You're It

by Shari J. Ryan

Relief…so much relief. “Just wanted to see how she was doing. Thanks for taking care of her, Sash.”

  “She is just fine. I love you Cali-girl.”

  I hang up the phone and let it drop onto the base of the sink as I throw my arms around Tango’s neck.

  Weakness. I’m so damn weak. He squeezes his arms around my waist and lifts me up, placing me down on the sink base. “Look at me,” he demands. “She’s safe, and if anyone comes near us, we’ll kill ‘em. We’re fine. Everything is fine.”

  I nod my head in agreement. “Okay.”

  “Say it,” he says, lifting the corner of his lips into the sexy grin that still makes my heart palpitate.

  “I trust you,” I say, giving him what he wants.

  “Hearing you say that is such a turn on.” His hands press against my back, holding me against him as his lips fall to my neck. “We need to be thinking clearer, and right now my head is so damn foggy.”

  “What are you suggesting?” I whisper into his ear.

  He lifts me up and pushes us into a small stall. His hands are tugging at my pants, tersely pushing them down to my ankles. Regardless of my lack of focus, I know what clears my mind too. I unlatch his belt and slide my hand down his pants until my fingers wrap around his girth.

  His teeth lock down over my earlobe and the soft groans in his throat make my mind blank.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TANGO

  I TURN HER OVER, pressing her hands up against the bathroom stall, taking in her perfect ass. More numbness. More perfection. I press my cock into her, watching the tips of her fingers turn white with her grip against the door. I lock my hands around her waist and plunge into her, hoping that the stall door is strong enough to hold us up. I can’t see her face, but I can hear her moans. She’s not shy, even if we are in a public ladies’ room. “Harder,” she groans. She reaches behind her and grabs my hand, bringing it down in front of her and between her legs. “There. Right there, baby.” I slide my finger inside of her, making her cry louder. The main bathroom door opens, but neither of us stops. We can’t stop. I pump harder. She screams louder. She bends over more, giving me more space, and I just about lose my shit when I hear Jags clear his throat.

  Moment is lost.

  “Don’t mean to interrupt you two crazy fucks, but your phone is going nuts, Tango. It’s Eli and the last text said ‘9-1-1’. “

  Cali reaches down for her pants and I pull out, trying to get my dick to soften, because even with Jags busting through the doors, I’m still hard as fuck. I turn around and take a couple of deep breaths while zipping my pants up. Holy fucking blue balls. Cali smoothes her fingers through her hair and whips the stall door open, coming face to face with Jags’s shit-eating grin. “I do the same thing when I’m pissed off. Fucking cures all.” Cali flips him off and moves over to the sink to wash her hands.

  “Call him,” she demands to me.

  I take the phone from Jags and punch him in the shoulder in the same moment. “Thanks for sweet sound effects,” he says.

  I dial Eli and wait for him to pick up, feeling the thundering of my heart start back up. He doesn’t call me, and he’s never texted me with a 9-1-1 message.

  “Hey, Sir,” I say as he picks up. He’s talking so quickly, I can’t make out a word of what he’s saying. “Slow down, man. I can’t—” My heart stops. Like literally fucking stops in my chest. My breath goes missing and the blood in my face goes cold. “How do you know?” I hang up on him. I can’t waste another second.

  “What’s going on?” Cali asks, her voice trembling.

  “Get in the truck.” Normally she’d force the answer out of me first, but she’s clearly terrified, as she should be. She’s about to be a hell of lot more terrified. “Go. Let’s go.”

  Clambering into the truck, Cali struggles to put her seatbelt on and finally flings it against the door before grabbing at chunks of her hair and dropping her head between her knees. “Tell me,” she grits her teeth.

  “I need you to calm down,” I tell her. I need to calm down. I need someone to tell me to calm the fuck down.

  Jags is sitting behind Cali and places his hands over her shoulders. “Breathe.” Jags, being the medic he is, has a way about him that tends to calm people down. When I tell someone to breathe or calm down, I get punched or slapped, usually by my beautiful wife. As Jags breathes with her, I see the color lighten in her cheeks and her head lift.

  “What did he say?” she asks.

  The only thing I can hear replaying in my head is the one rule Cali lives by: Know everyone. Trust no one. That’s for damn fucking sure. This is going to put her right back into that place. I’ve been working on her for four years now, trying to get her to see that it’s okay to trust some people, but shit! She can’t trust anyone, and I understand why it’s so difficult for her to even trust me.

  I’m flying down the highway, realizing I still haven’t given Cali an answer. Her gaze is burning a hole into the side of my cheek, and if I don’t give her some kind of response in the next minute, I’m going to have her fist through the side of my cheek instead.

  “Why are we going back to Sasha’s?” she asks, the volume of her voice escalating. “I swear to God, Tango, if you don’t tell me right now what’s going on I’m going to go fucking nuts.” I guess she’s giving me a warning before punching me in the face. I know that was my last warning, though.

  “I just need to make sure Tyler is safe,” I offer as a time kill.

  “I talked to Sasha no more than thirty minutes ago. What do you think could have changed from then to now?” She’s facing me, raging. Boiling. Jags’s hand is still on her shoulder. He knows nothing either, but he knows how my mind works. So does she, but she can’t control her anger.

  “It’s always better to err on the side of caution, Cali. We should just let the man make sure all is well before we continue this fiasco.”

  Her hand is on my arm now; her fingernails are digging into my skin. The heat from her contact is boiling and I can feel how angry she is. I can’t have her rolling into that house armed and ready to murder. This is such a lose-lose situation.

  I somehow manage to pull into Sasha’s driveway without telling Cali what Eli told me, but I have a feeling she’s going to bust down that door and assume the worst. Not that she’d be completely wrong, but it’s going to agitate the situation before it needs to be.

  We pull into Sasha’s driveway and Cali’s out the door before I can even put the truck into park. Jags chases after her, grabbing her by the arm to slow her down. “Chill, chill,” I hear him tell her. “Easy. We don’t know anything right now. Let’s let Tango do what he has to do before we start making people eat shit.”

  I walk around the side of the car and open up all of the doors, adjusting Tyler’s car seat so I can put her right in without having to fuss with the damn thing. I’m grateful Jags is here now. Backup might become a necessity. Sometimes it takes more than me to keep Cali under control.

  I ring the doorbell while also avoiding the look on Cali’s face—although, out of the corner of my eye, I can see the redness tinting her cheeks. I wait no more than twenty seconds before I start slamming my fist into the door. I can feel the rage bubbling in my stomach. It takes a lot to push me over the edge, but once I get there, I make Cali look like an innocent little bird.

  Jags releases Cali and pushes through the bushes in front of the house windows to look inside. Thank God the sun is rising, or we probably wouldn’t be able to see a damn thing. “The TV is on, playing Elmo or some shit. There’s a coloring book on the table with crayons dropped on the floor. And—”

  “And what?” Cali shouts over, her voice breaking apart. She rushes over to Jags and shoves him out of the way to look in. “She doesn’t have her shoes on, and she doesn’t have her Pooh bear. She left unwillingly.”

  “I was going to say, ‘There’s a fucking sidearm lying across the coffee table.’”

  In an instant, Cali is back in the truck, in
the driver’s seat this time, with the phone pressed up against her ear. By the time Jags and I get back into the truck, she’s thrown her phone across the dash and has the truck in reverse.

  “The fucking douchebag, Landon, isn’t who anyone thinks he is. Eli told me he works with the company in China. He’s been playing all of us for four years, but why now? That’s the goddamn question.”

  “How did Sasha not know? She had to have known. She just took Tyler in, knowing he was with them. Would she do that to me? Sasha, out of everyone in this whole messed up world, wouldn’t do this to me. I trust her. I fucking trusted her!” Cali shouts.

  “Babe, I know. We both trusted her.” My heart is pounding so hard. We don’t know where to go or how to find her. We can call the cops, but that means I’m going away too, which I’ll gladly do for my baby girl. “Call the cops.”

  Cali looks over at me with pain-stricken eyes. “But—”

  “Do it. There’s no question in my mind when it comes to her, Cal. You know this.”

  I watch a lump in her throat swell as she tries to swallow it. Tears form in her eyes and it damn near rips my heart out. “I can’t lose you again.”

  “This isn’t about us anymore, babe. This is about our little girl and I know what those sick fucks did to me for those nine months. I won’t allow them to do it to her.” Sure, they were nice to me while keeping me hostage, but they had me tied to beds with wires attached to every inch of my body for months. The must have drained and refilled my blood a dozen times, nearly killing me each time. They needed all the blood they could get so they could test for everything. It was so fucking brutal. Yes they rewarded me with money, and I was fucking happy to get out of there alive, but I will not let her go through that. There’s just no way. I haven’t told Cali every detail of what happened during that period of incubation because I felt like it wasn’t something she needed to know, and now I’m glad as hell I didn’t tell her.

  “I’ll call,” she croaks.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CALI

  WITH ONE HAND ON THE WHEEL, I press the emergency button on my phone. I’m going to be sick. After I’m told to state my emergency, I tell them my daughter has been taken. They ask me how long she’s been missing. I can sense the questions when I tell them it’s only been forty-five minutes and the people I left her with are the ones who have taken her. I can feel the doubt coming through the phone when I tell them I’m classifying my daughter as missing because her babysitters aren’t answering their phone and aren’t home. I believe I’m seconds from being told to try to find her for a bit longer before reporting her missing. I’m reminded that a person isn’t missing unless it’s been forty-eight hours. Except she’s three. “Sir, I know for a fact she’s been taken.” That’s all it took for the cop to ask me to pull over and wait for dispatch.

  “What else did my dad tell you, Tango?” I ask him, trying to keep my voice calm.

  “Only what I told you.” I divert my attention from calling Dad to typing a message to Sasha, careful not to drive off the side of the road. “Cali, watch the road. Quit texting while you’re driving. Want to get us all killed tonight?”

  I hear him, but I need to try and reach Sasha any way I can. “We’re fine,” I mutter, typing the four words I need to type.

  “Cali!”

  Me: Where are you, Sasha?

  I see the read receipt pop up on my phone, and for some reason it gives me a sense of relief—a very small sense of relief. The blinking dots appear, telling me she’s responding.

  Sasha: I had no idea. I had no idea. I’m so sorry, Cali. I’m so sorry. I don’t know where we’re going. Tyler is okay. She’s with me in the back seat.

  “Sasha responded,” I shout over to Tango. He snatches the phone from my hand to read it. He fumbles with my phone and makes a call from his.

  “Eli, give me the coordinates for this number,” he says, spitting off Sasha’s phone number. He opens up a notepad on my phone and waits, his eyes boring into the dash. He types a bunch of numbers into my phone and tosses it back to Jags, who does something with his phone. Within a minute, we have a direction.

  “Let me drive,” Tango demands. I pull over and hop out of the truck, passing him as he jumps into the driver’s seat. We’re out of the driveway and speeding down the street within seconds. My heart is beating so hard it’s making my ribs hurt. My baby girl is in trouble and I’m nowhere near her. I’ve never left her side. I shouldn’t have left her side. What the hell was I thinking? I grab the back of my neck, squeezing it, feeling the blood rush to my head.

  “We have to find her. We have to.”

  Tango places his steady hand over my bouncing knee. “We’re going to get her back.”

  “They’re pissed off at you, Tango. You pissed them off yesterday and now they have her. What if they hurt her? God, what if they fucking hurt her?” I’ll kill them. I’ll kill whoever touches her.

  Tango’s hand squeezes around my knee, but I don’t think he realizes his grip has tightened.

  “Five miles out,” Jags says from the back seat. I feel the speed of the truck accelerate and I watch Tango’s boot press the gas down to the floor. I’m holding onto the door and the dash, wishing the truck could go a lot fucking faster.

  “What kind of car does this dick drive?” Dick. What a joke. I thought Landon was this awesome guy. I thought he was perfect for Sasha.

  He was trying to date Krissy before he met Sasha. Before Krissy died.

  Holy fucking shit. He was trying to date Krissy. He was after her. This has all been a plan of his. How stupid am I? How did I let this slide by? I don’t let things by me. I don’t trust people and I trusted them with my baby.

  “Didn’t he have a BMW?” Tango asks me.

  “It wasn’t in the driveway when we got there,” Jags says.

  “It was probably in the garage. I think it’s a black SUV.”

  “Is that them?” Jags asks, his hand shooting out beside my face, pointing out the window. I squint into the horizon, seeing that the nearest vehicle is black. It could be them.

  “If he sees us, he’s going to speed up,” I tell Tango.

  I feel the release of the gas and the truck jerks backward. “We’ll stay at this distance so we can follow them.”

  Every part of me wants to jump out of the truck and run like a bat out of hell until I catch up. I realize it’s not humanly possible, but I need to do something and I feel so helpless right now.

  “He’s stopping,” Jags says. Why is he stopping? There’s nothing but fields of tumbleweed over here. I hear Jags fumbling with something in the back seat and I turn around to see what he’s doing. He’s going through the bag he brought and pulls out a case. “Binoculars,” Jags says. Why didn’t he pull them out five minutes ago? God. “He’s bringing them into the field. The woman has a rope around her wrists and he’s carrying Tyler,“ Jags says.

  Tango pulls the truck over to the side of the road, looking back at Jags, probably waiting for an update on what he sees. I can only see blurry figures. They’re too far away to make out what’s going on.

  I’m not waiting. I can’t. Screw this. I kick the door open, immediately feeling Tango’s hand clench around my wrist. I pull away from him, jumping out of the truck. I don’t give a fuck what Landon does to me. I’m getting her back.

  “Cali, stop.” I’m not stopping. He has a hold of me though and I’m pulling as hard as I can. “Stop it, goddammit. He could be armed.” I’m still pulling because I don’t care what he does to me. “He could hurt Tyler.” His grip loosens. He knows me well enough to know I’ll stop. He also knows me well enough to know I can’t breathe right now. “Take a deep breath.”

  “We’re wasting time,” I grunt. He removes his hand from my arm and places his palms up, warning me to take it easy. I hate when he does that. I hate that he’s always right.

  He reaches into the back seat and grabs his bag, pulling it up front. I’m pacing back and forth in small circles ne
xt to the door, trying my hardest to keep a focus on where they’re going. Where the fuck is he taking them?

  Tango steps out of the truck and prepares himself. There’s no way I can prepare myself.

  “Okay, are you ready?” Tango asks me, his eyes are wide and his brows arched as he stares at me through the open truck.

  “No, but let’s go.”

  He leads us to the opposite side of where Landon’s taking Sasha and Tyler, and we run at a quick pace until we reach a parallel angle to where they’re walking. “You need to go slow and be quiet,” Tango warns. I know this. I’ve run from enough people, I know how to be inconspicuous; although, there are only so many ways to be unseen in a big fucking open field.

  Tango leads the three of us across the street and as we reach the other side, I notice that the grass is at least two and half feet tall, which helps us a little. We crouch down as we continue toward them. They have about five hundred yards at this point, and I really want to know where the hell he thinks he’s going.

  Just as I think that, he stops. They all stop. Shit. Please don’t turn around. Landon looks over his shoulder in the opposite direction of where we are and then he places Tyler down on her feet. She’s crying. I can hear her crying from here and my chest is caving in, shattering. I promised her I’d never let anything bad happen to her, and now something really bad is happening to her.

  Landon drops the bag that’s over his shoulder and pulls out a small aluminum case. “Tango,” I whisper in a yell. He looks back at me and places his finger up against his lips.

  He wants me to be quiet and I want to scream at the top of my lungs.

  We’re only a couple dozen feet away from them now. Landon is focused on whatever is in his case, but Sasha has spotted us. She’s looking right at us with her eyes wide, shaking her head to say “no” and mouthing the words, “We can’t run”. He’s armed. That has to be the reason.

  The silence between them and us is overwhelming to the point where I think I can hear my own heart beating, which isn’t nearly as loud as the sound of grass crunching beneath my shoes.