by Susan Stoker
Wolf sighed. “Yeah, Ice. I think someone took Jess.”
“I don’t understand. Did she walk outside knowing someone was out there?”
“What would you do if someone threatened me, and told you if you didn’t go with them, they’d hurt me?” Wolf knew what Caroline’s answer would be, and wasn’t really expecting her to answer.
Caroline looked at Matthew in horror. “Oh my God. We didn’t even think about that.”
“Yeah,” Wolf agreed grimly and pushed the gas a little harder. The team had to figure this shit out, and quickly. Not only was one of their women in danger, it looked like their teammate was as well.
* * *
Jess ran as fast as she could. She knew she wasn’t moving quickly enough, but the further she could get away from Kason, the better chance Tex and his team had of getting to him before Brian could get back and hurt him after dealing with her.
The branches scratched Jess’s face as she blindly ran in the dark. She’d started out running in the opposite direction from where Brian had left the car, then as soon as the leaves had obscured her from Brian, she turned ninety degrees and changed direction. She did this once more until she hoped she was headed back the way they’d originally come. Jess had no idea where she was, or even how far it was. All she cared about was keeping as far ahead of Brian as she could.
When Brian got a hold of her he was going to hurt her. Jess knew it, she wasn’t an idiot. But she also knew if Brian took the time to do all the things she’d taunted him with, that meant that Kason would have a better chance of getting free or being rescued by his team.
There was no way she could keep ahead of Brian, but if she zig-zagged enough, and tried to hide more than run, maybe, just maybe she’d buy herself, and Kason, enough time.
Jess couldn’t believe Brian and Tammy were as cold-hearted and psychopathic as they were. She refused to cry about Tabitha now. How scared and confused the girl must’ve been. Shaking her head, Jess tried to put it out of her mind. She had to figure out how to get both her and Kason out of the current mess they were in. She’d grieve later . . . if she had a later.
Jess had purposely left her bra behind because she knew it had a tracking device in it. The strip tease had done its job in distracting Brian, but it had also been the only way she could think of to be able to leave a tracking device behind for Kason. Jess also had a thingie in her shoe, but there was no way she could leave her shoe behind, especially since she had to run through the damn woods. It had to have been her bra.
Jess fell for the fourth time, but immediately forced herself to get up. She had to keep moving. She couldn’t stop. Every painful step meant she was one step, hopefully, closer to rescue, but most importantly, one step further away from Kason and the danger he was in from a pissed-off Brian.
* * *
Wolf pulled into the parking lot of Aces and slammed on the brakes. He put the car in park and hurried over to his friends.
“Anything?”
“No, nothing looks out of place here,” Mozart said in a crisp business-like voice.
The men huddled together, trying to hash out what had happened when Alabama called from across the parking lot.
“I think that’s Kason’s car!”
The men all turned and headed to where Alabama had pointed. Shit, they were fucking losing it. They should’ve seen his car first thing, they’d all been too eager to talk with each other than to scout out the scene first. They had to get their act together if they were going to get Benny out of whatever bullshit he was in. Without touching anything on the car they walked around it.
“Doesn’t look tampered with,” Abe observed. “But why’d Benny park it here and not directly in front?”
“What if he was lured here too?” Cookie mused.
Wolf took his phone out and called Tex and put him on speaker. “Benny’s car is here.”
“Hold on.”
The team waited impatiently as Tex searched for something on his computer. They all knew time was of the essence. It always was. Every second counted. They all remembered how Cheyenne had been saved. If they’d waited too long, the bombs that had been strapped to her body would have gone off and killed her and hundreds of other people as well.
“Benny received a call from the bar around ten. Call lasted about twenty seconds,” Tex said in a brusque voice.
“Okay, so someone lured him here and told him something was going down and he had to keep it on the down-low.” Wolf turned in circles, checking out the area as he reasoned out what had happened earlier that night. “He didn’t call us, so the person probably threatened Jess in some way.” Wolf walked toward the side of the bar. “He didn’t want to go in the front door, so he snuck around the side thinking he’d be able to get in through the alley.”
Wolf, Abe, and Dude entered the alley while Mozart and Cookie stayed in the parking lot, keeping their eyes on the women who were huddled together around Wolf’s car.
The team searched the alley for something, anything, to give them more information about what had happened to their teammate.
“There!” Abe pointed. They all saw the blood spots on the ground and Benny’s K-bar lying open and clean on the ground.
“Okay, so whoever it was, took Benny by surprise. They incapacitated him, then sent Jess a text saying if she didn’t go with them, they’d hurt or kill him.”
“I have a feeling that’s right on, Wolf,” Tex said from the phone Wolf was still holding. “I hacked into her phone. I’m sending the picture to Abe that was sent to Jess from Benny’s phone.”
The men waited, and when Abe’s phone vibrated, they huddled around it.
“Dammit!” Dude exclaimed upon seeing the picture of Benny unconscious and bleeding on the screen. “No wonder she did exactly what they wanted her to when she saw this.”
Wolf was moving back to the parking lot. “Status on Jess, Tex?”
“She’s been stationary for about seven minutes now. Still in the middle of the park.”
“Okay, we’re headed there now,” Wolf told him. “I’m keeping you live on my phone, let me know if anything changes.”
Wolf stalked toward the five women standing near his car. He pulled Caroline into him as he reached her side. “We’re going to get them back. I need you guys to go into the bar and stay there. Don’t fucking move until we get back. I don’t care if you get a text or a call. Don’t. Move. Got it?”
Ice hugged her man tightly, then pulled back. “Got it, Matthew. Tex has us. You go.”
Wolf loved Caroline. She was tough when she needed to be and practical as all get out. She knew just what to say to calm him down. “Thank you, Ice.” He kissed her once, hard, then backed away. He watched as his teammates said a quick passionate goodbye to their women as well, then they turned back to him.
“We’ll take my car and Dude’s. Let’s get this done.”
The men nodded in agreement and without a word, split up into the two cars and they all headed toward Brant Park to find their teammate and his woman.
* * *
Jess grunted as Brian tackled her and she landed hard on her knees, then her stomach. The light from the lantern on his hat shone crazily around them. She knew it was only a matter of time before he caught up with her . . . but she’d made it further than she thought she would. Brian roughly turned Jess over until she was on her back. He grabbed both her wrists in his and braced them above her head. He sneered down at her and Jess flinched away from the light shining in her eyes from his hat.
“Tag.” Brian sing-songed and then laughed at his own joke.
“You caught me!” Jess said, still trying to buy time.
“Fucking right I did.” Brian pulled Jess to her feet and shoved her in front of him until he got to a sort of clearing. He shoved her and Jess fell on her hands and knees. Jesus, her hands and knees were going to be permanently bruised before this was all said and done. Before she could move, Brian was behind her. He grabbed her hips and pulled her
back until his cock rested against her ass. He thrust against her as he described exactly what he was going to do to her.
Jess blocked out Brian’s voice, refusing to listen to the disgusting words coming out of his mouth and desperately looked around for something she could use as a weapon. There was a lot of trash in the small clearing . . . it’d obviously been used as a camping spot for some unfortunate homeless person at one time or another.
She looked to her right and saw the last thing she expected to see in the middle of nowhere. It was part of a cinderblock. Jess had no idea how it had gotten there, perhaps a homeless person had lugged it in thinking it could be used for something, but whatever the case . . . right now it was a godsend.
If she could only get to it.
Brian pulled her back to her feet by her hair, his favorite way of handling her apparently, and shoved her up against a tree. “I’m going to fuck you right here. You’re going to take everything I’ve got. I’ll fill all your holes with my cock, then we’re going back to your boyfriend and I’m going to watch as you put a bullet in his brain. Then you’ll come back to my place with me and I’ll tie you to my bed and you’ll serve as my little honey pot for my friends. Anytime I want drugs, you’ll take my friends any way they want and you’ll be fucking quiet about it or I’ll arrange for your other friends to die as well. You want that? You want to kill your little girlfriends or their men? I’ll fuck them before I kill them too. Defy me, Jess. I fucking dare you.”
Jess couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. All she could see was Kason tied against the tree, bleeding from a bullet hole in his forehead that Brian had made her put there. Other images flew through her brain, one after another. Alabama lying dead on the floor, Fiona tied up and begging Brian’s friends to leave her alone. Cheyenne, Summer, Caroline. She couldn’t even think about the guys. They were her friends. No fucking way was Brian doing this. He was a monster. He sold his own niece for drugs and scarred her so badly she felt she had no way out but to take her own life.
Jess lunged away from Brian, taking him by surprise. She got about three limping steps away when Brian managed to stick out his leg and trip her. Jess fell hard once again and Brian threw back his head and laughed at her.
“Fuck, that was funny. You’re still trying to get away from me. When are you going to learn that you’re nothing but a fucking cripple, Jess? No one wants you. You’re nothing and nobody. Do you think I believed your sob story back there? Hell no, I know you loved that fat bitch. You’re mine now and I’m not fucking letting you go again just so you can go to the cops. I’ll fuck you, and my friends will fuck you, and you won’t ever get away from me again. I’ll chain you to the bed and you’ll never see the light of . . .”
Brian’s words ended abruptly. He never saw the cinderblock that came toward his face. The last thing Brian knew was his feeling of triumph over the stupid crippled woman who was lying at his feet.
* * *
“Wolf, we got problems.” Tex’s words were sharp and biting. Wolf and Dude had just pulled into the parking lot at Brant Park. There was one other car in the lot.
“Talk to me,” Wolf told Tex brusquely.
“I’ve got two marks now. One is stationary in the same place it’s been for the last fifteen minutes. The other is moving. It started off heading north, then it turned back and is now coming toward you and the parking lot.”
“What the hell?” Cookie said under his breath, hearing Tex’s words.
“We’ll stick together as long as we can, but if the tracks split up too far, we’ll need to follow them separately,” Wolf said, already setting out into the trees in the park.
The team agreed, and quickly followed Wolf, flashlights in hand lighting up the area as they started toward the beacons.
“What’s going on, Tex? I know you can’t see us, but are the marks still doing the same thing?”
“Affirmative. The one still isn’t moving, and the other has now stopped too. Head north-northwest from the parking lot and you should run right into whoever has the tracker.”
The men picked up their pace. They could run all night if they had to, but it looked like they only had to go a short distance before they’d come across the first tracking beacon that had once been on Jessyka.
The men pushed themselves hard. There was so much at stake. They’d been in brutal life-and-death situations before. Situations that included rescuing their own women, and this situation was just as important as any they’d been on before, perhaps more so. One of their own was in trouble. Not only one of their own team, but his woman as well. The stakes were twice as high.
“Tex?”
“Situation static,” Tex told Wolf, indicating nothing had changed from the last time he’d reported in.
Wolf didn’t bother to respond, he and his team just kept moving. “Spread out, we don’t want to miss anything in the cover,” Wolf urged the others.
The men fanned out until they were about ten feet apart, and still moving northwest through the thick foliage, their flashlights moving crazily in the darkness.
It was Dude who found Jess first.
“Here!”
The other men changed course immediately and closed in on Dude.
All five men stopped at the edge of the clearing and stared at the scene in front of them.
Jessyka was there, and so was her ex-boyfriend, or what they thought was Brian.
Dude edged slowly toward Benny’s woman.
“Jess? You’re safe now.”
Jessyka didn’t respond. She was crouched by Brian’s body, breathing hard. She was holding on to a broken piece of cinderblock with both hands. They could all see the blood that had splattered over her upper body.
It was obvious Brian wasn’t going to leave the park alive.
“Jess.” Dude’s voice lowered and he used his Dominant voice. “Put down the cinderblock.”
“No.”
The men all looked at each other. Jess’s voice sounded off.
“He won’t touch the others. I won’t let him.”
“He’s not going anywhere. We’ll make sure of it.” Dude tried to reason with Jess.
“No! I’ll make sure of it. I’m not a cripple. I’ll fucking show him crippled.”
Dude couldn’t help the inappropriate smile that crept across his face, but looking down at the woman in front of him and the smashed in skull of Brian, made the smile disappear quickly.
Wolf had eased around behind Jess and Dude met his eye. They didn’t want to do it this way, but they had to get Jess out of there. Dude nodded at his teammate.
Wolf came up behind Jessyka and circled his arms around her lifting her upper body up and off the ground.
Jess shrieked and kicked backward, dropping the heavy cinderblock in the process. “No! Let me go!”
“Shhhh, you’re safe now, Jess. It’s Wolf. I’ve got you.”
“Wolf! He’s gonna hurt Caroline. Make him stop!”
Her urgent words made Wolf’s heart ache. “He won’t hurt her, sweetie. You made sure of that. Come on.” Wolf turned Jessyka around so she couldn’t see Brian’s body on the ground. “Talk to us. We’re all here. Tex tracked you. Where’s Benny?”
It was as his words snapped her out of wherever her mind had taken her. “Oh my God, Kason!” Jess wiggled in Wolf’s arms until he loosened them enough so she could turn and face him. She grabbed hold of his shirt, leaving dark smears of blood on his navy blue shirt, and looked up at him. “Kason! You have to find him! He’s hurt!”
“Okay, Tex’ll lead us there.”
“I’m coming too.”
“No, you’re not,” Wolf had no sooner had the words out of his mouth when Jessyka stepped backward and had turned and started hobbling painfully back into the woods.
Cookie swooped in and picked her up with one hand under her back and the other under her knees. “Come on, Jess, it’s obvious you’re in pain. Let Wolf, Dude, and Mozart go and get Benny for you. Is there anyone else out her
e?”
Jess struggled in Cookie’s arms. “Let me go, Cookie. Please. Damn, I need to be there. He’s so pissed . . .”
“Jess. Is there anyone else out here?” Dude bit the words out. He’d stepped over to Cookie and took hold of Jess’s chin with his hand, forcing her to look at him.
Jess whimpered and panted hard. Finally she whispered, “I don’t think so. I only saw Brian. But I don’t know how he got Kason out here. He might’ve had help.”
Dude kissed Jess on the forehead and said quietly, “We’ll bring him to you, Jess. Hang in there.”
Jess could only nod, then she watched as the three men left the clearing heading into the woods back the way she’d come as she was running from Brian.
Cookie and Abe headed back to the parking lot without another word. Jess laid her head on Cookie’s chest and prayed they’d find Kason in one piece. She had no idea if he’d forgive the words she’d said while trying to placate Brian, but ultimately it didn’t matter. As long as he was alive, she knew she wouldn’t have done anything differently.
Chapter Eighteen
Wolf, Dude, and Mozart followed the path that Jess had taken through the foliage. They could see where she fell and how hard she’d tried to keep ahead of Brian. It was obvious she’d been running for her life, and Benny’s.
It wasn’t too far from where they’d found Jess, and with Tex’s directions, that they stumbled on their teammate. Benny was tied to a tree and had almost freed himself. There was rope still bound tightly around his legs, but the bindings that had been wrapped around his torso and the tree were hanging loosely.
Wolf stepped up to him with his K-bar knife and quickly sliced through the gag and the ropes around his torso. Dude cut through the bindings around his legs at the same time.
“Mother fucker,” Benny spat out as soon as the gag was removed. “He’s got Jess. We have to find her.”
“We’ve got her, man. She’s safe. Tex called us. We found her right before we got here to you.”