by Roma, Laurie
“I ran a trace on both of their cells but got nothing. They must be turned off. Katie wouldn’t turn her phone off,” Nick said. “Her family has a rule that she is always supposed to leave it on when she’s out. She wouldn’t forget that, and she never forgets to keep it charged either. Something must have happened to them.”
“I called Lynx and it went to voice mail, too,” Slade added.
“So did I,” Rock said over the line. “Reboot her phone.”
“What do you mean?” Nick demanded. “I just told you their phones are off.”
“That’s what I was planning to do,” Slade said, ignoring Nick. “Let me call you back in five.”
“Got it,” Adrian confirmed. “We’ll be waiting.”
Slade hung up the phone then turned to Gage, studying him.
Gage wanted to punch the bigger man for looking so damn normal. So damn calm. He didn’t seem worried that his friend was missing when Gage felt like he was going out of his mind.
“How much do you care about Lynx?”
“What the fuck? Seriously? You’re standing here asking me that when I feel like I’m going fucking crazy because I’m afraid something’s happened to them and you don’t seem like you give a damn? And don’t call her that.”
“I’ll call her whatever I fucking want. Lynx is family to me, now answer the question,” Slade snapped, finally showing some expression.
Gage blew out a breath, wishing he could punch the other man. He struggled to control himself and leash the crazy so he could focus on what was important. He needed to find Mikayla and Katie. That was all that mattered. “I think I’m falling in love with her. Christ, I know I am.”
Slade nodded. “Good answer. Come with me.”
“Where?” Gage asked, grinding his teeth as he was forced to ask the question to Slade’s back since the man was already walking away again.
They followed Slade into the main foyer and watched as he went to the wooden paneling under the large staircase. Slade pressed on a panel of the wood, and Gage watched in amazement as the wall slid open to reveal a hidden elevator. They got in and Slade pressed his palm down on the blank panel that looked like glass. The glass panel lit up and scanned his palm. He lifted his hand as numbers appeared on the screen and quickly pressed in a sequence.
The door of the elevator slid shut and with barely a jerk, the elevator sank two floors below the house without seeming to move. When the doors opened Slade moved fast, leading them through to the security center.
“I’m showing you this because you love her,” Slade said. “But remember, there are about a hundred different ways I can kill you without leaving a mark if you ever tell anyone what you’ve seen here.”
“Yeah, like that is something I’d ever forget,” Gage muttered as looked around the security center below the cabin in awe. Both he and Nick stared at the arsenal of weapons on the back wall with trepidation.
“Who the fuck are you people?” Nick demanded. “As an officer of the law I—”
Slade turned to him. “We’re IAD.”
“Shit,” Nick growled. “I knew it. I fucking knew it!”
“What?” Gage asked, gripping his hair with his hands in exasperation. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means your girlfriend is a spy! A goddamn super secret spy!”
“So the fuck what? All I want to know is how to get them back!” Gage yelled out.
“Don’t you understand? Mikayla probably put Katie in danger!” Nick explained to Gage then glared at Slade. “Are you running some sort of operation right now? You son of a bitch, if you put Katie’s life at risk because—”
“You’re going to want to be very careful about what you blame Lynx for.” Slade spoke softly, but the tone of his voice was clear. He was getting pissed off, and they didn’t want a pissed-off Marco Sladerman to deal with. “Lynx is on medical leave recovering from an injury. She’s not involved with anything that could have caused someone to take her. Now, if you are done bitching perhaps we can focus on finding them.”
Ignoring Nick’s glare, Slade turned to Gage. “What car did they take?”
“Katie’s. But the title is under my name,” Gage answered. He gave the information and Slade entered it into the search program, remotely turning on the vehicle’s GPS system. His fingers flew over the keyboard then typed in another set of numbers, startling Gage and Nick as Adrian and Rock Savage’s faces popped up on one of the monitors on the wall.
“I’ve got their vehicle tagged and I rebooted her phone. Both at the same location. I’m sending you the coordinates now,” Slade said, avoiding any greetings and jumping right to the salient information.
“Got it,” Adrian confirmed. “I’m heading out to go check it out. Tag me on my phone and keep me updated.”
Slade, Gage and Nick could see Adrian leave the room behind Rock, who frowned back at them. “Why take them? At first I thought this had to be connected to the thefts at Cryton Dynamics. Lynx did a walk-through this morning. The VP of logistics Arvan Kelner rang her bell, but I did some cross checking this afternoon, and the guy is clean. Now, I’m not so sure. But even so, she is just consulting. We’ve been on this case for a week. Why take her?”
“What is Cryton Dynamics?” Gage asked. Rock quickly explained what he and Adrian were working on and why they were in Denver.
“You’re right, that doesn’t make sense. I think this has to do with the missing women,” Nick said, calmer now as he slid into cop mode. “There’ve been twelve missing women in the Denver area in the last two months and this is too similar to the other cases to ignore.”
“How can you guys be so fucking calm about all this?” Gage raged at them. “It has to be the same guy! We have to find whoever took them and we’re not gonna do that just sitting here!”
Slade sent him a hard look. “We have to figure out who the fuck that is before we run out there looking for them. The only way we’re going to do that is to narrow down the who, the why, and the where, so sit down and shut the fuck up if you aren’t going to help.”
Nick gripped his shoulder. “I want to get them back just as much as you, Gage. But Slade is right. We need to figure out where to start looking.”
Gage pulled away but didn’t sit. Instead he began to pace the room like a large jungle cat, energy humming through him that pushed him to do something, anything.
This was killing him.
They had to do something!
“I knew that woman was going to get herself into trouble. Even on vacation, she can’t seem to help herself,” Slade muttered. “I’m going to conference in Bishop. Hold on.” He dialed a number, and a few seconds later Brett Michaels’s scowling face popped up on the monitor next to Rock’s face.
“This better be good,” Brett barked out.
“We’ve got a problem,” Slade began.
Brett snorted. “Tell me about it. I’m in El Paso dealing with a clusterfuck of my own. Fucking Trinity… That crazy bitch was tired of waiting, so she blew off Steele and got herself counted as one of the illegals paying to be brought over in the last shipment.”
“Christ. This is the Alvarez op?” Rock asked.
Agents Lucian Steele and Katrina “Trinity” Cross had been working to take down the Alvarez cartel in Mexico over the last few weeks. Besides running drugs, the cartel had taken over a large portion of the coyote business of running illegal immigrants over the border into the US. Recently they started kidnapping the young women and men and selling them off as slaves instead of simply taking the money to smuggle them into the country.
Brett nodded. “We needed the find out who the end buyer was for this bullshit before we shut it down. Trinity put a couple of skin tags on herself before she got taken so we could track her to the source. What she didn’t count on was four of those animals locking themselves in the back of the truck with them on the trip over so they could sample the products on the long drive over. They tied up the illegals and tried to take a shot at Tri
nity and another young girl.”
“I’m guessing Trinity took care of them,” Rock said.
Brett sighed. “She did, but they messed her up first. When we got to the buyer’s warehouse, we opened the truck to find a group of traumatized illegals, four dead bodies, and our girl, stabbed and beat to shit.”
“Fuck. Is she okay?”
“She’s in surgery. I’m at the hospital waiting for an update while Steele oversees the cleanup with the local LEOS. They say she should be okay, but can you imagine being stuck in the back of a hot truck for hours with four dead bodies…in the dark? I swear to god, these female agents are going to be the death of me.”
“Speaking of,” Rock began then cleared his throat. “Slade has something he wants to tell you.”
Fucking Rock.
Slade cursed and crossed his arms over his massive chest. “Lynx is missing.”
Brett’s face cleared of all expression as his hard eyes bore into theirs even through the screen. “I’m sorry. I must have heard you wrong because it sounded like you just said that Lynx, the woman who is on fucking vacation, is missing? She’s not a goddamn set of keys! How the hell did you manage to lose her?”
“She was in Denver this morning then went to lunch with Katie Stark. No one has seen or heard from either of them for hours. We’ve tracked their car and found it in a parking lot in the city. We’ve tried tracing their phones, but we’ve got nothing. Bishop, there are women going missing all over the fucking place around here.”
Brett let out a string of curses. His image bounced on screen as he began to pace and he jerked at his hair like a man under extreme strain. “Fuck! I told you. These women are going to kill me! Give me the basics of the missing women.”
Slade gave a concise recap of all the information they had then Brett nodded. “Bring up the tracking program.”
“Her phone is where the vehicle is,” Rock said.
“It’s not for that. Did she take her cane with her today?”
Rock nodded. “She had it with her during her visit.”
“I made her promise she would use it today while she was out,” Gage added.
Brett’s eyes narrowed. He scowled as he finally saw Gage and Nick standing behind Slade in view of the camera. “What the hell are those two doing in the ops center? Slade, have you lost your damn mind?”
“They’re here for a reason. I’ve read them in on the basic,” Slade replied. “It’s Gage’s sister that’s gone missing and he’s…involved with Lynx.”
“Oh sweet baby Jesus, are you fucking kidding me? My agent and my damn neighbor. Of course!” They saw Brett look away from the screen at someone they couldn’t see. “What are you looking at?” he barked out then glared back through the monitor. “There is a tracker in her cane. Type in tracker “MLL2013.”
Rock’s eyes widened. “Does Lynx know it’s there?”
“Hell no,” Brett scoffed. “She’d have my balls for breakfast if she did. Besides, it wasn’t my idea. It was her uncle, the commander, that did it. He told me after the fact.”
“Got it,” Slade confirmed. “Passcode?”
“Passcode is ‘stubbornlynx.’ No space.”
Slade snorted in amusement as he typed in the code and waited for the program to run. His breath hissed out in frustration when nothing came up. “Nothing. She’s either somewhere they’re blocking the signal, or they found the tracker.”
“No way they found it,” Brett countered. “They have to have her in a secured location. Keep checking it and send me any updates. I’m on the next flight out and will be there shortly.”
As the screen went blank when Brett signed off Gage felt an overwhelming sense of helplessness surge through him that almost brought him to his knees. That was his sister out there and the woman he… Shit. Yes, he loved her.
He loved Mikayla like he never thought he’d ever love a woman. And like he’d feared, he loved her like a fucking madman. Every second that ticked by without knowing if she was hurt or still alive was driving him insane. It was debilitating. He simply didn’t understand how to deal with this kind of fear.
Gage didn’t care if he knew her for a year or a day. He loved Mikayla and he couldn’t imagine not getting the chance to tell her. Now, all he could do was wait and pray that they found them in time.
Chapter Fourteen
Mikayla floated in a sea of pain as time seemed to stand still. She lay on the bed, flexing her muscles to try and bring the feeling back to her rigid limbs. Since the men had left the room she had time to consider the conversation she had overheard while they thought she was still under, and one thing was clear.
Time was running out.
She had inadvertently walked into a whole shitload of trouble and brought Katie with her. Mikayla would never forgive herself if anything happened to the younger woman and she prayed that she would be in time to get them the hell out of this mess. They’d been missing for hours now and she was confident that her friends would be looking for her. The only question was, would they find them in time?
The paralyzing drugs slowly wore off as she struggled to regain control of her body. Before Dr. Ellis had returned to the room shortly after everyone had left, stating to one of the guards that he had to change her saline bag. He had done so but had also injected something into her IV that had her blood boiling in her veins after he left.
At first she thought he was trying to kill her but soon realized that whatever he had given her was making her recover faster. The uncomfortable tingles had spread and changed to sharp needles of agony that had her muscles twitching painfully.
It was to her advantage that she had until tomorrow until the others came back, but until then she still had two guards to deal with. Dr. Robert Ellis was a different story. He was still an unknown quantity in this equation. She’d have to be very careful how she proceeded.
Mikayla didn’t know what to think about him. It seemed like he was as much of a victim in all this as she was, and yet he was still to blame for the creation of what sounded like one of the most despicable drugs ever made. She decided she would try to save him if she could, but if it came down to it and he posed a threat to her and Katie’s safety, she would take him out.
Relief flooded through her when her eyes finally opened. That relief disappeared quickly at the sight of the room she was being held in. The only light was filtered through the crack at the bottom of the wooden door and from a single oil lamp on the table. The dim light cast shadows throughout the room and increased the creepy feeling that had chills running down her spine.
Yeah, she was fucked all right.
Looking around, she could tell she was in a cellar of some sort by the damp chill in the air and the stone walls that were imbedded into the dirt mixed with sheets of plywood. After a closer inspection the underground room looked like it had been structured out of an old abandoned mine shaft.
On one hand, it was good that the room wasn’t highly secure with only a door and lock keeping her inside. There were no cameras or anything that would track her movement inside. She’d have no problem busting out of there, except for the guards waiting on the other side of the door. On the other hand, the room was creepy to the extreme and she tried not to think about what had happened to the women who had been held there before her.
The room was sparse with nothing but a bed, a movable tray table, and a few machines she was hooked up to that monitored her vitals, and chains hanging from the ceiling and walls. It was a room situated for one purpose.
Torture.
Oh yeah, it was straight out of a nightmare.
Sheer dread tried to worm its way into her heart as ugly memories began to slither into her mind, terrorizing her with their debilitating oily residue. She allowed herself five long seconds of fear before she mentally slapped herself into gear.
She had to fucking get herself together and escape this hell hole.
She had to survive.
Mikayla braced herself as she heard the
sound of a key entering the lock on the door and watched through slitted eyes as a man entered the room. By the look of him she guessed that it was Dr. Ellis. He was sporting a rather painful-looking black eye and various bruises that showed on his face and neck. He closed the door and walked toward her carefully, like a man who had recently been injured and was careful how he moved his body.
Yeah, he was a victim too.
“Ms. Lincoln? Are you awake?” he whispered.
Mikayla debated with herself for a moment then chose to go with her gut. She opened her eyes and stared straight back at him. Her decision paid off as he visibly relaxed. Robert was a young man, far younger looking in person than he was in his photos. It could have been because of the bruises and the beaten look on his face. Either way, Dr. Ellis was clearly not a willing participant in this madness.
“Oh, thank god. I gave you a shot of adrenalin earlier, hoping that it would help kick the other drugs out of your system faster. I noticed your limbs twitching when everyone was in here last and knew that I needed to try and get you mobile as soon as possible.”
“Why…” Mikayla began but had to swallow again before she could continue. Her throat was so dry it was difficult to speak. “Why are you helping me?”
“Here, let me give you some water.” Robert pulled a water bottle out from a pocket in his cargo pants and held it out to her. She reached out her hand, and her arm trembled at the strain. She hesitated before taking it, eyeing him cautiously.
He gave her a small smile. “It’s safe, Ms. Lincoln. It hasn’t been opened yet, but I could take a sip to show you if you don’t trust me.”
“Call me Mikayla.” The fact that she was dying of thirst outweighed her suspicion of him and she allowed him to twist off the cap of the bottle so she could roll to her side to drink from it. She took small sips that tasted like ambrosia and fought down the desire to guzzle the entire bottle.
“I’m going to have to take out your IV and umm, the catheter.”