Revealing Nicola

by Sam Cheever

  Looming in the seat beside him with a tense expression on his face, Erik was silent for a moment. He turned to look at Franco. “Who was that back there? In the park?”

  “Someone who should have known better,” Franco growled out.

  “She reminded me of Nicola a little bit.”

  Franco’s hands tightened on the wheel. “Yeah.”

  Erik must have realized he wasn’t going to get anything else from Franco on that subject. He fell silent again, his eyes raking the road ahead and on the opposite side, just in case the SUV flipped around.

  Franco wanted to kick himself. The kid was proving to be sharper than he was. He’d let his emotions take control and it was affecting his professionalism. Rage flared up and stars burst before his vision. If anything happened to her...

  “There!” Erik pointed to a cluster of cars on the other side of the highway. A tractor-trailer rig rumbled along in the left lane and the big SUV slid in beside it, clearly trying to hide.

  Franco ground his teeth together and forced himself to keep going as if he hadn’t seen them. They couldn’t come at Osgood’s men straight on. They were too well trained and, when provided with an obstacle, had contingency plans for their contingency plans.

  As soon as the big car disappeared from the rear view mirror, Franco slowed the sedan just enough to turn it onto the grassy verge and plough toward the other side. He barely slowed as he gunned it and entered the highway going the opposite direction amid a cacophony of horns and squealing tires.

  His phone rang a few minutes later, as he sped toward where he’d last seen the SUV. “Did you find them?”

  “They took Highway forty-six east, toward the old water mill on fifteen.”

  “I know the place.” Franco threw on the brakes, wrenching the wheel to the right to take the next exit. Horns blared all around them. He barely noticed. He’d passed the exit for forty-six three miles back.

  “You want me to call the locals?” Pam asked.

  “No. Thanks. I need to keep this under the radar as much as possible.”

  “Franc, if somebody gets killed Gordon won’t be able to save you.”

  It was an argument they’d had a hundred times in the days after he’d taken the security job for Gordon. Pam didn’t like private citizens forming their own security infrastructure. Even wealthy citizens who gave millions of dollars a year to charity in Indianapolis. Normally Franco would agree with her, but he comprehended the sensitivities of the DeVitis family’s situation and he understood why they had to do it their way. “Nobody’s going to get killed. I’m just going to get Nicola back.” He hung up before she could launch into the next phase of her argument, the one where he’d been trained to uphold the law and had no business acting as a vigilante.

  At the moment, Franco didn’t really care about any of that. He only wanted to get Nic back. He only wanted her safe. He glanced at Erik. “Call Mike and tell him where we’ll be. Have him bring as many guys as he can.”

  “You’ve bumped up against these guys before?”

  “Yeah. They’ve found us a couple of times. They’re not screwin’ around. To tell you the truth, I’m a little surprised Osgood’s letting them off the chain the way he has. They’ve made a lot of noise and created a few scenes. He’s lucky law enforcement hasn’t broken down his door yet.”

  Erik spoke briefly into the phone before disconnecting. “Mike says they’ll be here in an hour. They’re bringing the chopper.”

  Franco frowned. An hour was too damn long. “We’ll have to go in without them.”

  Erik nodded, clearly on the same page. He might have been lying to his adopted sister for years, but that didn’t mean he didn’t love her.

  The road leading to the old mill was rutted, the thin layer of gravel still remaining pocked with water-filled puddles that showed signs of a vehicle having recently passed through. The chain-link fence which had once surrounded the place was bent and torn, the gate hanging crookedly off one rusted post.

  He parked the car just inside the gate, forming a pretty effective blockade for anyone trying to flee the place, climbed out and walked around to the back. Shoving the gun Alfric Honeybun had given him into the waistband of his jeans, he rummaged through the jumble of blankets and clothes and found the extra magazines he’d purchased on the road, sliding them into his pockets.

  He was closing the back door when a single shot rang out, followed by a series of shouts. Erik took off running down the driveway and Franco was right behind him. The broken hulk of a red-brick building rose up before them about a quarter mile along the drive. By that point, the pretense of gravel had given way to nothing more than rock dust and mud. There was ample evidence that the SUV had sunk deep in the mud, its big tires churning the nearly worthless drive to muck.

  The SUV was sitting empty out front. It was parked crooked on the broken concrete of the parking pad, one of its doors hanging open. They’d apparently abandoned it quickly.

  Franco started around the car, keeping safely back and crouching as he ran. He jerked his head for Erik to head around to the river side of the broken building, hopefully cutting them off if they tried to flee Franco’s approach.

  That gunshot worried him a lot. Unless Nic had managed to get hold of one of their guns, there was only one reason somebody would have discharged a firearm. And that reason made Franco’s gut twist with alarm.

  He crouched behind the vehicle and eyed the windows of the three story building. The glass was broken completely out of most of them, a jagged sliver stuck up from one or two. Nothing moved in the darkness beyond the windows, no voices gave him a clue as to where they’d gone.

  Beyond the aged brick structure, the sound of water rushing past dulled his hearing, making the situation he was walking into even more of an unknown. Going in blind was dangerous. But Franco’s gut was telling him they didn’t have much time.

  Another shot rang out and Franco surged from his spot, taking off toward the building. The door was broken off at the top hinge as if someone had kicked it in and the threshold was painted in blood. He figured out why a moment later when he eased through the door.

  A man lay in a pool of his own blood just inside. Franco knelt beside him, feeling for a pulse. He was dead. A tidy hole decorated the exact center of his forehead. Franco might be crazy, but that looked very much like a professional shot.

  Footsteps sounded on the grimy stone floor and Franco’s hand came up, the gun focused in the direction of the sound.

  A moment later, Erik rounded a corner and stopped, lifting his hands. “Me.” His gaze slid over the corpse on the ground. “You?”

  Franco shook his head. “No. What did you find out back?”

  “Nothing. But there were signs of a boat.”

  Franco’s gaze rose toward the upper floors. He wasn’t hopeful though, if Osgood’s men were there he and Erik would have already been dodging bullets. Even as they hit the narrow staircase in the center of the main floor, he knew they’d been too late.

  Nic was already gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Nici lay very still, listening to the environment around her. Every footstep, every sound had a dull kind of echo that made her feel like she was underground or in some kind of airtight space. The air smelled medicinal, antiseptic, and it was cool enough that she was shivering. She was lying on a thin mattress, her hands tethered, and the inside of her left arm hurt. She felt woozy and weak. Drained.

  Nici remembered being thrown into the SUV, having a hood flung over her head and her wrists bound, and then...nothing. She figured they must have drugged her, knocking her out.

  She lifted her head and tried to look around but everything was hazy. Only a softly diffused light met her efforts. Dropping her head to the surface beneath her, Nici rubbed it back and forth, feeling the fabric over her eyes shift. A few more moments of determined rubbing had the blindfold slipping down her face and, eventually, sliding to rest at her throat.

  The first sight
of her surroundings made her pulse race. She almost wished she’d kept the blindfold on. She was strapped to a gurney-like table, one arm hooked up to an IV and the other tethered to the side of the table. The inside of her arm was covered in puncture marks.

  “What have they been doing...?”

  “Help me...”

  Nici jumped at the unexpected voice. She turned her head and saw there was another gurney, next to hers, with a young woman on it. Nici’s heart twisted with fear as she looked at the young woman. She was clearly very sick. Covered in pustules, her skin the color of old meat, the girl was probably around sixteen. But the coarse, thinning hair and puffiness of her flesh made her look much older. “Where are we?” Nici asked.

  The girl opened horribly chapped lips and swiped a pale pink tongue over them. She lifted dazed blue eyes to Nici’s face, their feverish depths full of pain. “Please...help me.”

  That was when Nici realized the other girl was tethered too.

  What the hell was going on?

  “I’ll try. But first I need to know where we are.”

  The girl’s head shifted slightly and Nici realized that was all she could manage as a negative response. “I don’t know.” She swallowed as if it hurt and closed her eyes, her rail-thin body trembling. “I was just walking down the street...” A moment later her eyes opened again. The pain had been pushed aside under a momentary flash of anger. “They gave me something to make me sick.”

  Nicola’s glance skimmed to the puncture marks on her arm and she broke out into a cold sweat. “Have you been outside this room?”

  “Only a few times. There are no windows...” she swallowed again, with visible effort. “I think we might be underground.”

  “What about the people? Are they medical personnel? Or soldiers?” Nici’s gaze slipped over the area around her bed, looking for something she could use as a weapon.

  “Mostly people dressed like doctors and nurses. Some of them are armed though.”

  Nici spotted a small pair of scissors on a table at the end of her bed. There was no way she could get to them. “Has anybody told you why you’re here?”

  Amazingly, the girl’s eyes filled with tears. Silvery drops slipped down her swollen gray face and ran onto the yellowed sheet beneath her. “They told me I was going to be part of saving the world. That they were putting my useless, selfish existence to a grand purpose and that I should be proud.”

  Nici frowned. Could it be The Foundation that had taken the girl and Nici? She hadn’t gotten the impression it was a medical organization. Franco had led her to believe she was in danger because of money. “Did anyone mention something called The Foundation?”

  The girl shuddered, her eyes closing as something sliced through her that clearly gave her pain. She tried to moisten her cracked lips again but her tongue seemed to be as dry as her lips. “Not that I remember.”

  Nici thought for a moment. Had Franco been wrong? If it wasn’t The Foundation that had been after her, then who? She was silent for a moment as she considered the facts she knew. The woman in the park had told her she couldn’t trust Franco. Or at least she’d assumed it was Franco the white-haired woman had been talking about. For all she knew it was Gordon DeVitis or even her brother Erik, since he’d shown up shortly afterward.

  All of them had been keeping secrets from her. All had proven themselves untrustworthy to an extent. But could one of them have brought her there? Was it possible she’d been the victim of treachery from someone she loved...or someone who claimed to love her? Nici was having a hard time accepting that she was that gullible.

  Still...

  “Please help me.”

  Nici’s gaze shot to the other gurney. The brown-haired teen had closed her eyes and turned her head away from Nici. Her slight frame barely lifted the sheets and she was so still that fear sliced through Nici in razor-sharp waves. The girl seemed to be fading away. Nici panicked. “Hey, wake up! Stay with me. Don’t go to sleep now.” Desperate to form a tether from her to the obviously dying girl, Nici asked, “What’s your name?”

  The girl didn’t respond for a long moment. Nici started to worry she’d lost her. “Can you hear me?”

  “Betty,” the girl said in a too-soft voice. “My name is Betty.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Betty. My name is Nicola. My friends call me Nici.” The girl didn’t respond. Her chest barely rose and fell under the dingy sheet. “You need to keep fighting, Betty. I have friends. They’re going to help us.”

  “Friends, dear? Who would that be?”

  Her head whipped around and she gasped. A familiar form strode into the room, a clipboard clutched in her well-manicured hands.

  “Dr. Ainsley?”

  “Hello, dear.”

  Nici frowned, her mind racing. “What are you doing here?”

  The pug-faced doctor settled her clipboard on the table at the bottom of the bed and gave Nici a cold smile. “I’m taking care of you, of course. You’ve been very sick.”

  Nici frowned. She was a little weak but other than that she felt fine. “I’m not sick. You know I never get sick.”

  “You rarely do, that’s true.”

  Nici jerked a tethered hand. “Why am I cuffed to this bed?”

  “You were violent, dear. Don’t you remember?”

  Nici shook her head, fear wrapping cold fingers around her heart. “I don’t...” A terrifying thought formed. “How long have I been here?”

  “Just a few weeks.”

  Stars burst before her gaze. Wooziness overcame her and Nici closed her eyes, fighting to breathe through the panic. Weeks? How was that possible?

  Dr. Ainsley placed a cool palm over her forehead and then pressed her stethoscope against Nici’s chest. Her expression remained unreadable as she listened. Then she stepped back and patted Nici’s arm. “Try to get some rest, dear. Someone will be in to give you your meds shortly.”

  “What meds? I want to be uncuffed from this bed, Dr. Ainsley. I need to know what’s wrong with me!”

  The doctor ignored Nici’s demands, leaving without another word. Nici jerked her arms angrily, frustration getting the better of her. Clearly something was very wrong. She didn’t belong in that facility, wherever it was. And she didn’t intend to stay. Somehow she would find her way out. And when she did, the people who put her there would pay.

  Doubt snaked through her. Was she losing her mind? What if Dr. Ainsley was right? What if she was sick? Surely she would have known? But despite her best efforts to shove doubt aside, the image of Franco running after a car she’d just been dumped into played across her mind. Had that really happened? If she’d been there for weeks, why did it feel like that had just happened? Where was Franco? Had he abandoned her?

  She lay back and closed her eyes as question after question assailed her. When she tried to come up with answers all she got were more questions.

  The worst of it was that it seemed she’d been abandoned by her friends and family.

  If she’d been there for weeks, why hadn’t anybody tried to find her?

  That was the question that made her want to curl into a ball and escape into her own mind.

  ###

  Franco paced the library at the DeVitis mansion like a caged animal. On some level he was aware of the conversations boiling around him. The DeVitis’s had gathered together to discuss how to get Nicola back. They were ensnared in the obvious questions. Who took her? How did they find her? How could they approach Phillip Osgood and question him without starting an all-out war?

  Franco didn’t care about their words. He was losing his mind from the lack of action. His jaw clenched, teeth grinding painfully together, he paced near the wall of windows overlooking the massive backyard. It had been a mistake to let them drag him back. The secret to where they’d taken Nicola was somewhere else. And he needed to get busy finding it...before something terrible...

  “Franco?”

  It took a moment for Gordon’s voice to permeate his pa
nicked thoughts. When it did, he almost didn’t acknowledge it. In that moment the head of the DeVitis family looked more like an obstacle than a solution to the problem of where they’d taken Nic.

  “Franco!”

  He stopped, turning a steely glance toward his boss. “Sir?”

  “We’d like your input.”

  Franco strode across the room, stopping before Gordon’s desk and placing his hands on its surface. He felt the hostile glares of the DeVitis brothers at his back. Doug even took a step in his direction, his face firmed into resolute anger.

  Franco sent him a glower and the other man hesitated, no doubt unwilling to start something he wasn’t sure he could finish.

  Gordon sat back in his chair, steepling his fingers as he fixed Franco with an unyielding stare. “Go ahead, get it off your chest. Then maybe we can get something productive accomplished.”

  Franco barely kept from growling. “Productive? Sir, with all due respect, this isn’t a board meeting. Nicola’s life is in danger. If Osgood’s men have her...” He scrubbed a hand over his chin. He glanced up. “Why haven’t they contacted you with a ransom demand?”

  Gordon shared a look with his sons. Not for the first time since he’d joined DeVitis security Franco felt there was much they weren’t telling him. Like why, for example, Elena and now Nic were being targeted by a group as wealthy and powerful as The Foundation. “This isn’t about money is it?”

  Gordon rested the tips of his steepled fingers against his lips. He watched Franco for a long moment, his thoughts unreadable behind his blue eyes. Finally he inclined his chin. “I always knew you’d put the pieces together one day, Franco. I wanted you on my team because you were both a fearsome physical specimen and because you were smart. Unlike many of your peers in the IMPD, you knew how to look outside the box for answers when it became necessary.”

  Franco had a horrifying thought. “Is this connected to those street kid murders?”