by Claire Adams
“Let’s see you try to get free now,” he barked, retying my wrists so much tighter than before. The rope chafed against the already raw skin, sending bolts of pain up my arms. I gasped against the searing agony, and he grinned from where he’d knelt to retie my ankles with a sadistic smile.
“I underestimated you before, I’m not doing that again,” he said, his eyes gleaming with malice as he crossed the ends of the rope into a knot and tied it so tightly around my ankle that the leg of the chair was digging into the bone.
When he was done tying me up, he jammed the rag into my mouth using the plastic covering of the roll of tape from the day before, the cold plastic hitting against my teeth. He taped the rag into my mouth again, but this time he wrapped the tape all the way around my head, over my hair.
It was going to hurt badly when he eventually had to undo it, but I was already in so much pain that I doubted some hair pulling would even register. My stomach, wrists, ankles, and jaw ached, and I was starting to feel lightheaded.
But I couldn’t succumb to the blackness that was beckoning to me from the edges of my vision. Whether it was fear, shock, or pain causing it, I didn’t know, but I was fighting it with everything I had in me.
“You’d better calm yourself down in here, girlie. Your boy has a few hours left before his time runs out, but I’m not holding my breath that I’m going to get that money from him,” he sneered, loathing and contempt shining brightly in his eyes.
My protests were muffled moans that he ignored. “I hope you’ve been thinking, but I know that I have. I’ll be back in a few hours with instructions, and you’d better have calmed the fuck down enough to remember them, because tomorrow morning, you and I are robbing your bank.”
Chapter 33
Pacey
The wait was going to kill me, I thought as I finished another cup of coffee. I’d lost count of how many I’d had, but I went to the coffee machine and poured another anyway. Tugger was sitting at my kitchen table, shoveling eggs into his mouth.
We’d called for backup, after it became clear that we were in for a wait as it was so the others were on standby. We’d told them we’d keep them up to date with information as soon as we got it, but we didn’t have anything yet.
I couldn’t eat. I still couldn’t think straight, and I was on edge as never before. I was roaring to go, but I didn’t know where I was going yet.
Tugger’s idea had turned out to be a good one, the best, actually, but I was fucking impatient, and if we didn’t hear something soon, I was going out guns blazing. I know where I’d go or what the guns would be pointed at, but I was struggling to maintain control.
How the fuck had I gotten here again?
I rubbed my face a couple of times, frustrated to the edges of my sanity. Blunt stubble dug into my palms, and I wished that it would actually hurt. Anything to distract me from the firestorm raging in my body.
With each hour that passed, I was getting more antsy, more impatient. Tugger, on the other hand, seemed to become calmer, balancing me out perfectly. He calmly sat at the table, watching me carefully between glances at his phone, which was lying silent as a fucking cemetery next to his forearm.
After leaving Scott’s the night before, Tugger laid out his plan for me, and as messed up in the head as I was, I’d agreed with him that it was the most effective thing we could do.
“Do you remember that Jones guy we met on our second, maybe third tour?” he’d asked me, his eyes deadly serious in the muted light of the dash.
Had my brain been functioning normally at the time, I would’ve put it together immediately, but I didn’t. I was running in far from optimal condition. “Sure, why?”
Tugger’s brow furrowed, clearly realizing how far gone I was, speaking softly when he all but spelled it out for me. “He’s in intelligence, Pacey.”
Of course. Fuck. I’d slammed my fist to my forehead. “Do you know how to get ahold of him? Or if he’s even still there?”
“We kept in touch,” he’d said, releasing a low sigh. “I ran into him again during my last tour, and he mentioned he was coming home, too. We talked for a bit and exchanged contact info, wanting to get together sometime. That never happened, but we still talk from time to time. Last time was a couple of weeks ago; he’s still there.”
Thank God. “Let’s call him, then.”
Tugger nodded and pulled out his phone, putting it on speaker after he hit Jones’s number. Four rings later, Jones answered, sounding surprised to hear from Tugger. “Johnson, to what do I owe the honor?”
It was the middle of the night, but Jones was alert, maybe even a touch worried. Tugger glanced at me. “I’m with Nelson. We need your help.”
“Hey, Nelson, long time, brother. What do you need?”
“Jones,” I’d said, my blood singing with impatience and the need to fucking hit something. “We need everything you can get on a man called Jeremiah Anton. Current location is Stone Mountain, Georgia. He’s a local drug dealer, but that’s all we’ve got.”
Jones didn’t ask any questions. “It could take me a couple of hours, but I’ll call you as soon as I’ve got something.”
“Thanks, Jones,” Tugger said, and I echoed it.
“No problem, boys.” He clicked off without saying goodbye.
We’d driven back to my place to settle in for the wait. That was five hours ago, and we still hadn’t heard anything. Tugger crashed and managed a few hours’ sleep; I hadn’t gotten a wink. No surprise there. I hadn’t even tried. I’d guarded Tugger’s phone like my life depended on it, because Juliana’s might, which meant that mine did too, in a way.
I drove myself crazy by letting a highlight reel of my memories of Juliana play in my mind. Guilt ate at me, hot and heavy, because I hadn’t been there to protect her. Logically, I knew that it was senseless and that there was no way that I could have been, since we weren’t exactly living together or anything, but logic wasn’t winning in the war against guilt.
Tugger’s phone finally buzzed against the wooden table, the sound filling the quiet kitchen. I was next to him in a flash, and he slid his thumb along the green line at the same time. “Jones?”
“It’s me. I’ve got your guy.” He was all business. “I’m not even going to ask how you boys managed to get involved with this little prick. Your email still the same as it was, Tug?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” There was a second of silence, and then Jones was back. “I’ve just sent over everything I found, but let me give you a rundown. Jeremiah Wilbur Anton. Small-time supplier, but he’s making a tidy sum of money doing it. He’s been caught on a number of petty offenses, but he’s only done a couple of months on the inside. He owns a couple of properties in your area, three in his own name and a relatively small farm that he inherited from his grandfather.”
“Thanks, Jones, I owe you. Hugely,” I told him, already starting to head to the garage to grab the gear I’d packed a few hours ago. The routine of choosing my weapons and equipment was as familiar to me as breathing. The process of carefully arranging everything into a couple of big black bags and mentally ticking off whether I had everything that I could need, that and the routine were possibly the only things that kept me from going off the rails in the middle of the night.
“You don’t owe me anything,” I heard Jones say as I turned the corner out of my kitchen, but my focus was on getting to the garage and my gear. I grabbed the bag and loaded them onto Tugger’s truck, parked next to mine in the two-car space.
Tugger was there a few minutes later, carrying a stack of freshly printed paper. The sheets were still warm when he spread them out on the hood of his car. Pointing to the list of properties Anton owned, I saw that Jones had sent a summary of the property details under each address.
“That’s too small, too crowded of an area,” I told Tugger as I jabbed my finger at the apartment listed at the top of the page.
“Agreed,” he said and crossed it off with a black pen.
“Where’s that one?”
“Industrial part of town,” I replied, looking down at the second property on the list that Tugger’s finger was on. “Bracket it; it’s a possibility.”
He nodded and placed two brackets around the property’s address. Our eyes dropped to the next one. “That’s a residential area, I think.”
“Yeah, it’s the next one over from the Brooks property,” he said. “I don’t think it’s likely to be that one; the houses are big, but they’re not that big. If someone yells there at night, I’m pretty sure the neighbors would hear it.”
I agreed, but I didn’t add what I was thinking. That’s if she could scream: if they hadn’t drugged her, or worse, but I couldn’t think like that. “That leaves the inherited farm.”
“I think that’s a decent guess for first prize. It’s isolated enough, and the town records would probably still have it in his family’s name, not his necessarily.”
“True. We gotta pass almost right by the warehouse address in the industrial area to get out that side of town. Think we should circle the property there on the way out to the farm?”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
Tugger didn’t ask about weapons, didn’t check the bags. He trusted me, same as I trusted him. He hit the button on the clicker he had to get into my house, and the heavy garage door started lifting behind us.
The traffic was light for it being so early on a weekday morning, and Tugger gunned his truck to the south as I programmed the address of first the warehouse and then the farm into the GPS on my phone. The disembodied voice of the all-knowing lady who lived in my phone told us that our estimated time of arrival was 10 minutes.
Tugger got us there in six. We circled the warehouse slowly, but there were no signs of life. “Wanna check for heat signatures anyway?”
“Sure,” I said, reaching for the thermal imaging monoculars I’d packed. It was a couple years old already, but it still worked like a charm.
Lifting the shuttered eyepiece of the viewfinder to my eye, I raised the imager toward the warehouse. It was empty from what I could see. There were also no cars parked in the parking lot out front, and there didn’t seem to be a way to drive around the building.
“I think it’s safe to say he’s not here,” I told Tugger.
He had his monocular to his eye as well, and he nodded. “Let’s get to the farm.”
We hightailed it out of there, following the directions provided by my GPS. Tugger shaved off a fair number of minutes again, slowing on the gravel road when we were supposedly a couple hundred yards away.
“By foot from here?” Tugger asked.
“Yeah. Ready when you are.”
Taking only the monoculars with us, we parked Tugger’s truck behind an embankment and covered the rest of the distance fast, but keeping out of sight. We were only doing recon now. If we found Anton, and hopefully Juliana with him, we’d go back to the truck to get our weapons and to discuss our strategy once we’d seen what we were dealing with.
The farmhouse was secluded, alright. It sat in the midst of a copse of trees, set back from the gravel road.
There were six cars parked outside and a porch that seemed to wrap around the old, two-story building. There were no balconies on the second story, but windows dotted the walls. It looked like each room had at least one.
The front door had a screen hanging at an angle in front of it and wasn’t all the way shut. Getting in wouldn’t be a problem. Not at all.
Tugger was conducting his own quiet assessment; his eyes also narrowed as he came to his conclusions. We were taking cover behind some of the trees around the house, but we were both creeping closer, staying covered.
We neared the house and ran, bent at the waist, to drop behind one of the cars. We hadn’t spoken a word, but we moved in unison and raised the monoculars to our eyes. My pulse was thrumming in my neck when I counted seven heat signatures.
But there are only six cars.
It didn’t necessarily mean that the seventh heat signature belonged to Juliana, but my gut told me that it did. And my gut had never steered me wrong.
I made a rolling motion with my hand, and Tugger nodded. Let’s get this show on the road.
A couple of minutes later, we were back at the truck, locking and loading. And fuck if it didn’t feel good. I was finally doing something to actively get my girl back, and the knowledge allowed my mind, fucked as it had been since I found out she’d been taken, to focus completely. I relaxed into the familiar feeling of laser-like focus and supreme control.
It was a mode my body slipped into on autopilot before a mission, and it felt fucking great to be there again, more so since this mission was to get back what was mine. Fuck anyone who tried to stand in my way.
If she was in there, I wasn’t leaving without her. I allowed all outside thoughts and worries to fall away, clearing my mind and preparing for the mission ahead. I could see Tugger doing the exact same thing.
“Strategy?” Tugger asked.
“I’ll take point,” I said.
He nodded, “In through the front?”
“Yeah, doesn’t look like they’re expecting company. We have all the surprise we’re gonna need already.”
“Agreed.”
“Flash bangs, anyway?”
“Why not?” He shrugged and flashed me a grin. He missed this shit too, I could see it in his eyes.
“Ready?”
“Born ready,” Tugger said, with a cocky smirk playing on his lips. “Let’s not kill anyone unnecessarily, okay?”
I rolled my eyes. “If she’s in there, none of their deaths would be unnecessary as far as I’m concerned. They took her from me.”
Tugger’s grin kicked up another notch. “Caveman much?”
I flipped him off. “Do you disagree?”
He shook his head. “Not for a second. Have you let the others know where we are?”
Nodding, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and showed him the message I’d sent earlier. “You know it. They’re en route now. You want to wait for them?”
I prayed that he said no. It was smarter to wait for backup, I knew it, but I was also itching to get to Juliana. She’d been alone with those creeps for too long as it was. Thankfully, Tugger agreed.
“Nah. Tell them we’re going in ahead of them. Let’s go get your girl. I can’t wait to meet her.”
“Let’s go get her then,” I said. It was time to go in, and I was ready to kick some serious fucking ass.
Chapter 34
Juliana
My teeth sank into my lower lip to keep a whimper from escaping. I was trying to worm my way out of my bonds again, convinced that if I could do it once, I could do it again. I had to, but since my wrists were already raw and the ropes were tighter than before, it was so sore that it was all I could do not to cry out in pain.
Suddenly, there was a commotion on the other side of the door, with some yelling and loud banging and then my door burst open, and Dreadlocks came barreling through it. He was holding a knife in one hand and blinking rapidly, looking vaguely disorientated.
My breath caught in my lungs when he came at me with the knife, and I tried to shrink away, but there was nothing I could do. Nowhere that I could go. No way to protect myself. I sucked in a deep breath and let my eyes fall closed, waiting for the sharpened knife to sink into my flesh.
It never came. The next second, the restraints around my wrists were cut and my arms fell limply to my sides. My ankles were next. When I was freed from the chair, Dreadlocks yanked me up into a standing position and wrapped his arm around my collarbones, holding my back to his front.
Like a shield. What the hell was going on now?
“Walk,” he commanded, kicking my feet. I would’ve fallen over, but he was holding me against him in a tight grip. My legs forgot how to move as my mind raced, unable to comprehend what was happening, or to accept that something was.
There was a sharp bite of the knife against my
throat, and I gasped when I realized he had turned the knife on me. “I said move, bitch.”
Terror. That was the only way to describe what I was feeling as he walked me out, down the staircase I’d seen earlier and into the living room at the bottom. I didn’t think that I’d ever been truly terrified before that moment. I didn’t even think that I’d ever known the true meaning of the word until I felt it.
Terror morphed with confusion when I took in the scene that was playing out in front of me. The guys who’d been lounging around when I’d looked out earlier were engaged in some kind of fight with two huge guys wearing what looked like military-grade gear.
The big guys moved so fast that they nearly blurred before my tired eyes. They were fighting, but the way they moved made the whole thing look more like a well-choreographed dance. They ducked and rolled, lashed out, and retreated like they’d rehearsed it.
I only watched for a few seconds, but I was mesmerized by what was unfolding in front of my eyes. There was no doubt as to who was winning the fight, six against two or not. The big guys were kicking ass and taking names.
Until Dreadlocks yelled out, that was. “Stop! If either of you move another muscle, I’ll slit her throat.”
The fighting ceased instantly as every man in the room spun to face us. I only had eyes for one of them, though. My jaw dropped, and tears welled in my eyes.
Pacey.
Of course it was him. I should’ve known the second I heard the commotion that my big, strong SEAL had come to get me. Damn, Dreadlocks must have already been on his way up the stairs to me when Pacey had gotten here and the fighting started, otherwise I was sure they’d have gotten him too.
The guy standing next to Pacey, his eyes burning with an equal hatred as Pacey’s as they glared at Dreadlocks, was the guy from the website. His friend and business partner. Tugger.
Standing shoulder to shoulder, they made an intimidating sight. Add the weapons and protective gear strapped to their chests, and the combat boots on their feet, and they were fucking terrifying. I felt Dreadlocks flinch under the weight of their collective scowling eyes, but he pressed the knife a little closer to my throat.
