Driven by Fire

by Anne Stuart

  If they found her in time, so be it, but with luck everyone would assume the two of them had left together. Or been taken. By the time they found Jennifer, Soledad would be long gone, cell phone in hand, off to meet her lover.

  It was about fucking time.

  Chapter Twelve

  “They’re gone!” Remy broke into the room without his usual indolent grace.

  Ryder sat up, moving slowly, with deliberate care as he set the newspaper back on the desk. “What are you talking about?”

  Remy was looking harassed. “What do you think I mean? I went to pick up my little babysitting job and her room was empty. So is the room Jenny was staying in, and the place has been tossed.”

  Ryder wasn’t a man to let fury take over, but it was coming close. He rose slowly. “Interesting. I assume they took the phone you found last night?”

  “Of course. Though Parker would have known where she hid the thing, and I put it back in the exact same place after we dumped the information from it. There should be no reason for her to search the room. I’ve got Wilson and the others searching the house, but they’re gone, man.”

  “Why didn’t you keep a better eye on the girl? She was your responsibility.”

  “You should have let me sleep with her,” Remy drawled. “Then we wouldn’t have this problem.”

  Ryder made a dangerous noise in his throat. “Did they leave anything behind?”

  “Not as far as I can see. Not that either of them had much. We need to find out where the hell they went and how long they’ve been gone.”

  “And what they’re running away from,” Ryder added grimly, heading toward the hall and the stairs to the third floor. He had a good idea what Parker was running away from. He’d tipped his hand, and he’d gotten way too close in his guesses. There was no way she could know they had found the phone, but she had good instincts, and she would have realized her time was about up. It still didn’t explain why the room had been searched, but it didn’t matter. She’d been so damned easy to read when he’d softened her up. Once he got her in bed she’d spill everything.

  And where the hell had that idea come from? He wasn’t getting her in bed—that hadn’t been part of the plan. In fact, it would be a very bad idea, and he needed to remind himself of that fact. It wasn’t as if the subject wouldn’t come up—Parker and her little waif weren’t going to be on their own for long. He would find her and drag her back kicking and screaming and, hell, chain her to the fucking bedpost if he had to.

  His room was a shambles. The mattress had been torn off the bed, the pillows ripped open, drawers yanked out and dumped on the floor. He stared around him in fury. Why the hell would she think he was hiding something there? He certainly wouldn’t have put her in a room with secrets.

  Remy had followed him. “Do you think they left during the night?”

  He shook his head. “Parker made herself breakfast this morning—we’ve got her on the security cameras.”

  “I don’t suppose the ones on the third-floor bedrooms are working?” Remy said.

  “They’re for intel, not voyeurism. No, they weren’t turned on. We should have feeds for the hallways, though.” He grabbed his phone out of his pocket, pushed a number, and got Jack in the control room. A moment later he turned back to Remy. “Two people left an hour ago. Parker was bundled up in something, Soledad was looking pleased with herself, Jack says.”

  “Wasn’t he supposed to be watching?”

  “No, you were,” Ryder said pointedly. “The question is, if Parker wanted to run off, and she has her reasons, why did she take Soledad when she wanted us to deal with her? Unless Soledad is in on it too.”

  “Do you hear that?” Remy demanded suddenly.

  “Hear what?” A moment later the sound came. It was a muffled thudding noise from the direction of Soledad’s room.

  Remy was on his heels as he stalked back into the smaller bedroom. The thumping noise was coming from the closet door, and he swore, striding across the room to open it.

  It was locked. The door splintered in one kick, and a body tumbled out onto the floor, trussed in duct tape and looking furious. Jenny Parker hadn’t run off after all.

  “Looks like your little waif isn’t the helpless unfortunate you thought she was,” he said, squatting down beside her. Her eyes were blazingly furious above the gag of silver tape, and he ripped it off, causing her to shriek with pain.

  “You have to go after her. I think someone kidnapped her,” Parker babbled, fury and clear embarrassment coloring her cheeks. “She was standing in the middle of the room, looking scared, and then someone hit me.”

  “Ma’am, you sure have had a lot of people beat up on you in the last three days,” Remy murmured, and Ryder glared at him before turning his attention back to Parker. He wasn’t in any hurry to release her from the rest of her bonds. “If you didn’t have a concussion before, you probably have one now.”

  “I’m fine,” she said in a panicky voice. “Get this stuff off of me so we can go after Soledad.”

  “Go after her?” Ryder echoed. “Why?”

  “Because she’s been kidnapped, you idiot,” she said, squirming in her bonds.

  He made no effort to release her. “She didn’t look coerced in the video feed. She walked out with someone I thought was you. In fact, you’re lucky you started making noise or you’d have been in that closet a lot longer.”

  “I’m so lucky,” she said bitterly. “Will you please release me?”

  Remy took a curious look at Ryder, then moved in front of him, the knife he always carried with him out and slicing through the tape before Ryder could stop him.

  The moment she was free she tried to stand, but she staggered, and Ryder caught her as she fell against him, all warm femininity and fury. He held her a moment until she steadied herself, and then she yanked herself free a bit too enthusiastically, so that she almost fell again.

  She managed to straighten up. “We need to go after her,” she told Remy. “I warned you she was in danger, and now someone got past your defenses and took her. I would have thought this would be the safest place for her, but apparently someone just waltzed in with nobody noticing. You should make sure no one took anything.”

  “No one’s touched the other rooms,” Ryder said coolly. “Just yours. Someone had to let her ‘kidnapper’ in. Was it you?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said bitterly. “If I had I wouldn’t have ended up in a closet.”

  “Possibly,” he said, eyeing her. She was still dressed in a pair of his boxers, a T-shirt, and one of his old flannel shirts, which came partway down her long thighs. She looked a hell of a lot better in his old clothes than he did, he thought, then banished the notion. He wasn’t going to be thinking about Ms. Jenny Parker’s undeniable attributes. Not unless he needed to use them.

  She was slowly pulling herself back together, and her gaze sharpened. “What do you mean, no one touched the other rooms?” she said. “Did someone . . . Did they . . .” Without another word she pushed past them, racing into the hall and into the trashed bedroom. She came to a halt, frozen in place, and a low wail came from her. “Oh, no!”

  “Go downstairs, Remy,” Ryder said suddenly.

  “I can help . . .”

  “Go back downstairs and help Jack with reconnaissance. No one’s to come up here until I say so.”

  She turned to look at him then, and everything was stripped from her face but the truth: disaster and real fear swamped her.

  He waited until Remy had gone. “You have every reason to look scared shitless,” he said in a quiet voice, crowding her back into the bedroom and shutting the door behind them, closing them in. “What did they take?”

  “Nothing.” It wasn’t even a good lie.

  “Don’t even try it,” he said. He was going to make her tell him the truth by any means at his disposal. He kept his voice steady, low, but she had the sense to recognize danger when it stared her in the face. “What did they take,
Parker? Who are you covering for?”

  “No one. Nothing!” she cried, looking completely guilty and utterly miserable. “We have to find Soledad. They’ll kill her . . .”

  “If ‘they’—whoever ‘they’ are—wanted to kill her, then we’d be finding her body and probably yours as well. You can count it your lucky day that they decided to simply truss you up like a turkey instead of slashing your throat. That would have been effective and quiet, and chances are we wouldn’t have found you until you started to smell.”

  She looked at him in horror. “Is that what you would have done?”

  “Yes. Which means your enemies aren’t as smart as I am.”

  “Aren’t you my enemy as well?” It was said in a small voice, devoid of hope, and he wasn’t about to give her any.

  “Yes,” he said again. “Just how much danger you’re in depends on how much you’ve lied. I’m going to ask you one more time—what did they take, and who are you protecting?”

  “Nothing . . .” He cut off the word by shoving her up against a wall, his arm across her throat, his body trapping her smaller one. He wasn’t using much pressure, but she wouldn’t know that. To her, in her panicked state, it would feel like she was about to die.

  “Tell me the truth. If you think Soledad was kidnapped, then we need to know why.”

  “I don’t know why they took Soledad. She didn’t even know I had the . . .” Her voice trailed off, and then she looked up at him defiantly. “The phone,” she said.

  Releasing his hold, he took a step back. She looked small and helpless for a moment, but he wasn’t about to make that mistake. Jennifer Parker had more balls than half his men.

  He moved away from her, shoving the mattress back onto the bed, kicking a gutted pillow out of the way before he turned back to her. He didn’t worry that she’d try to run—he kept his body between her and the door at all times, and if she tried it, Remy or Wilson would catch her before she made the front door. They wouldn’t like it, but they’d do their duty.

  “You mean the phone you had on the boat,” he said in a low, dangerous voice. It wasn’t a question. “I thought you were using it to call your confederate. But it wasn’t your phone, was it?”

  She was watching him warily, not certain what to make of him, which was the first smart thing she’d done today. She’d probably never run into anyone as ruthless in her life, even with her family’s criminal background. She didn’t say anything.

  “Was it?” he repeated, not raising his voice. He didn’t need to. She shivered in reaction. He was one scary motherfucker when he wanted to be, and right then he wanted her scared shitless.

  “No.” Her voice was very quiet.

  “Whose was it?” If she was going to keep giving him monosyllabic answers, he was going to have to shift this into high gear, and he didn’t want to have to go there. But he would if necessary. He always did what was necessary.

  She looked up at him with a sudden flash of defiance. “I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Wrong answer,” he said, and a moment later he’d slammed her down on the bed. There was nothing sexual in it—he just needed her immobilized for what he had to do. “Who are you covering for?”

  He twisted one arm behind her back, and he knew it had to hurt, but not nearly as badly as he was about to hurt her if she didn’t give him the right answers.

  “No one. It was nothing. I didn’t . . .”

  He knew interrogation techniques, and he knew when coldhearted determination could get him what he wanted. He could have seduced her into telling him the truth, but it would take too long, and for some reason he didn’t want to use sex as a weapon, effective as it could be. Not with this woman.

  He knew how to hurt her, how to cause exquisite pain without leaving a mark, and he began to exert pressure on her other arm, enough that it cut off her words until she was panting with the effort not to cry out.

  “You didn’t what? Didn’t traffic third-world children and women into a life of slavery? Do you know how long a child lives as a sexual slave? The average life expectancy is seven years. Seven years of hell.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with it!” she cried. He increased the pressure, and tears of pain started in her eyes. “It wasn’t me.”

  “Then who was it?” He didn’t give her a moment to consider it, twisting her arm. “Who?”

  “He didn’t know what he was doing,” she said desperately. “He got in over his head—someone took advantage of him.”

  “Fuck your excuses,” he said icily, twisting again, and she let out a low, keening wail of pain. “Who is it? What does the cell phone have to do with it?”

  “Nothing . . .” She screamed then, but it didn’t matter. If they heard her downstairs—and chances were they wouldn’t, given the soundproofing in this place—they’d simply ignore it. “Stop,” she begged him. “Please, God, stop . . .”

  “Then tell me what I want to know. Who are you covering for? Whose phone is it?”

  She bit her lip, a useless attempt to keep the words back, and he wondered if he was going to have to do some real damage in order to make her talk. She was more stubborn than he could even begin to guess.

  “So Miss Goody-Two-Shoes isn’t so good after all. Did you spend all your time helping the victims as a way to expiate your sins? Trust me, it doesn’t work. You can’t make up for what thousands upon thousands of women and children go through, and no one who’s involved with it deserves a do-over. You understand me?” He shook her slightly, and she shuddered, staring up at him, her eyes glazed with fear and pain.

  “I can’t . . .” she began, and he’d had enough. He twisted again, and her high, keening wail made him want to throw up. He hated this, but nothing would show on his face but cold determination, no matter how much he hated this.

  “You can and you will. Or you really won’t like the consequences.”

  Her bitter laugh was thick was tears. “Unlike this torture? What are you going to do, rape me?”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, hurting you is not a turn on for me.” He thrust his hips toward her, knowing arousal was the last thing on his mind. He released her hurt arm for a moment, only to catch her wrist with his other hand, holding the two together. “If you don’t start talking I’m going to have to become creative, and those things leave marks and scars, and not just on your body. I think it’s time you told me what’s going on before we go to a place you’ll never come back from.” He put his hand on her throat, exerting pressure. “Tell me,” he said, his voice low and vicious, devoid of humanity or mercy. “Tell me.”

  She broke, as he knew she would. “My brother,” she gasped beneath the pain. “My brother Billy.”

  He released her throat immediately, knowing he wouldn’t have to hurt her any more, knowing he shouldn’t feel sick inside. “Tell me.”

  Tears were pouring down her face, tears of pain and shame. “He’s my baby brother—he didn’t know what he’d gotten himself into. He had a gun, and I knew you’d shoot him as you . . . you killed those other people on the boat.”

  He didn’t disagree. “What did you do?”

  “He was hiding under the desk when you came in. I just wanted to give him a second chance,” she said brokenly. “Everyone makes mistakes in their lives,” she said, a plea for understanding in her voice, one that left him entirely unmoved.

  “You treacherous bitch,” he said coldly. “What about the phone?”

  “He wants it back. He said it contained names, information, and if it got into the wrong hands he’d go to jail.”

  “He’d be lucky if he made it as far as jail,” Ryder snapped. “And you still think he’s innocent? Next thing you’ll be telling me he’s a victim just like the people on that ship. I strongly suggest you don’t. Where was the phone?”

  “Under the mattress.” Her voice crumbled, finally admitting the truth, and he wanted to curse, to shake her, yell at her.

  He’d done enough to her. He levered
himself off the bed, and she immediately curled into a fetal ball, hugging herself and her damaged arm, refusing to look at him.

  Ryder was furious, with her for lying and making him hurt her, with himself for hurting her. And now there was a missing woman and the incriminating phone, and he had no choice but to go after both, when all he really wanted to do was get Ms. Goddamn Parker out of his life. When all he wanted to do was pull her shivering body into his arms and hold her.

  No one hurt people like Jenny Parker on purpose like that, not the way he had. The sheer psychic shock of it was probably more debilitating than any pain he’d inflicted on her body. The pain was transitory, the disillusionment permanent. She now realized that people did such things to each other without a second thought, and it could happen again. She’d never feel safe.

  “I’ll have Emery bring you some clothes. You can’t keep wearing my cast offs,” he said in an expressionless voice.

  She didn’t lift her head. He could see only part of her tear-streaked face, and he kept his face impassive, feeling sick inside. “I’ll be leaving tonight,” he added in the same dead tone. “You’ll stay put and behave yourself.”

  “No,” she said, shocking him. He would have thought he’d stripped all the fight from her. “You’re not going anywhere without me. You need me to find the cell phone.”

  “I don’t think it’ll be that hard to find a phone with the New Orleans Saints on it,” he drawled.

  “They get rid of the case, and then it will look like any other smartphone. I’m the only one who can be sure.”