by Megan Crane
“You’re getting in the trunk,” he told her when he turned the car off.
And she was relieved.
Actually relieved that he hadn’t pulled off the road into this deserted middle-of-nowhere to do something far worse.
It took her long moments to realize he was waiting. Watching her.
He didn’t move, but Mariah got the distinct impression that he wanted her to fight. He wanted her to argue, or make a grab for the car keys, or do something—because then he could really hurt her.
She didn’t understand why, if that was what he wanted, he didn’t go ahead and do it already.
“You can’t be serious,” she whispered, every upsetting movie she’d ever seen running through her head. Liam Neeson whispering about particular skills. Blue gravely telling their self-defense class that you always fought—you never let them take you to a second location. That you ended them, the situation, or yourself, then and there.
All of that wound around inside her, choking her as surely as an allergic reaction.
“Get out of the car, bitch,” the man said calmly.
So calmly.
It made her shake. But Mariah fumbled for her door and pushed it open, because if she didn’t, he’d hit her. And if he hit her, he might keep hitting her.
And that could only end badly. He might knock her unconscious. He might hurt her a lot worse whether she was unconscious or not. And either way, he’d almost certainly find the phone.
Which would lead to more hurt, for both her and her mother. And would lose her the only potential ace she had up her sleeve.
So she pushed the heavy door open with her foot and climbed out of the car, feeling like she had stepped outside herself. The humid wallop of the Georgia air made her feel unpleasantly flushed at once, and the creepy brown hair of the wig she’d been wearing for much too long now stuck to the back of her neck.
She wanted to throw up. Instead, she obediently walked to the back of the boring-looking sedan and stood there like some kind of nauseated, terrified sheep.
Her captor only stared at her, one brawny arm lifted up to hold the trunk wide open, a violent glitter in his flat gaze.
“You either get in or I knock you out and put you in.” He looked bored by the whole situation. “I don’t care which.”
Everything in Mariah screamed at her to do something. Run off into the trees. Head for the water. It was a Saturday. Surely there’d be someone around. Or maybe she could get her hands up so she could move in and palm strike him right in his nose, hopefully incapacitating him.
She needed to do something—anything—to stay out of that trunk.
“You have three seconds,” the man told her. “If you make me chase you, your mother loses a body part. If you try to come at me, she loses two. If you argue with me again or even look at me funny, she loses a piece and you do, too. And let’s be real clear, bitch. I’ll enjoy it.”
Mariah chose the trunk.
She pitched herself forward and caught herself with a jarring thud, but then crawled inside—fast—because the last thing she wanted was to be bent over like some kind of invitation. She broke out in nauseated goose bumps at the image, scrabbling her legs in behind her and rolling so she could see him.
As if seeing him coming would make it better.
Her vision was narrowing and she could taste her own panic, metallic and choking. She curled herself into a kind of protective ball when the man moved.
But all he did was slam the trunk shut, leaving her in the close, hot darkness.
And Mariah freaked out.
There was no prettier way to put it. She couldn’t breathe. Her heart was exploding in her chest. She was afraid she might pee her own pants, or worse. Even more terrifying, she wasn’t sure she cared. It was stiflingly hot in the trunk, she was as sweaty as her stomach was greasy with terror, and the more she focused on everything that was wrong, the worse it got.
Maybe she blacked out. She couldn’t tell. There was noise in her head, and she could hear a kind of whimpering sound. It took her long, scared moments to realize the sound was coming from her. She was making that animal noise.
She had to shove her hands over her mouth to stop it.
The car started up again, and that was worse. She could feel every bump of the old dirt road as her abductor turned the car around, then every pothole and jarring bump when he started down the road again.
She felt like she was in a coffin.
But you aren’t, she reminded herself. Not just yet.
She tugged the awful, sweltering wig off of her head. That was marginally better. She felt around the trunk, but it was empty. And she saw the dim glow of the emergency release lever Blue had told them about but she’d never had occasion to see with her own eyes before.
Mariah ran through her options quickly, but they all came back to the same place. Her mother. There would be no flinging herself out of the trunk and hoping she didn’t break her leg, because she had no doubt at all that the man would keep right on driving so he could hurt her mother himself.
She wanted to live. She wanted out of this trunk.
But she couldn’t do either of those things at her mother’s expense.
And then she remembered her phone. Her phone.
She wrestled it out of her pocket, biting her lips to keep from sobbing out her joy. The car rocked her around as she swiped at the screen to power it on, then waited for the phone to find service.
Mariah wanted to make a call more than she wanted to breathe, but she didn’t dare. It would comfort her to hear a friendly voice, or really any voice at all, but it was too risky when she didn’t know if the man could hear her.
And besides, she wasn’t sure her throat worked at the moment, all thick and tight with fear.
She scrolled to Griffin’s number, which he’d given her—reluctantly—in one of their situation meetings at Caradine’s restaurant.
And something in Mariah hardened as she remembered that first meeting with Griffin. Or shifted, anyway.
She refused to believe that she would never see Grizzly Harbor again.
Or him.
She refused to accept that this was the end, no matter how maudlin she was tempted to get.
And she refused—she absolutely refused—to believe that Griffin wasn’t on his way to save her, even now.
In the trunk of a gray Honda Accord heading south of Atlanta, she texted him, fighting to keep from dropping the phone as the car bumped along. Stopped outside of Brooks, then drove on dirt for a while. Now sounds like a highway.
The car sped up, and that was better for Mariah. Smoother.
He hasn’t hurt me yet. They have my mother.
She stopped her frantic typing then, panting in the close confines of the trunk. And she believed he was coming. She believed.
But just in case, she added, If you don’t make it in time, I would do it all over again.
Then she hit send.
Fifteen
They left Alaska after delivering Rory to the hospital in Juneau and briefing the rest of the team, and were wheels down in Atlanta by six o’clock the next morning, local time. Meaning it was two in the morning in their bodies. But they were all used to handling time zone changes. There was nothing for Griffin to do but suck up the situation he’d caused.
The situation he wasn’t sure he could fix.
Isaac had been in communication with their people in Atlanta throughout the flight, so they were good to go when they hit the ground. Oz reported that Rory was mostly thirsty and pissed, which was a good thing. But it was a grim, tight rollout from the plane to the SUV in Atlanta, because everyone involved was fully aware of what was at stake for Mariah—who hadn’t been left behind, shoved carelessly into a shed.
And they still hadn’t found her.
Mariah’s apartment was empty.
There was no sign that anyone had been there in weeks. The rooms were shut up tight, the air was stale, and, as the Atlanta satellite team had assured them, there had been no security breaches since they’d started monitoring the place weeks ago.
Griffin hadn’t expected to find her there. Someone had taken her from Alaska. And there was no reason he could think of that anyone would abduct her only to head to an Atlanta apartment building, with its high concentration of potentially nosy neighbors.
Though he didn’t really want to consider what might cause the sorts of noises bad men would want to conceal from the neighbors.
He refused to let himself think about it.
Their next stop was Mariah’s ex-husband’s monstrosity of a house. It was set back from the winding road and hidden behind pretentious gates that were clearly there for show, not real security. Blue and Jonas melted around the edge of the property to access the back. Griffin and Isaac went in the front.
It was always amazing to Griffin what regular people could sleep through.
Fifteen minutes later they knew more about David Lanier than anyone needed or wanted, thanks to both of the women he had sleeping in his bed with him. And the resentful, mutinous staff in the kitchen, who had no qualms about ripping their boss apart in Spanish while they thought they were alone.
But Mariah certainly wasn’t one of those women crashed out in her ex’s bed. Nor was she rolling her eyes as she talked smack about him over coffee with the gardener. They couldn’t find her anywhere in the house.
And the fact that her ex was snoozing away his Saturday morning with last night’s conquests didn’t mean he wasn’t behind Mariah’s abduction. But it didn’t feel right.
“We could check his friends and favorite haunts,” Isaac said tersely when they were back in the SUV. “Maybe he stashed her somewhere, like one of those remarkably shiny golf trophies.”
“He belongs to a lot of country clubs,” Griffin replied, forcing his jaw to work despite the way he was clenching it. “But however much they might like a full roster of nothing but white-collar criminals, I think they might frown on being used as part of an abduction.”
“Will it look like an abduction?” Jonas shrugged when Griffin glared at him. “You heard what Ernie said. He took them for a married couple. She’s a chameleon.”
Jonas and Isaac exchanged looks. Griffin figured they were bonding over the kind of blending in to enemy territory they’d both done over the years. The kind of blending Griffin had always done was different. He knew how to be mistaken for rock, not . . . an Atlanta society princess on a seaplane jaunt to Anchorage.
His jaw ached.
“What about her hometown?” Isaac asked when he and Jonas were done silently congratulating themselves on their Delta Force days. Assuming that was what Jonas had done in the service. “I feel like a guy who camps out for weeks in Grizzly Harbor and takes advantage of the one time she had a watch change in the middle of the night might like the symmetry of it. If this is connected to her marrying that dumbass, the hometown might make sense.”
It took Griffin a minute to realize they were all staring at him, waiting for him to sign off on this. And much as he might want to tell himself it was because he’d done Mariah’s intake and had assumed command of her case, he was pretty sure that wasn’t the reason.
But that was one more thing he wasn’t talking about.
“Why not?” he gritted out. “Nothing about this makes sense.”
It was supposed to be a solid three-hour drive from the ex-husband’s house deep in to rural Georgia, where Mariah had grown up. The way Isaac drove, Griffin figured they’d make it in more like two.
It gave him just enough time to deal with himself.
Or try to, anyway.
He kept trying to slow himself down and box himself back up. He’d spent his entire adult life packing himself away into separate internal compartments, and he liked it that way. He liked him that way. Over time, he’d developed a foolproof system of padlocks and heavy steel doors to keep things where they belonged.
There was no cross-contamination. There were no feelings that started in one compartment and poisoned the whole.
Machines ran on proper fuel and maintenance, not feelings.
But today he couldn’t seem to get a handle on himself no matter what he did. He was all temper and fury, running hot and much too intense, and he might have been worried about what was happening to him if he hadn’t been a whole lot more worried about Mariah.
Griffin had failed completely. It wasn’t only that he’d let sex get in the way like some punk. It was much worse than that. Mariah had become a distraction to him. He’d let that happen, day after day. And that was a piss-poor excuse for missing the fact that some jackhole had been trailing her the entire time she’d been in Grizzly Harbor.
They’d all missed him. As far as they could tell, he’d come in on the same ferry Mariah had taken and settled in to one of the rental cabins in the woods, claiming he was a writer on a creative retreat. No one had thought twice about him.
But thinking twice was Griffin’s responsibility.
Any inventory he took of his behavior since the day Mariah had showed up tallied up the same way. He’d missed everything. He’d been wrong about her, but that wasn’t likely to kill her. That was simply more evidence of what a bastard he’d been, pretty consistently, since he’d first laid eyes on her.
That he’d been wrong about the threat against her, on the other hand, might have already killed her.
It had been almost twenty-four solid hours. They’d tracked her to Anchorage and assumed she’d headed to Atlanta, but there were a whole lot of ways to get there, and not all of them direct. She could have been taken anywhere. She could be anywhere right now, in any condition.
He wasn’t sure he could breathe through it—and until today, he would have said he could breathe through anything.
“This isn’t on you,” Isaac said, an hour into the drive.
Griffin automatically checked his six, but Jonas and Blue were sacked out in the back and snoring, because soldiers slept wherever they could. Whenever they could.
Griffin didn’t look at Isaac when he turned back. He kept his gaze trained on the two-lane highway in front of them. “You told me I was acting crazy. You were right.”
“Sure. But everything isn’t all one thing or the other. There are gray areas.”
All his locks and steel walls were melting, compartments flying open and slamming into each other, and Griffin didn’t know how he was sitting upright with all that agony tearing his ribs apart. If this was a gray area, he wanted no part of it.
“Maybe for you. I either make a shot or I don’t. It’s that stark, brother. Every time.”
“You’re going to make the shot, Griffin. You always do.”
That was supposed to be encouraging, Griffin guessed. He could do without it. It made his skin feel like it was peeling back off his bones, exposing all the muck beneath.
He’d survived a whole lot of terrible things in his lifetime. It was his job. His calling, even. But he didn’t know how he would survive this.
“Besides,” Isaac was saying, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening in the passenger seat, “you didn’t make the call. I did. I could have ordered you straight back to the inn when you showed up at my front door like a wild man before dawn. And I could have overruled your request for a shift in our approach. I didn’t.”
“You operated on intelligence I gave you. Faulty intelligence.”
Isaac sighed as he sped up to get around a slow pickup truck.
“I hope you’re having fun up there on your cross, friend. I hear martyrdom is real entertaining.”
Griffin entertained himself the next few miles by imagining all the ways he could kill—or at least stun—Isaac without even breaking a sweat or necessarily crashing th
e vehicle. And when he’d finally soothed himself enough to break through the murderous red haze that wasn’t helping anybody, his phone buzzed in his pocket.
He pulled it out, expecting it to be an update from Oz, then froze.
“She’s alive,” he told Isaac.
Isaac belted out a command that had both men in the backseat sitting up straight and alert before he was done.
“Alive and unhurt, for now, but in the trunk of a Honda Accord,” Griffin told them, staring down at his phone while everything in him roared. She was alive. “Headed south into the woods. And they have her mother.”
He heard Blue flip open his tablet, and knew without having to ask that he was getting Oz on that Honda Accord. And the GPS coordinates to Mariah’s phone, which they hadn’t been able to lock in on before now, suggesting she’d had it turned off all this time.
Griffin relayed the rest of the information in the text, except for the last line.
That was his.
Though the heat that moved through him because of it was shame. And guilt.
Because it was ridiculous that she would want to repeat anything that ended with her in the trunk of a car.
He only hoped he had the opportunity to tell her how ridiculous it was.
To her face.
And soon.
Isaac kept driving, even faster than before.
It took Oz minutes to find Mariah’s phone. Jonas calculated the change in their direction, directing Isaac off the main roads and into the spiderweb of back roads that laced the rural Georgia countryside.
“We’re about twenty miles outside Two Oaks,” he said from the backseat. “And headed away from the crossroads that marks the town center.”
“It makes sense.” Blue levered himself forward. “Whoever’s doing this—and I’m thinking it’s the husband less and less—they’re zeroing in on her family.”
“It pains me to admit it,” Griffin agreed, “but I don’t like the husband for this at all.”
And he didn’t need anyone to chime in then to remind him what that meant. That they had nothing. That Mariah was in the trunk of a car and they didn’t know who was doing it or why.
