Colton Showdown

by Marie Ferrarella

  The heavyset man offered them a cheery “Good morning, Mr. Colton. Good morning, miss,” as he held the door open for them.

  Hannah huddled against Tate’s arm as a blast of cold December air greeted them the second they came out of the building.

  “We’ll take a cab,” Tate decided, raising his hand to catch the attention of the next passing cabdriver.

  “Oh, no. Please, let’s walk,” Hannah urged. She wanted to savor every moment she had with him. “I don’t mind the cold.”

  He dropped his hand just as a cab pulled up before them. Shaking his head, he dismissed the driver. “The lady’s changed her mind.”

  The cabbie mumbled something under his breath as he drove away.

  * * *

  He’d almost walked right into them, but as recognition suddenly hit him, the heavyset man managed to sidestep out of the way at the last minute.

  Talk about dumb luck, Darren Sorell, the man who considered himself Maddox’s right-hand man, thought. He stared after the couple he’d almost plowed into. They were going down the block now.

  He’d been looking for the woman, Jade, for the past five days, ever since that raid on the warehouse had taken place and all the high rollers had scattered like frightened mice, trying to abandon a sinking ship.

  Only a handful of Maddox’s men—Maddox included—had managed to escape. And Maddox didn’t want to leave behind any loose ends. Jade was a loose end. A very big loose end. Unlike the other girls who’d been taken from that backward, medieval village where they lived, according to Maddox, Jade had been an unwitting witness to things that would put him away for the rest of his life.

  The way around that was to find her and eliminate the threat.

  Sorell had been the unlucky one to draw the assignment and he’d been combing the city ever since someone had said that the last call from the so-called high roller who had been so interested in Jade at the warehouse party had been traced back to New York City.

  It looked like the tip had paid off.

  Snow was beginning to fall. Sorell took shelter in the doorway of a coffee shop that had recently gone out of business. Taking out his cell phone, he immediately called Maddox to report the sighting.

  The second he heard the phone stop ringing, he announced, “I found her. She chopped off her hair and dyed what’s left, but it’s her. There’s no mistaking that face.”

  “Where?” Maddox bit off.

  “Coming out of a fancy high-rise in the city. Building’s got a doorman and—”

  Maddox cut him short. “Anyone with her?”

  “Yeah, that guy from the warehouse party, the one who was slobbering over her.”

  Maddox uttered a curse. “That wasn’t a guy, that was the undercover cop, you idiot.”

  Used to his boss’s lack of gratitude and surly temper, Sorell shrugged to himself. “Yeah, right. Now I remember. All I know was that he was sticking to her like glue.”

  “Plant yourself outside the high-rise,” Maddox ordered. “The second he ‘unglues’ himself and goes somewhere without her, you know what to do.”

  “What if he doesn’t? Unglue himself,” Sorell elaborated when there was no reply on the other end.

  “Then kill them both,” Maddox snapped. “Do I have to do your thinking for you, too?”

  Before Sorell could answer, the connection was terminated.

  “Sure thing, boss,” Sorell said sarcastically into the phone as if he were still talking to the other man. Frowning, he tucked his cell phone back into his pocket and stepped out of the doorway.

  He was going to be out here a long time, he thought. He had no illusions about his boss. If Sorell came back before he carried out the man’s orders, Maddox would have him killed.

  * * *

  “If I told you something, would you promise not to think badly of me?” Hannah ventured nearly two hours later as they were walking back from the restaurant where they’d had breakfast and then lingered over their second cups of coffee.

  Tate laughed and shook his head. Everything about this woman was endearing. “I don’t think it’s possible to think badly of you.”

  She blushed in response and he watched her skin take on a rosy tint. He felt his heart swell again. She had that effect on him.

  “I like it here,” she confided in a low voice, as if what she was sharing with him was a secret. “I think I would like to stay a little longer.”

  No more than I’d like you to stay, he thought, silently cheering. But he managed not to give himself away as he said out loud, “Well, right now, there’s not much of a choice,” he answered. “Despite the number of people around us, it’s easier keeping tabs on who’s coming and going here in New York than if you were hiding in a small town.”

  “A small town like mine,” she guessed.

  He nodded. “Like yours.”

  Maybe, Tate thought, just maybe, since she seemed to be settling in for now, he could find a way to convince her to remain with him for a while longer. A lot longer, he amended.

  He knew he shouldn’t be getting his hopes up, that someone as sheltered, as pure, as Hannah should go back to her family and friends as soon as possible, but he couldn’t help wishing that she wouldn’t. That she’d want to stay with him.

  Get a grip, Colton. You know the score, she doesn’t. She’s better off with her own kind.

  Knowing he was right didn’t make it any easier to accept.

  * * *

  He had no sooner walked into the apartment with Hannah than he heard his cell phone ringing.

  This can’t be good, he thought, though his expression gave nothing away when Hannah looked at him quizzically.

  Pressing his lips together to keep from frowning, Tate took his cell phone out and looked down at the caller ID.

  Nope, this isn’t going to be good, he thought.

  It wasn’t some random call, or a call from his sister, asking for an update. Instead, the call was coming in from his supervisor.

  Hugo Villanueva rarely called his people himself, preferring to delegate tasks as well as responsibility whenever he saw fit. That he was the one calling meant that something was up.

  “Colton,” Tate said as he took the call. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hannah watching him apprehensively. His body language must have given him away. He deliberately smiled at her, hoping to erase the worried furrows from her forehead.

  Hoping to do the same for himself.

  As with all his calls, this call was short and to the point. Villanueva was calling an impromptu meeting and wanted all hands on deck, including him. Tate looked at Hannah uncertainly as his supervisor gave him last-minute instructions.

  He didn’t like the idea of leaving Hannah alone—but there was no one he could leave her with while he attended this unscheduled meeting.

  When he heard Villanueva pause, Tate said, “I’ll do my best to be there.”

  “Don’t ‘do your best,’ just be there,” Villanueva ordered just before he ended the call.

  The man could use a few tips on sociability, Tate thought, putting his cell phone away.

  The call over, Hannah was instantly beside him. She searched his face. “Is something wrong?”

  He knew better than to brush her off with a trite “No, of course not.” “That was my supervisor. He wants to have everyone who’s working on this case come in for a meeting.”

  “Yes?” There was a question in her voice, as if she knew there was more and she was coaxing him to continue.

  He sighed, tamping down his agitation. “And I can’t bring you with me.”

  She continued looking at him, waiting for him to say something that explained the look on his face. “And?”

  “And I don’t like leaving you alone,” he ground out. Leaving her unattended went against all his instincts.

  Hannah smiled patiently, placing a gentling hand on his shoulder. For now, their roles had reversed and she was the reassuring one. “I’m not a child, Tate. I know how to lock
the door. And I won’t open it,” she added, sensing he needed to hear her assure him of that. “Go to your meeting with your supervisor. Hear what he has to tell you. I will be fine,” she stressed with a warm smile.

  He wasn’t convinced. This was making him extremely uneasy, as if he was going against his better judgment. “I don’t know—”

  Handing him his overcoat, Hannah began pushing him toward the door.

  “I do,” she insisted. “Go. I will be right here, waiting for you.”

  He supposed maybe he was overreacting and worrying too much. After all, there was a doorman in front of the building, and Langdon never allowed anyone in unless he either knew the person, or one of the tenants could vouch for the guy. No stranger was going to get by him.

  Putting his overcoat back on, he turned to look at Hannah. If anything happened to her, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. “And you promise you won’t open the door?”

  She held her hand up solemnly, making a pledge. “I promise I won’t even come near the door until I see you walking across the threshold.”

  “I guess that’ll have to do,” he said. His hand on the doorknob, Tate paused long enough to kiss Hannah soundly. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “And I will be here, waiting,” she promised. She closed the door behind him, then flipped the locks just the way he’d showed her.

  She started to walk away, then stopped. Intuition told her that Tate was still there, on the other side of the door. She doubled back.

  “Go!” she ordered through the door with a laugh.

  “All right,” she heard Tate say through the door. “Stay safe.”

  “You, too,” she answered, raising her voice so that he could hear. “You, too.”

  Giving it to the count of ten, she waited for any further indication that Tate was still hovering in the hallway.

  When there was nothing further, she smiled to herself and went into the kitchen. By the time Tate came back, he’d probably be hungry and she didn’t want him to feel they had to go out to another one of the restaurants that seemed to be absolutely everywhere she looked.

  There had to be something in this kitchen that she could use to make if not an exciting meal, at least a nourishing one.

  A ten-minute search through the refrigerator and the pantry told her that she just might be wrong about that. She was still foraging through the vast cupboard space when she thought she heard the front door opening again.

  At this rate, the man was never going to get to his meeting. With a shake of her head, she laughed. “What’s your excuse for coming back this time?” she wanted to know.

  “Didn’t know I needed one.”

  She stiffened as every hair on the back of her neck stood up. The deep voice didn’t belong to Tate, but she still recognized it.

  She felt sick.

  The voice belonged to one of the other guards who came into the motel on occasion. He was the one who made her skin crawl every time he looked at her. There was something exceedingly humiliating about the way his eyes swept over her.

  They’d found her.

  Frantic, Hannah looked around for some way to escape, or, barring that, somewhere to hide.

  Hannah remembered that she and Tate had escaped from his apartment in Philadelphia by climbing up those iron stairs that ran the length of the building. She hadn’t seen any of those stairs on the front of the building, but maybe they were located on the other side, like by the bedroom window.

  She made a quick dash for the bedroom, but her escape was abruptly cut short before it could fully get underway. The husky, bald man, moving incredibly quickly for a man of his girth, grabbed her before she could make it out of the room.

  Unlike when she’d been abducted from Paradise Ridge, Hannah fought back this time. Fought using her nails, her fists, her legs, anything she could. She was a whirling dervish, scratching, punching, kicking and biting.

  Because she’d surprised him by resisting in this fierce manner, Hannah managed to escape from him when she kicked him where it did the most painful good.

  Sorell cursed at her roundly as he howled in pain. Hannah darted out of the room, heading for the bedroom.

  Knowing he couldn’t come back without her, Sorell managed to rally and he caught her by her hair, yanking her back.

  The movement was so abrupt, it was all she could do not to scream as pain shot first through her scalp and then through every inch of her. Turning her around, he punched her in the face.

  Battered, with her head spinning badly, Hannah fought back like a tiger. It was then, just as she thought she could get free, that she felt the sharp prick of a needle going into the side of her neck.

  Instantly, her limbs felt as if they had turned into tree trunks, completely weighing her down. She couldn’t move and she was struggling to keep her eyes open, to remain conscious.

  It was a battle she was destined to lose.

  She thought she heard the bald man talking to someone, but she couldn’t turn her head to see who.

  The next moment, her surroundings faded to black and then completely disappeared.

  Chapter 15

  Well, those were two hours of his life he was never going to get back again, Tate thought as he made his way back to the building where he was staying. The meeting, in his opinion, hadn’t really been necessary. No new information had surfaced, only a rehashing of what he already knew and suspected that Villanueva knew that he knew.

  All right, he amended, turning down the next block and narrowly avoiding a dog walker and his Doberman, that wasn’t entirely true. No new helpful information had surfaced. What had come to light was that several more bodies of abducted young women had been found.

  Tate suppressed a sigh. This was going to upset Hannah. He knew she identified with them.

  He dreaded telling her, but he didn’t see a way around that. He wasn’t going to lie to her or keep anything from her. If he did, he risked losing her trust, which he was not about to do. He just needed to pick the right time to tell her, he thought, and that wasn’t going to be easy.

  The distant sound of a siren splintered his thoughts.

  The sound grew closer and he looked over his shoulder in time to see an ambulance, its lights flashing wildly, coming down the block.

  There was no reason in the world that seeing it should make him suddenly grow apprehensive. It wasn’t as if an ambulance, flying by traffic, was an uncommon sight in Manhattan. At any given moment, there were eight million people in the city with a great many of those people stuffed into every square block. The ambulance could have been summoned by any one of them for reasons that had nothing to do with Hannah.

  He pulled over, parked the car and broke into a run anyway, heading straight for the high-rise building where he’d left her.

  The feeling of dread and anxiety tripled the moment he saw the ambulance double-park right in front of his building.

  The next moment, as he came closer to the building, he saw that Langdon was missing from his post.

  Did that mean the doorman was inside, tending to whoever the ambulance had come for?

  Oh, God, don’t let it be Hannah.

  Still running, Tate finally reached the front door. The paramedics were already inside. Yanking the door open, he could see one of them kneeling over someone.

  Fear all but strangled him.

  I should have never left her, Tate silently upbraided himself. Why the hell didn’t I go with my instincts and take her with me?

  “Is she—?” The question died abruptly on his lips as he came to a halt directly behind the kneeling paramedic. The body on the ground wasn’t Hannah.

  It was the doorman.

  Langdon lay unconscious in a pool of his own blood. There was so much blood, it outlined the upper part of his torso. The paramedic was feeling for a pulse.

  “It’s thin, but it’s there,” he told his partner. And then he saw Tate. “Move back, buddy, and let us do our job,” he ordered impatient
ly. “You can look on from the sidelines.”

  Tate didn’t bother mentioning that he was a cop. He was moving too fast. There was only one reason anyone would try to eliminate Langdon: they didn’t want a witness.

  The lobby began to fill with tenants. Tate raced past all of them. The elevator was in use. Rather than wait, he took the stairs.

  Tate didn’t remember running up all those flights to his floor. He was only aware of praying.

  By the time he finally reached his floor, his legs felt like rubber—disembodied rubber. He couldn’t feel his feet and he wasn’t sure just how he did it, but he managed to cross the hallway to his apartment.

  There wasn’t even an attempt to hide his tracks. The gunman had left the apartment door wide open.

  The living room was a shambles. With its overturned table, scattered books and broken figurines—the figurines he’d given her as souvenirs of their night on the town—giving clear testimony that a fight had taken place here just within the two hours he’d been gone.

  Hannah hadn’t gone quietly with her abductor.

  Had to have been one hell of a surprise to whoever had been sent to get her. She’d gone from a docile, meek young woman who gave herself less rights than her shadow to a woman of spirit who couldn’t be easily overcome.

  He took comfort in the fact that Hannah had to be still alive. If Maddox had merely wanted her dead, Tate knew he would have been looking down at her body right now, not the aftermath of a battle.

  Okay, they’d taken her—but taken her where?

  Looking around his apartment, he hadn’t a clue.

  It had to be a place where Maddox felt he had the advantage over whoever might come looking for him—or for Hannah.

  Tate tried to think if there was anyone who would have been privy to that kind of information. But fear for Hannah’s safety was undermining his ability to think clearly.

  He took a deep breath, ordering himself to calm down, to look at this as if it was just another case to be solved and resolved with optimal results.

  But it wasn’t just another case, dammit. Hannah’s life was at stake and he couldn’t afford to be wrong, couldn’t afford to fail.