only one opening, showing me that first glimpse of beautiful ocean blue. “Jase?”

  Christ, her voice sounded so weak. So broken.

  “Hey, sweetheart. There you are.”

  Her lips tilted up in the smallest version of a smile. “Hi.”

  “Hey, Flower. I’m here. You’re gonna be okay, all right? Just stay with me. I just need you to stay with me for a little longer, baby. Help is coming.” I turned my head and barked, “Call an ambulance,” before looking back at Poppy.

  Her expression pulled in a wince that broke my heart. “It hurts, honey.”

  “What hurts
?” I asked, my tone pleading.

  Her hand shifted, reaching for her side before falling limply to the ground. I lifted her shirt and my stomach instantly plummeted to the floor. There were cuts all across her abdomen, but it was the deep, penetrating wound on her side that scared the hell out of me.

  “Jesus, fuck.” I pressed my hand against the stab wound, trying to staunch the flow of blood. “Fuck! She’s been stabbed. Call a goddamn ambulance!”

  “Christ,” Lincoln bit out, coming down on his knees beside me. “Press harder.”

  I did as he ordered, hesitating when Poppy let out a faint groan.

  “Harder, Jase. Trust me. It’ll hurt, but it’s the only way to stop the bleedin’. You need to put pressure on the wound.”

  I did what he said, leaning in and whispering apologies in her ear for hurting her and begging her to stay with me.

  “It’ll take an ambulance forever to get out here,” Jensen clipped. “She doesn’t have that much time. We gotta get her outta here now.”

  “I’ll run back and get the car,” Hunter said before he and Marco took off out the door, but all I could focus on was the woman in my arms.

  “Stay with me, Poppy. We’re gonna get you help, I swear.” I brushed the hair off her forehead with trembling hands, praying to God to help her, to get her through this. Praying for him to let me keep her so I could spend every day for the rest of my life proving to her how much I loved her. “Just need you to hold on a little longer, baby. Just a little while longer. Please.”

  The pain faded from her face, and that one eye opened slightly. “Okay, honey,” she whispered, lifting her arm to brush at the scruff of my jaw with her finger tips. “Love you, Jase.”

  I hunched over, squeezing my eyes closed as I rested my forehead against hers. “I love you too, Poppy. More than you can imagine. So you don’t let go. You hear me? Don’t you dare let go.”