by Elise Faber
But I didn’t let go.
Instead I shifted the gun to my uninjured hand, tore my throbbing wrist free of her grip, and dug my fingers into the bite on her forearm.
She screamed, lurched away.
And I didn’t let go. I moved with her, climbing on top of her and screaming at the top of my lungs, “Where the fuck is my daughter?”
“Funny, I was wondering exactly the same thing,” came a cool voice.
I didn’t have a chance to turn around and confirm my suspicion. The words had barely processed and my brain started pinging with alarm as it tried to comprehend—
Crack.
There was a flash of pain as something collided with my skull and then everything went black.
42
Sonya Harrison. In the flesh.
Sonya Harrison. My mother.
Sonya Harrison, who I hadn’t seen in so many years that she was almost a stranger.
Almost because even though her face had more lines and her hair was more gray, even though her skin had that thin papery quality that only came with age, her eyes were still the same.
They were my eyes.
“Mom?” I asked. Questions pounded the inside of my skull. Or maybe that was the headache from whatever I’d been hit with.
I tried to push to my feet but found I couldn’t. My hands were bound behind my back, my ankles tied together. What the hell was going on?
“Where’s Allie?” I asked, head spinning as I tried to search for my daughter. I was no longer on the trail. Instead I was inside a dark room, just able to see the outline of several windows and a door from the cracks of light shining in through their perimeters.
Brighter sunshine. So it was later than when I’d been on the trail. But how much later? How long had I been gone?
Someone snorted, and a light flicked on.
I blinked against the brightness, and when my eyes settled, I decided that I liked the room better dark.
“Where’s my daughter?”
“As I said earlier,” my mother replied drolly, “that was my question. Though I guess I should have said I was wondering where my daughters were.” Her gaze slid to Celeste’s and went disapproving. “You know Cal doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
Celeste’s face clouded. “I don’t give a fuck what Cal wants.” She turned to me, and I think I would have been terrified by the malice in her expression if I weren’t still processing the daughters comment.
Did she have Kelly? What about the babies? If they hurt her—
Celeste lifted the gun, and I cringed back.
My movement didn’t matter. She aimed. Shot.
I screamed as the bullet tore through the skin and muscle above my knee.
Sweat broke out on my forehead, tears streamed down my cheeks. My wrist and feet, which had both been throbbing before barely registered a peep as a burning pain consumed me.
“You idiot,” my mother screamed. “We need her! If she dies, we won’t have a way to get the money.”
“Kelly,” I murmured.
“That’s right,” Sonya said. “We need Kelly.” Firm hands pressed on my thigh, and I screamed again as something was wrapped around my leg and yanked tight. “Hush now. Cal will be annoyed enough without you carrying on.”
“Take this.” A slap across my cheek had me opening my eyes to a glaring Celeste. She held a little baggie of white powder in front of my face.
I shook my head. Drugs were a no and besides that, how was I supposed to take it? My wrists were still bound.
“Take it!” she screamed, hands grabbing for my mouth, no doubt to force it down my throat.
I’d heard of drugs being laced with fentanyl, knew that it had killed people. Aside from the fact that I’d never taken an illegal substance before, I definitely wasn’t going to willingly consume whatever white powder was in that bag.
I could barely handle a half of oxycodone. Who knew what a bag of drugs would do to me?
“Stop.”
The voice this time was different. And male. And—
I struggled to not empty the contents of my stomach on the floor as my mother squealed, launched herself into the man’s arms, and latched onto his mouth.
This must be my mom’s new flavor of the month.
The man, Cal I assumed, tolerated my mother’s attention for all of ten seconds before he roughly shoved her away.
He was tall, probably several inches over six feet and built. His skin was tanned, almost weathered, as though he’d seen many days on the back of a horse. He reminded me of the ranch hands Kel hired to help out with the horses.
“Enough,” he said and wiped his sleeve across his mouth. “You can blow me later. We’ve got things to do.”
“You can always just do me, Cally-bear,” my mother said, blinking coquettishly up at him.
I threw up a little in my mouth. Really, it was all so gross.
“Stop with the nickname,” he ground out. “It’s Cal. And we need to move with this.” His eyes flicked to mine. “This her?”
My mother nodded. “My oldest.” A snicker. “Though not the prettiest.” She glanced across the room, and my stare frantically followed hers. Had I missed something? Was Kel here?
But Sonya’s eyes didn’t stop on my sister.
Or at least not on one I recognized. They came to a rest on Celeste.
Daughters.
Kelly wasn’t here.
Daughters.
“Holy shit,” I muttered.
Celeste smirked. “She’s kind of slow isn’t she?”
“Not the prettiest. Not the smartest,” my mother confirmed.
I studied Celeste, tried to find some similarity, because could it really be? And if it was true, how could it be?
But as I looked more closely, mentally erased the full face of makeup, the crimson lips and smoky eyes, I saw that there was indeed a resemblance between her and my mother.
She had Sonya’s mouth, the angle of her jaw. Celeste had Kelly’s cheekbones, the same color of hair.
Son of a sinking soufflé, she was my sister.
“This isn’t really happening,” I said. “This can’t be happening. This—this isn’t—I can’t. I’ve—” My voice gave out, the words stifling. My heart was pounding, my skin was clammy, and whether from the shock of the news or the gunshot wound, I very nearly passed out.
“Hey.” A gentle hand touched my cheek. Cal was staring at me. “Your other sister isn’t here. Neither is your daughter. This was a ploy to get you, you understand?”
His face had somehow softened despite the hard lines etched into the skin around his eyes and mouth. This was a dangerous man. An evil man. I could feel with every fiber of my being that he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me.
And yet his caress on my face was tender. His voice soft.
It was absolutely terrifying.
“Do you understand me?”
Allie was safe. Kelly was safe. That was all that really mattered.
I nodded.
“Good,” he said. “Let’s go.” He swung me up into his arms.
I decided I didn’t like the trunks of cars.
I also decided that if I didn’t get out of this trunk, I was probably going to die.
It was cramped, dark, and disgusting. Something was sticky against my cheek and I didn’t want to think about what kind of bodily fluids were currently inches from my mouth.
But I’d discovered that I could almost get my hands below my feet and around to the front. The trouble was they kept catching on the heels of Kel’s boots. So I was trying to wriggle the boots off and get my hands around, but the cable tie around my ankles and the flipping gunshot wound in my leg meant that it was a lesson in agony by inches.
Finally, I felt one of the boots begin to slide free. Slowly, slowly it slipped off and I was able to pull my foot loose and use it to toe off the other. Without the boots on, the cable tie was loose and I—
“Come on,” I muttered through gritted teeth as I tried
to yank my unhurt leg free. “Yes! Finally.”
Now I just needed to get my arms around to the front.
Carefully, I bent my knees to my chest, my injured leg screaming at the movement. I had contorted myself into a pretzel many times over for a yoga class. This wasn’t any different.
Plus, my pain in this moment didn’t matter.
Not if I wanted to live.
I had just inched my bound wrists past my butt when the car hit a bump. I cried out in pain as I was bounced around the unpadded space, but the jarring movement did what I probably wouldn’t have been able to do on my own.
It freed my arms.
Well, they were still tied together, but they were in front of my body, and that meant I could finally do something.
I crammed them into my boot and pulled out my phone.
It had been buzzing against my leg consistently for the last ten minutes, and I hoped to God that meant that somebody knew I was missing.
My bound hands were too wide to reach my cell, so I turned the boot upside down then spent a good thirty seconds chasing the phone around the trunk when the car took a sharp turn and it slid away from me.
But then it was in my hands, and I pressed the button to light up the home screen.
There were over one hundred missed calls and more texts than I could scroll through.
I ignored them all and called Rob.
“Miss?” he answered before the call completed its first ring.
“It’s me,” I said.
“Thank God.” He sighed. “Are you okay? Where are you? The barn. The sign—”
I slid across the trunk as the car made another sharp turn, whimpering when I banged my leg against something sharp.
It was a screwdriver and I quickly stuffed it into the waistband of my underwear.
“Miss? What is it?”
The car started to slow, and I knew I was running out of time.
“Listen, okay?” I said. “Don’t interrupt.” I paused and when he didn’t speak, I hurried to get out as much information as possible. “My mom is behind everything. Her new boyfriend is named Cal. I don’t know if he’s a drug dealer or what, but he’s dangerous. And there were drugs in the room and Celeste is here. She’s my—” The air caught in my lungs. “Well, you won’t believe it, but she’s my sister, and she said she had Allie. I went to the barn, saw Mr. Tails. I thought they had her.” I dropped my chin to my chest, my voice broke. “It was stupid. I know that now because they have me, and they’re probably going to—”
They were probably going to kill me. I was going to fight like hell to prevent that. But I didn’t hold any false hope.
There weren’t too many scenarios where I got out of this.
“Melissa,” Rob said. “I’m going to find you.”
“Of course you are.” My words were filled with a confidence I didn’t feel as the car pulled to a stop. “I love you,” I said and hung up the phone.
Because I was afraid.
Because I wanted the last thing my husband heard me say not to be a scream of terror or pain, but a declaration.
Of love.
43
Rob heard the phone click and lost his fucking mind.
“Fuck!” He whirled and put his fist through the wall of the chief’s office. It made a satisfying crunch as it pierced through the sheetrock. “Fuck!” He yelled again and probably would have made another hole if not for his phone ringing a second time.
“Melissa?” he answered, not looking at the caller ID.
“No,” came a male voice. “This is Dr. Johnson. Sam. The vet.”
Rob was blinking slowly, trying to settle his heart rate and listen to the fucking man who’d flirted with his wife.
He assumed there was a reason the jerkwad was calling and it had better be good.
It was.
“Is there a reason I just saw your wife get pulled out of the trunk of a car on the old McKinney property?”
Rob’s heart skipped a beat. “What are you saying?”
“I’m at the Sinclair Ranch checking on some injured cattle. I just saw your wife being pulled from the trunk of a car on McKinney land. There’s an old barn just off route seventeen. It’s maybe two miles beyond the last marker.”
For a second, Rob couldn’t say anything. Then he got his shit together. He glanced at the chief who hadn’t said a word about him punching holes in the office wall but nodded at him now.
“Whatever you need,” he said.
Rob nodded back. “Okay. Can you call Justin and have his security team meet us at the Sinclair Ranch? We’ll proceed to the McKinney property on foot from there.”
“Done,” Sam said and hung up.
Everything that Melissa had told him in her rapid-fire recitation flashed through his mind. Celeste was her sister. Sonya involved. Drugs. And—
“Wasn’t the lead FBI investigator who took over the case named Cal?” he asked the chief.
Rob parked his police car behind the Sinclair barn as the chief, Hayden, and McMann—the only officers, friends he’d trust with his wife’s life—tore into spaces beside him, kicking up dust and rocks. Justin, Danny, and the security team had beaten them to the location and were working on a plan to infiltrate the McKinney property where Melissa was being held.
Danny came over as Rob got out of the car. “I’m sorry,” he said, shaking Rob’s hand. “We should have waited until the new team came in before we left.”
“They were watching. They knew they had to pull us out to get to her. And if Celeste is in this like I think she might be . . .” Rob shook his head and took the camouflage jacket and hat Danny handed him, along with an earpiece.
They’d rolled up to where Celeste had supposedly been held, the location she’d texted earlier in supposed panic, only to find the warehouse had been abandoned for some time. They’d known immediately something was wrong, but it had been too late, and by the time they’d gotten ahold of the security at the house, Melissa had been long gone.
She’d been smart, though, and thanks to her sign in the tack room they’d trailed her to an old outbuilding on the property. But aside from a large amount of blood on the floor, there had been no sign of his wife.
“It’s beyond inexcusable—”
Rob cut him off. There would be plenty of time for the blame game later. “They would have waited for any moment she was unprotected.”
He and Danny both ignored the way Rob’s voice wobbled on the last word.
Because the last damn thing a man wanted to do was leave his woman unprotected, and he’d done just exactly that.
“We’ve got eyes on her. She’s alive, and we’re ready to move in an instant.” Danny pointed at the cell Rob held in his hand. “Have they made contact yet?”
Rob tried not to notice how Danny had seemed to deliberately avoid the and well portion of alive and well. “No contact yet.”
But the words had barely emerged from his mouth when his phone rang.
And not the one in his hand.
It was the other one.
Celeste’s phone. Which had been returned to the chief by the FBI’s lead investigator.
Who was named Cal.
This whole thing stank more than a barrel of week-old fish.
“Hold on,” Danny said when Rob pulled the cell from his pocket and went to answer it. He gestured quickly to one of the men who handed him a device that he plugged into Rob’s phone. “Location set?” he asked.
The man—Rob thought his name was Anthony—nodded. “Set to Justin’s place.”
“Go ahead,” Danny said to Rob. “But you’re not here. You’re at Justin’s. Quiet everyone!” he shouted.
“Got it.” Rob swiped and put the phone on speaker. “Hello?”
“Robbie!” Celeste chirped. “Have you seen your wife? Because I have when I put a bullet in her.”
Rob opened his mouth, ready to threaten her within an inch of her life, but Danny squeezed his shoulder, giving him a hand signal to
calm down.
“Where are you?” he asked instead.
She laughed. “That is classified information.” A tsk, and Rob heard typing in the background. “Ah good. You’re where you’re supposed to be. And you’ll stay at your brother-in-law’s ranch until I give you some directions.” Her voice went hard. “No investigating on your own, that’s how you got your wife into trouble in the first place.”
A boulder settled in his gut. “What do you want?”
“You.” Celeste cackled. “Just kidding. I want some of your brother in law’s money. Five million. Cash.”
Cold slid down his spine. “Celeste. I can’t—”
“Oh, you will, Robbie,” Celeste said cheerfully. “You will. Twenties and untraceable. I’m assuming you can do that by . . . oh, let’s say midnight.” She sighed, the air crackling through the phone’s speakers. “Or perhaps sooner if you don’t want Melissa to lose too much blood.”
“Celeste—”
But she’d already hung up.
44
I was cold and getting more chilled by the second. We were in another room—only this one was actually a retrofitted barn and had been brazenly lit from the moment we walked in. Part of the reason it was so bright was because of the sun pouring in through skylights overhead.
The other reason was the heat lamps.
One full wall was filled with marijuana plants using said heat lamps. Two others held shelves with blocks of paper-wrapped packages. I didn’t know if they held drugs or money, but I suspected there were both.
Near the door was a rack of guns. Illegal ones, by the looks of them. Or at the very least they vastly overpowered Rob’s small police-issued handgun.
I was on the floor in the corner, trying to appear insignificant and attempting to stay out of sight.
I’d had enough time to slip my phone into my underwear—on the opposite side of the screwdriver . . . hopefully they wouldn’t both fall out and give me away—and cram part of my foot into the cable tie around my ankle before the trunk had flown open. I hadn’t been able to get my hands behind me, but no one had seemed to notice that particular detail.
