“Okay then,” she said, pulling her keys from the ignition and slipping them into her pocket.
She unbuckled her seatbelt and opened the driver’s side door, stepping out into the cool morning air. She heard one of the back doors of the car open, and as she walked around the hood, Cassandra spotted Hardy moving into place off to the side of the front porch. She shook her head to herself and continued on her way to the front door; it was painted a creamy white, and looked like it had been done fairly recently—there was a smudge of enamel on the brick pavers that made up the patio. Cassandra glanced at Hardy; he was half-crouched out of the view of the door.
Am I really doing this? What if someone other than Riley answers?
She pressed her lips together, thinking as quickly as her tired mind allowed. She wasn’t sure what Hardy would do to her if she didn’t go along with his plan, but instinct told her that she wouldn’t enjoy his reaction. She took a quick breath to steady her nerves and lifted her hand. Glancing one more time in Hardy’s direction, Cassandra knocked on the door with a quick tap-tap-tap of her knuckles. She took a step back and waited, straining her ears to hear any kind of reaction from inside. There was nothing. She looked around; there was an old, weathered SUV parked in front of the driveway; her Nissan was barely visible behind it.
Cassandra knocked again, a little harder this time. Her heart beat faster in her chest, but before her apprehension could descend into panic, she heard the lock in the door turn over, and the next moment, the door started to open.
She put a polite smile on her face as a man appeared. He was dressed in pajama pants and a washed-out tee shirt. Unlike Jack Hardy, the man at the door had started to go a little soft around the middle; he had the start of a beer gut and his arms were not as starkly defined, though there was still muscle there under the skin. He had dark hair that was starting to show signs of gray, cut into a high and tight, and thinning at the close-cropped temples. Where the sleeves of his tee shirt ended, tattoos covered the man’s arms, faded a little from time and sun. He frowned, looking at her in confusion.
“Can I help you?” The man’s frown deepened and then something like recognition came into his dark brown eyes. “Hey—I’ve seen you on the news, haven’t I? You’re that woman. The one…”
Before the man could get any further, Cassandra saw Hardy break cover, and before Cassandra’s stunned eyes, swiftly put the man into a chokehold.
“Jack?”
The man’s voice came out in a surprised gasp. He tried to bend forward and throw Hardy off—he was maybe three inches taller than Hardy, but Cassandra saw immediately that he wasn’t in the same kind of shape. She watched in mute shock as the two men struggled. Finally, Hardy raised a fist up and over his head. The fist descended and Cassandra heard a grunt—she wasn’t sure if it was from Riley or from Hardy—and the dark-haired man went still on the floor of the patio.
Looking around with a darting gaze, Hardy closed the door behind them and stood up. Cassandra bit back a scream as panic worked its way up her throat. Hardy reached down, lifting the prone man off of the floor and maneuvering him into a fireman’s hold.
“Come on!” Hardy’s voice left his lips in a hiss.
Numb, and shocked beyond reason, Cassandra followed in her kidnapper’s wake. Hardy hauled the back door of the car open and lowered Riley onto the seat, securing him with a seatbelt. Cassandra almost laughed at the precaution, thinking how bizarre it was in that particular moment.
“Get in the car, Cassandra,” Hardy told her firmly.
She walked as quickly as her rubbery knees would allow, picking her way around the front of the car. Almost without knowing what she was doing, she opened the driver’s side door and climbed in, slipping her keys out of her pocket. At that point, her shock took over again, and she simply stared at the shiny look of the metal in her hands, momentarily unable to comprehend what she needed to do with them.
“Drive! Drive, for crying out loud.”
Hardy’s voice jolted her out of her shock and Cassandra put the key in the ignition. She started the car up and, in a series of automatic movements, reversed out of the driveway and turned onto the street.
“What are we doing?” she asked. She felt the car shifting as Hardy did something in the back seat, and Cassandra found she didn’t exactly want to know what he was doing to the other man. “That’s Riley?” She glanced in the rearview mirror hesitantly.
“Yeah,” Hardy said, breathless from the effort of his second kidnapping of the day. “Get the hell out of this neighborhood. I don’t need someone seeing us and taking down your plate number or something.”
Cassandra focused on the road in front of her as she navigated her way out of the neighborhood. In the back of her mind, she realized that—unwillingly or not—she was now an accessory to a kidnapping. Can a kidnap victim also be a kidnapper? The questioned teased her frozen brain for a few moments until Cassandra decided that she would have to work out the ethics and morals of her situation later.
She drove for what felt like an hour, though the clock informed her that it had only been about fifteen minutes.
“Pull over here,” Hardy said from the back.
It was a deserted home lot on a seedy-looking residential street, the grass full of weeds. Cassandra pulled onto the lot and Hardy sprang into action. In the rearview mirror, she saw him unbuckle Riley’s seatbelt and maneuvered him out of the back seat. For a moment, Cassandra wondered if Hardy had somehow not just knocked the other man out but instead killed him outright. Am I an accessory to a murder now? The thought chilled her.
“Open the trunk,” Hardy called through the back door of the car.
Cassandra obeyed without even thinking about it. Hardy opened up the trunk the rest of the way, and Cassandra watched as he gathered up the larger man and lowered him into the trunk of the car. Hardy slammed down the lid of the trunk and hurried back to the back door of the car, throwing himself across the seat.
“Oh my God, I have a body in my trunk,” Cassandra said, cold fingers dancing down her spine. Her stomach lurched inside of her, and she thought she might be sick.
“Not a body, a person,” Hardy told her firmly. “He might have to become a body later.” Cassandra shuddered. “Get moving. If we hang around here too long someone might decide to investigate.”
Cassandra got the car turned around and back onto the road, her hands trembling on the wheel. While her fear of Hardy had become mixed with confusion about his motives during their long drive to his former best friend’s house, Cassandra now felt more frightened of the man in her back seat than she had been at any other point in the short time she’d known him.
Cassandra drove up the street until she came to a stop sign. Hardy’s head popped up in her rearview mirror.
“Okay,” he said, his voice sharp and tense. “Turn right up here.”
Cassandra felt as if she had somehow managed to suffer frostbite in her brain; her hands and feet moved in a kind of automatic reaction to the words that Hardy barked at her.
The residential neighborhoods began to fade away, replaced by longer and longer stretches of empty lots and almost-rural patches, cordoned off with industrial fences, as Cassandra followed the directions she was given. She never knew how long the drive was, but by the time she could sense that they were reaching the end of their journey, it felt as though they’d lost almost an hour.
“Turn in here,” Hardy said. His demeanor had relaxed somewhat as the space between them and Riley’s house had increased.
Cassandra reached the gate that Hardy wanted her to turn in at; a low complex of concrete and metal buildings lay behind a chain link fence. At the gate there was a metal box with a keypad.
“Okay…” Cassandra glanced back at Hardy. He frowned, hesitating a moment.
“Three-one-seven-five-two-nine,” he said quickly. Cassandra rolled down the window and punched in the numbers. The box beeped, and then the gate rolled aside with a metallic squeal. Cassandra pu
lled through, and then she was inside of the compound.
“Turn right,” Hardy said.
Shaking her head at the cryptic instructions, Cassandra did as she was told, turning right as soon as she fully cleared the entrance.
“Where are we going? What is this place?”
Hardy didn’t answer. Cassandra looked around; taking in the concrete walls, the pull-down doors, she realized it was some kind of storage facility. Isolated and anonymous, it was exactly the sort of place Cassandra would have expected a bounty hunter like Jack Hardy to know about.
“Follow the road down to the end and then turn left,” Hardy said.
Cassandra kept the car moving forward, watching row after row of austere units file past her windows.
“At the second intersection, turn right.”
Following Hardy’s instructions, Cassandra made so many turns that she couldn’t imagine being able to find her way out of the facility again. Hardy sat up in the back seat once they were well away from the road—at such an early morning hour, nobody was around.
“It’s up ahead,” he told her quietly. “Bay number 328A.”
Cassandra pulled up to the storage unit, glancing behind her in the direction of her trunk.
There’s a human being in my trunk, hopefully still unconscious. There cannot be anything good in this storage unit.
Cassandra’s stomach twisted inside of her, roiling with too much caffeine and the certainty that what she was about to participate in was much more than just a kidnapping.
“I think…I think I want to stay here in the car,” she said quietly. “And maybe get some sleep.”
“You’re coming with me,” Hardy told her. He opened the back door and in a quick, fluid movement he was through it.
Cassandra pressed her lips together, fighting down the misgivings she felt. Nothing about the isolated location, the sterile concrete and metal buildings, gave her any sense of comfort about what Hardy intended to do with—or to—Riley.
“Pop the trunk,” Hardy called from outside.
Closing her eyes, resigning herself to what she was fairly certain she was about to see, Cassandra reached down under the steering wheel and pulled the lever that unlocked the trunk.
Chapter Eight
Riley was, mercifully for them all, still unconscious. Cassandra watched as Hardy carried the big man towards the roll-up door of his unit. She took a quick, deep breath and opened the driver’s side door, unbuckling her seat belt and getting out of the car.
I hate this. I hate this. Why am I going along with this? What will he do to me if I refuse to watch what he’s about to do?
Closing the car door behind her, Cassandra slipped the keys into her pocket and watched as Hardy opened the padlock attached to the storage unit’s door.
If I’m a kidnapping victim, can I still be an accessory? The question swirled around in her mind as she walked towards the door, making her skin crawl.
“What is this place?” Cassandra asked quietly as Hardy started pulling up the door.
“Keep an eye on Riley,” he told her. Cassandra glanced at the unconscious man on the ground. “It’s one of a few storage places I have,” he continued. “The police don’t know about it—they never found it because I rent it under a fake name, and I pay cash.”
“Why would you rent a storage unit under a fake name?”
“Sometimes I need to do things without having my name attached to them,” Hardy said absently. “And I need a nice, isolated place to do them in.” Cassandra shivered.
As the door opened, she peered into the unit. It was obvious that there was very little being stored inside of it: she saw a chair, a beat-up lamp, and some restraints, including two pairs of handcuffs and the plastic strips the police sometimes used. Off to one side of the little room was a storage locker.
Hardy crouched down and picked Riley off of the ground, and Cassandra heard him grunt softly at the effort. She stood back and watched as Hardy carried Riley into the unit, depositing him in the lone chair and letting his arms fall to the sides.
“Pull the door down,” Hardy said, quietly, without even looking at her.
Cassandra hesitated for a moment; it was one thing to watch as Hardy did whatever it was he planned to do to Riley, but closing the door would be too much like actually participating.
“Did you hear me?” Hardy glanced at her. “We don’t have a lot of time to fuck around, Cassandra.”
She closed the door with a thump, her hands trembling slightly and her mouth dry, then turned around once more to see Hardy finishing up with Riley. He had tugged the tee shirt off of the other man, stripping him down to the waist. Riley’s tattoos, Cassandra learned, continued up his arms and along his shoulders onto his chest. She watched as Hardy secured each of Riley’s wrists and ankles to the arms of the chair with plastic handcuff strips, and then stepped back to evaluate his work.
Moments before, Cassandra would have said that there was nothing about the situation she was in that could possibly turn her on. But then, as he moved towards the small, metal locker, Hardy reached down and hauled his own tee shirt up, revealing a ripped, muscular torso; Cassandra thought that she could almost discern individual muscle groups rippling underneath his skin. Her mouth was dry, but in spite of herself, the sight of the man who had kidnapped her made her pussy more than a little wet as she stared in shock at the simple, brutal beauty of his body.
She shook herself, trying to push down the reaction she’d felt, and looked around the tiny, close space. Hardy opened up the locker and Cassandra saw sinister shapes inside: a torch, pliers, a poker, things her dazed, fearing eyes couldn’t quite take in.
Swallowing down against a rising current of nausea, Cassandra looked at Riley. The dark-haired man was still completely out, his head lolling forward, his hands slack on the arms of the chair. As she watched, hearing the clatter and clink of metal and plastic coming from the locker, Cassandra was seized with the suspicion that Hardy may have done his former friend more serious injury than he’d planned. Just as she was about to ask him, one of Riley’s hands twitched.
Chapter Nine
Jack
Jack hesitated in front of the storage locker, looking over the usual implements of “persuasion,” as he considered them.
I have to know. I have to get to the bottom of this. Even if they send me back to prison at the end of it—I have to know.
His hands tightened into fists and Jack clenched and unclenched them, breathing slowly and steadily. The prospect of treating Riley, the man he’d considered his brother for so many years, the way that he treated the scum he took in as a bounty hunter was a difficult one to swallow. Maybe I can just threaten him—maybe I won’t have to actually use any of this on him.
Jack remembered the daily tension of his life in the prison, the fact of his sentence: thirty years before he could even be considered for parole. Thirty years of his life gone, never to come back to him. Jack took a pair of pliers off of a peg in the locker and gripped them tightly, reminding himself that if Riley was the man who’d done this to him, he deserved to suffer for what his actions had put Jack through. He picked up a hunting knife, from one of the shelves in the locker and started to slip it by the hilt into his pocket.
“J-J-Jack?”
Hardy turned around and saw Cassandra, back against the wall, staring at Riley. He frowned. He had expected that Cassandra—someone who’d only seen the fringes of the ugliness in the criminal underworld—would be squeamish about what he planned to do, but he had thought she’d wait at least until he’d started interrogating Riley to start freaking out.
“Riley!”
Her trembling hand pointed across the room. Jack looked over at his former best friend, just as the man’s eyes opened. Jack unsnapped the strap on the knife and pulled it out of its sheath, advancing towards Riley in an instinctive reaction.
“Fuck,” Riley said, groaning.
Jack watched as the man strained against the handcuff st
rips, looking around as he slowly came back to full consciousness.
“Where am I?” Riley’s head turned and he caught sight of Jack. “Jack? Is that you? Where the hell am I?” He looked down at his arms, confusion washing over his features. “What the fuck, dude?”
Jack raised the knife, but something inside his brain turned over; Riley looked, to his trained eyes, to be genuinely confused. If he had done something, wouldn’t he know why I’d brought him here?
“You framed me for murder, asshole,” Jack said, trying to maintain the firmness in his voice. “You killed Laura Granger and pinned it on me to get back at me.”
For a second—the span of a few heartbeats—Riley continued to stare at him in confusion, silence stretching between them.
Then, as suddenly as he had awakened, Riley began laughing. First it came as a quick guffaw, before it deepened into a belly laugh, Riley’s head falling back as he howled.
Jack glanced at Cassandra. Her expression had changed from terror to smiling; it was an awkward, nervous grin, but it lit up her face, softening her features, making her eyes gleam. The tension in the room evaporated, and Jack put the knife back into its sheath, stepping towards Riley.
“Jesus, Jack,” Riley said between slowly fading peals of laughter. “I thought I was never going to see you again—I definitely never expected to end up on the wrong end of a knife from you.”
Jack couldn’t help himself; he felt his lips turning up in a grin.
“There was a point when you figured you’d be on the right side of a knife with me,” Jack pointed out, crossing his arms over his chest.
Part of his brain insisted that he still had to go through with this; that he had to know whether or not Riley had been involved. He remembered the way Riley had punched him the day that he’d found out about Adrianna, and the threats he’d got word about.
“That’s in the past, man,” Riley said, shaking his head. “And anyway, everything ended up working out, you know? Why would I hold a grudge?”
Steal The CEO's Daughter - A Carny Bad Boy Romance Page 16