Not just one of them, I thought. But I didn’t want to say it out loud. “You know what?” I said, letting anger carry me, because sorrow sure as shit wasn’t going to work. “You know what? I don’t give a flying fuck what you think. I’m an adult, and I can sleep with whoever I want to. So back off.”
My mom stomped away toward the front of the building. I couldn’t go that way. I couldn’t go back inside the meeting hall, because I’d be facing even more people.
Turning around, I looped around the back of the building. I’d find Zak and Logan and we’d return to the bunkhouse where things felt normal—or at least as normal as possible. I wanted to have another picnic by the firepit and talk to them about their lives. I wanted to be cradled against Drake’s chest again, and listen to Zak play his guitar while Roman did the chicken dance and Everett bobbed his head to the beat, wearing his handsome, reserved grin.
The rear of the meeting hall had a large deck which faced the river, and a dock below, much grander than the dock David used for his old fishing boat. Logan and Zak weren’t back here, so it meant I’d have to go through the meeting hall.
I really didn’t want to do that, but there was no choice. Grumbling, I quickly walked across the deck.
A sight stopped me in my tracks. Zak lay sprawled on his stomach, a pool of blood under his head, staining the planks beneath him and seeping into his suit jacket.
“Zak!” I rushed to his side and went straight for his neck, trying to find a pulse.
He had a pulse, but it was faint.
“Someone help!” I screamed, but all I caught was dark movement from the corner of my eye.
Something solid made contact with my temple. I started to fall over Zak, and everything went black.
Chapter Fifteen
I woke to darkness, my arms and legs bound. I tried lifting my legs, but they hit something solid. I wriggled to the side, and my shoulder hit something, too. The other side, same result.
Immediately, my heart started pounding hard and sweat broke out over my forehead. Small space. I hated small spaces. Anything that kept me from moving freaked me the hell out, and here I was, trapped in…something. I called out, but my voice sounded muffled, even to my ears. Then I realized—I was in the trunk of a moving vehicle.
It didn’t matter that nobody would hear me—I screamed. I screamed and kicked out with my legs, ramming them against the solid surface above me. I rolled around in a panic and knocked my head, which exploded in pain. My temple was beyond tender—it felt like someone had gouged out a piece of my skull.
Moaning, I lay still again and listened. The car slowed and made some tight turns, like it was pulling into a parking spot.
We were parking somewhere. If it was a lot, maybe someone would be nearby. I could scream, get help.
The engine died. The car swayed slightly as someone got out. A car door slammed shut. I heard footsteps, and then suddenly, the lid of the trunk came open and I could see my kidnapper, face to face.
“Logan?”
The word was barely out of my mouth before his hand came down and he shoved a wadded piece of cloth between my lips. Holding it there with one hand, he jerked me out of the trunk with his other. I stumbled against him.
At some point since I’d been taken, my heels had fallen off. The pavement still held heat from the summer day, and it was rough beneath my bare feet.
I wasn’t naive enough to think that Logan had brought me here to protect me. Something had been off about this guy from the very beginning, and yeah, at a few points I had been naive enough to think maybe he just needed another chance. He needed to be included, invited in.
But now, in this dark parking lot, his face revealed the disgust he truly felt for me. Disgust that he’d been hiding for days and days.
We were in an empty parking lot with a building close by. Two stories tall, it looked like a motel. I cast my gaze around until I saw a flickering, half-lit sign. Carter Diamond Motel.
This was where that body had been found—the body Curtis had told us belonged to Wren. It hadn’t been Wren, of course, but now, seeing this shadowy, dark, and hollow setting, my sympathy for the poor woman who died ratcheted up several notches. Whether she’d been killed here or died naturally somewhere else, it wasn’t fair that her body had been used in such a way.
I looked back to Logan. Was he going to kill me? Would my mom and David next have to hear that it was my body that had been found in this godforsaken place?
Tears welled in my eyes. The last thing I’d said to my mother was that I didn’t give a flying fuck what she thought.
The rag in my mouth tasted like dust and oil. I wanted to gag.
Logan gripped my arm and jerked me toward a motel room door. I kicked at his leg, but he dodged neatly out of the way. I shouted around the cloth in my mouth.
“Shut up,” Logan said, “or I’ll knock you out again.”
I shut up. I needed to be awake so I could fight him. I tried to thrive on my feelings of fear and panic, to use them to start a vision, but my brain was working too fast. It was in problem-solving mode, not feeling mode.
Logan unlocked the motel room door and shoved me inside in front of him. My foot caught on the threshold and I fell to the cheap berber carpet. The force of my fall knocked the rag out of my mouth.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
Yanking me up by my elbow, he said, “It’s not personal, dear heart. It’s my job.”
“No,” I said slowly. “Your job is protecting me. Hitting me and throwing me in a trunk doesn’t fit that job description.”
He began fastening my tied wrists to the mattress railing near the head of the bed. Just enough that I could raise my hands in front of me, but no farther.
“My job is to get you to Ms. Geard. First, I had to verify that you had enough power to be of value. Then I had to see whether you’d accept her offer. If you weren’t going to take it, I was supposed to take you.” He patted the knots he’d made with the nylon rope. “And now, here we are.”
I opened my mouth to scream, but he raised his fist. I closed my mouth. Conscious. I needed to stay conscious.
He grinned. “Screaming won’t get you any notice here. I’ve reserved the rooms to the side, below, and behind this room. No one will hear you. But it will annoy me, and I will knock you out. I’m going to take a leak. Be a good girl until I get back, okay?”
I glared at his smug face, his cruel hazel eyes.
He patted my cheek like a patronizing asshat, then turned around and went to the bathroom.
I scrambled for anything that might help me. The nylon rope was knotted flawlessly to the bed, although it was a little loose around the lace sleeves of my dress. While I slowly moved my hands back and forth, I closed my eyes and tried to See.
First, I had to feel. I thought about Drake’s bedroom eyes, Zak’s emotional music. Everett’s protective arms, Roman’s endearing humor. I felt the love I held in my heart, the overwhelming love that tied me to them.
And then I Saw them. They moved with determination on the compound. Zak had a bandage on his temple, but he was up and walking around. They were talking to David, they were looking at tire tracks in the drive.
Wren appeared in the vision, her blond hair bright, her eyes shining with love. “Your mates,” she whispered.
I wrenched myself out of the vision. Mates?
The toilet flushed. I sat up straighter and put my hands calmly in my lap. The rope wasn’t loose enough yet, but I’d stretched it a tiny bit.
They—my mates?—would find me, I knew it. But I was sure Logan was too smart to leave any clues, and that meant that however they got here had to have something to do with me. I was in charge of my fate—that’s what the vision had taught me. I had to See this happen.
Logan came out of the bathroom and threw himself down on the bed next to me. He leaned back and closed his eyes.
Like I wasn’t a threat. Like he had nothing to fear. He took his phone from his p
ocket and punched in a code, which I pretended not to see.
“We’re here and ready,” he said, then ended the call and put the phone back in his pocket.
“So what’s next?” I asked.
He opened one eye. “I’ve called in for one of Ms. Geard’s transports to get you through territories and over to California.”
“You’re not taking me?” I asked.
Both of his eyes opened now, and he sat up a little. “Why? Are you going to miss me?”
“I’d thought…I’d thought we were getting closer,” I said.
He scoffed. “I watched you throw yourself at each of those other assholes. I watched you for weeks before that at Magic. You’d dance, flirt, disappear to fuck someone. Then you’d come back and do it all again. Not once did you look at me.” Suddenly his voice got darker, edgier. “I watched you, but you never once looked at me.”
Stifling a shiver, I said, “I wanted to. I thought we were moving toward something, like I had with the other guys. After you helped me See Wren, I thought…”
I had to be careful. I had to speak only the truth.
He shook his head. “Didn’t matter. Ms. Geard told me to keep it in my pants.”
“But why?” I asked. “I thought you were hot, this whole time. Us hooking up would’ve convinced me even more that you were on my side.”
“She didn’t see it that way.” His gaze dropped to my lips.
Fighting back revulsion, I lowered my gaze and said, “You’re just as hot as the other guys.”
It wasn’t a lie—because objectively, Logan was hot. The fact that his hotness hadn’t ever done much for me was beside the point.
“Oh yeah?” He leaned toward me, subtly. Whatever his brain or his boss was telling him, Logan’s body was interested in mine.
Somehow I had to fake a shifter out and make him think I felt the same. If I could get him close enough, maybe I could hurt him, distract him long enough to knock him unconscious and get myself out of here.
But how far was I willing to go with this? I knew my hair had to be crazy, falling out of the high bun I’d worn it in for Wren’s memorial service. But I shook my head gently and held myself up. Held myself out. I imagined I was talking to Zak about his family again, learning more about him and his life.
Logan turned on his side so he could watch me, and that’s when I saw it—his cell phone peeked out of his pocket.
He saw where I was looking and grinned. “I don’t think so, Sparrow.”
He moved it out of my reach to the far side of the nightstand.
“Hmm,” I said, injecting some flirtation into my tone, because there was no way in hell I could pretend I hadn’t been interested in getting my hands on that phone. “I could arm-wrestle you for it.”
He chuckled. “You’d lose.”
“You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you?” I pictured Roman in front of me, one of his hands on my hip as we danced, one hand threading through my hair.
He sniffed the air. “You even smell aroused. Shit, you weren’t lying, were you?”
I kept my thoughts on my guys—my mates—on their warm, work-roughened hands, their skilled lips and tongues, on the way they could bring me to heights I hadn’t known existed.
Logan groaned and inhaled again, then buried his face against the outside of my thigh. The bulge in his pants had tightened—I’d turned him on.
Shit, what was I supposed to do now? I froze. I could raise my elbows and bring one down on his temple, but would it be hard enough to knock him out?
He abruptly pulled away and jumped off the bed, standing to face me. He ran a hand through his brown hair. “I can’t. Fuck. I can’t. She told me under no condition whatsoever was I to touch you. She’ll kill me if I do.”
Five feet now stood between us. I’d lost my chance at striking him. I didn’t have to feign my disappointment.
An expression of revulsion came over his face. It seemed that if he couldn’t have me, he was determined to hate me.
“I gotta get some air,” he said.
Growling, he turned and left the room. His footsteps faded from my hearing.
The phone was still on the nightstand.
Now was my chance. Heart thumping, I yanked at the rope around my wrists. The thick, lacy fabric of my sleeves scratched and tore at my skin, but in the end, it was my salvation. Because as it fell away, it left me with more space to wriggle away from my bindings. Suddenly, one of my wrists was free.
I scrambled for Logan’s phone and pushed a button. Nothing. Shit, he’d turned it off. I pushed the button harder and waited for it to power on. Hurry, hurry, hurry, I thought, jiggling the phone in my hand as if the movement would help it work faster.
Finally, it lit up. I punched in his code that I’d just seen, then I dialed the only number, other than Wren’s, that I knew by heart.
I called my mom.
She answered immediately. “Logan? Where are you? Where’s Sparrow?”
“It’s me,” I said. “Logan took me—he works for Charlize Geard.”
Mom gasped. “Where are you? We’re coming right now, David’s calling in the pack.”
My eyes filled with tears. Despite the fact that she’d been furious at me only hours ago, she was coming for me. “I’m at the Carter Diamond Motel.”
“We’re on our way.”
“Thank you. I—”
“I love you, Sparrow.”
Footsteps sounded outside, and the faint beep of the door.
I whispered, “I gotta go,” then ended the call, tossed the phone back on the nightstand, and wrapped my hand back in the rope. If I could get Logan to leave for another few minutes, I could get my second hand free, and get out of this room and start running toward home.
Logan stepped inside and the door clicked shut behind him. His gaze immediately went to my face, my wrists—
—and then to the phone, sitting on the nightstand, with the screen still lit.
“What the fuck!” he shouted, and came over to me, his fist raised.
I pulled my hand away from the rope and yanked my second arm free, scratching it up with the lace in the process. Then I clapped my fists on either side of Logan’s ears. Before he could recover, I brought up my knee and got him in the groin. He bent over double, clutching his dick, and I raced, barefoot, to the door.
He reached for me, but I put on an extra burst of speed, flung open the door, and ran into the parking lot.
“I’m going to fucking kill you, Sparrow!” he shouted behind me.
Arms pumping, heart beating a rhythm of fear, I ran.
Chapter Sixteen
Beyond the parking lot was the empty, two-lane highway. No headlights in sight. I crossed it, straight into the forest on the other side.
It was dark as hell, giving Logan the advantage not only in speed but in sight.
Ghostly trees with dark branches whipped past me. My feet already had cuts on them, but I barely felt the pain. I tripped, fell, scrambled to get up again. My heart pounded out a rhythm of panic in my chest, faster than Roman’s moves on the dance floor, bigger than Everett’s compassion, warmer than the heat in Drake’s eyes, wilder than Zak’s fingers on his guitar.
“I don’t care what Geard said,” Logan yelled. “I’ll fucking tear you apart, you stupid whore!”
No fucking way, I thought. I’d escaped him in the hotel, I could do it again.
Besides, I was in the dress my mom picked out. No way was I going to let myself die in this thing.
I ran like hell, from his curses, from his clutches. Everything was numb as I ran for my life.
He couldn’t be far behind. I put on a burst of speed, but ran smack into a fallen log and fell in a heap on the other side of it.
I braced one hand on the log to haul myself up. A faint light filled the forest—an ethereal glow that I knew all too well.
Logan was shifting. Pretty soon it wouldn’t be a pissed-off man chasing me, but a furious grizzly.
A s
ob escaped my throat. I’d never outrun a grizzly.
His shift would give me a few extra seconds, so I leaped to my feet and hurried away.
Then I realized, he’d be hunting me on scent. If I doubled back, maybe I could fool him long enough for the pack to get out here.
I went forward for a few more yards, being sure to take note of my path. A wild roar came from Logan’s direction, so I quickly turned around and retraced my steps. At the fallen log, I traveled to the far end and huddled in the hollow made from the exposed roots.
Heavy footfalls sounded, and the log shook. Logan was climbing over it. I held my breath. My heart pounded so loudly, I was sure he’d be able to hear it.
But he traveled forward, along my fake trail.
I still didn’t exhale; I was afraid he’d hear me. I held my breath until he was completely out of sight and out of earshot.
Slowly, carefully, I stood. If I could make my way back to the motel, I’d hide out at the office until David and the pack arrived. Until my guys arrived. The thought of seeing them again, being held by them, made me move faster. I made my way along the log to the point where I could climb over it.
There, I came face to face with a grizzly.
I screamed.
From far off in the dark forest, there was an echoing roar.
The grizzly in front of me grabbed me, tugging me close. I expected the claws to cut, the teeth to tear, but they didn’t. Suddenly I realized that I wasn’t facing Logan—this was Everett, and he was giving me a literal bear hug. He was enormous and towered over me. The thick, coarse hair of his coat was rough on my bare skin, but his embrace was gentle and reassuring.
“I’m so glad you’re here.” I wrapped my arms around him, as far as I could reach across his expansive chest, and squeezed.
He rumbled a contented sound.
“I was at the funeral when I saw Zak knocked out on the ground,” I said. Pain filled my chest just as it had when I’d seen him lying there, unmoving. “He’s okay, right?”
My vision had suggested he was. And I knew that Zak had shifter healing on his side. Still, I wanted to hear it.
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