Payback

by Jasmine Cresswell

  Anna gave Seth an exuberant hug and a kiss. “You’re such a clever man.”

  “I know.” Seth grinned. “That’s why you love me.”

  Nineteen

  October 22, 2007

  T he darkness was so intense that it penetrated Kate’s dreams. Or perhaps it was some tiny, out-of-place sound that set her interior alarm bells jangling. She woke with a start and needed a moment to remember that she was back in Chicago, safely tucked into her own bed. For some reason, her heart continued to pound even after she oriented herself, so she rolled over, reaching for the switch on the bedside lamp. She clicked it on, but nothing happened.

  The darkness, she realized belatedly, was total. The face of her alarm clock wasn’t illuminated and the night-light by the doorway wasn’t casting its usual friendly pink glow. A blown fuse, then, or maybe a power failure. She really needed to keep a flashlight in the drawer of her nightstand so that she wouldn’t have to stumble and fumble her way to the fuse box when this sort of thing happened.

  Then she remembered: her alarm clock ran on batteries. Even if there had been a power failure that should have no effect on her clock. Why weren’t the digital numbers shining brightly? Kate patted the surface of her nightstand, feeling for her clock.

  It wasn’t there.

  She pushed back against rising fear. Had she become disoriented by travel and made a mistake about where she was? Maybe she was still in the hotel in Virginia. She rubbed her fingers over the distinctive fluffy surface of her comforter and felt the lacy edge on her favorite pillowcase. Everything was familiar, which meant that she was at home, this was definitely her bed and the clock was missing. Perhaps the tiny sound that penetrated her sleep had been made by the clock falling from the nightstand.

  A creak of the floor warned her of another human presence in the room. Her fear metastasized into a giant cancer, eating away at her ability to think. She instinctively dived toward the edge of the bed, away from the sound, but it was already too late for evasive action. A cloth was thrown over her head and drawn tight, cutting off air and demonstrating the terrifying fact that what had seemed pitch darkness only a few seconds before had just become several degrees darker yet.

  It was instinctive to struggle, to fight against the inevitable horrors to come. But her captor was prepared and she’d been caught sleepy and off guard. The roughness of his grip warned her it was a man, although she hadn’t even glimpsed his outline, much less seen him. He quickly taped her wrists together, covering her hands and most of her fingers, too. The darkness transformed the zip of unraveling tape from an everyday sound into a riff of terrifying menace. Her attacker wound the tape around her neck, securing the covering he’d thrown over her head into a makeshift hood. The folds of the thick cloth pressed against her mouth, making breathing a chore and talking impossible.

  She could feel looped fibers brushing against her lips and caught a disorienting whiff of her own lavender shower gel. The cloth covering her head must be a towel, she realized. Apparently her attacker hadn’t arrived already equipped with a blindfold. He’d simply purloined a towel from her bathroom as he passed by en route to her bedroom.

  Perhaps by accident, perhaps because he didn’t have murder on his mind, her attacker didn’t lash the tape around her neck tightly enough to cut off her breathing. Kate tried to be grateful for that one small spark of hope. She willed herself not to get hysterical, not to pass out. If she was going to be raped, most experts warned it was safer not to fight back. She hung on to her sanity by promising herself she would remember every detail about the assailant that sound and touch could provide. She made herself a promise that she would see him brought to trial if it took the rest of her life to find him. He’d taped her fingers, so there was little hope of scratching him and getting a sliver of skin under her fingernails that could be tested for DNA. His preparations, she thought bleakly, seemed depressingly well planned. Despite that, she could still fight him. She would use her mind, the only weapon he’d left her, and, by God, she would defeat him.

  “I warned you to stop looking for me.” The whisper was harsh and barely audible through the towel tied over her head.

  Chills shook her body. So this was what it had come to. She wasn’t about to endure the horror of rape by a stranger. She was going to end up killed by her own father. The prospect of rape had been terrifying enough; this was something worse. Kate wanted to feel anger, but her terror was so all-consuming that it left no room for any other emotion, not even the rage her father so richly deserved.

  “You’re my daughter, so I’m giving you one more chance.” His whisper held more menace than a shouted threat. “Stop looking for me, Kate. Don’t corner me, or I’ll become like any other trapped animal. I’ll lash out. I can’t afford to give you any more warnings after this. Keep searching and you will die. You’re leaving me with no choice.”

  She couldn’t talk, and she had no intention of humiliating herself by making pathetic grunting sounds, but she probably wouldn’t have deigned to answer him even if the towel hadn’t made coherent speech a physical impossibility. She could move her legs, though, and rage suddenly liberated her from the paralysis of fear. She twisted out from under the covers and kicked as hard and as fast as she could.

  She connected with flesh, but the blow didn’t make much impact, enough for a brief moment of pain, perhaps, but no more. She kicked again, but this time her father sidestepped and her foot merely brushed against the side of his hip. Still, she heard the gratifying hiss of his indrawn breath and felt a split second of triumph that she hadn’t allowed him to escape totally unscathed.

  “Keep still, or I’ll hit you.”

  For the first time in her life, she wished she had a gun. A rational part of her recognized that since she was blindfolded and handcuffed, introducing a gun into the picture was as likely to get her killed as it was to injure her father. At this moment, though, she would have traded her certain death for the hope of inflicting injury on him.

  She didn’t doubt that he meant exactly what he said, and since she didn’t want to add a blow to her head to the woes already afflicting her, she sat quietly, no longer fighting.

  The whispering began again. “Kate, you’re my own flesh and blood and I admire your feistiness and your will to live. I don’t want to hurt you. I love you, I really do. Don’t force me to do something we’ll both regret. You know the last thing I want is to be left with no choice but to kill you. Take this warning, Kate, for both our sakes. Please.”

  He was claiming to love her? Even if she hadn’t been tied up, blindfolded and barely breathing, his whispered words would have left her speechless with disgust. As it was, she couldn’t do anything more constructive than turn her back to the direction of his voice and force herself to remain calm so that she wouldn’t throw up behind the heavy weight of the towel. How was it possible that she and her mother had both lived with this man for almost three decades without understanding anything about him?

  He didn’t react to her pathetic gesture of defiance in any way that she could detect. In fact, he’d never touched her at all once he finished tying her up. Rigid with tension, she waited for what would happen next. More verbal threats? A physical assault of some sort?

  Nothing happened. Silence and darkness spread their thick, oppressive cover.

  After a while, she wasn’t sure how long, it occurred to her that she no longer had any sense of another presence in the room. However hard she strained to hear, she could detect no sound. Even though the towel over her head filtered out several levels of awareness, she gradually became confident that she was once again alone.

  She was alone, but blinded by a towel and severely hampered by the tape wound around her hands. There was a phone on her nightstand, but with her fingers bound together, she couldn’t even hold the phone, much less dial out and summon help, even if she could somehow find the correct numbers. She wriggled her wrists, but the tape was strong and she felt almost no give in the sturdy binding
s. It could take hours—days—to loosen the tape to the point that she could break her hands apart.

  Panic returned. She lived alone, and although she and her mother normally exchanged phone calls every couple of days, Avery wasn’t the sort of person to hover. Unfortunately, Kate had stopped by to see her mother on her way home from the airport, so it wasn’t as if Avery would be waiting anxiously for news about what had happened in Virginia. Kate had already filled her in on at least the general outline of everything she and Luke had discovered. She had promised to be in touch with her mother very soon, so that they could decide exactly when and how to pursue her father, but if Kate didn’t call, her mother might assume she was snowed under at work and leave it at that.

  If Avery didn’t raise the alarm, how long would it take before somebody else got worried and came looking for her? She would be missed at work, of course, but it could easily be a couple of days before anyone actually became concerned enough to jump through the hoops of getting possession of a house key and physically searching for her.

  Luke? He might call—she hoped he would call for reasons that went beyond her need to be set free—but they’d parted company at the airport without making any definite plans. Would he keep calling when she didn’t pick up?

  “I’ll be in touch,” Luke had said. He’d sounded as if he meant it, but she’d responded with a careless smile and a casual wave because God forbid that he should guess how badly she had wanted to invite him to come home with her.

  Get a grip, Kate informed herself grimly. If nobody’s going to come looking for you, then you have to escape. It’s that simple.

  She wasn’t tied to the bed, she reminded herself. If worst came to the worst, she could slowly feel her way along the walls, down the stairs and to the front door. There had to be some way she could get the door open, even if she couldn’t imagine right at this moment how she would twist the handle and actually open the door.

  The prospect of wandering into the street blindfolded, and with bound hands, wasn’t appealing, but it sure beat the alternatives. She should count herself lucky that she happened to be wearing pajamas tonight, as opposed to the skimpy tank top and panties that she usually slept in. She might even be able to locate a pair of shoes she could scuff into before she walked outside. The low temperature tonight had been forecast in the thirties, which wouldn’t make for a happy prospect if she was forced to end up meandering blind and barefoot along the sidewalk.

  Removing the blindfold would open up a world of possibilities, Kate realized. It might, in fact, be a better key to making a swift escape than trying to get rid of the tape binding her wrists. With her sight restored she could quickly and easily find a knife. She could put the knife in her mouth and quite possibly saw through the layers of tape to free her hands.

  Okay, so she’d work on the blindfold, not on freeing her hands. At least she now had a plan and a goal. Resting against the headboard to provide herself with balance, she retracted her chin tightly against her neck and scrunched her head, trying to insert her chin beneath the tape that held the towel in place. Her hope of instant release proved a fantasy, but she refused to give up. The tape wouldn’t stick anywhere near as efficiently to rough toweling as it stuck to her skin; she only needed to pop one fold, and she would be free.

  She worked doggedly, pushing her chin down, edging it beneath the folds of the towel and then pushing outward. She started to get some traction and heard the sound of tape splitting. Unfortunately, there were multiple layers of tape and the other layers continued to hold the towel in place. Still, the fact that she’d succeeded at all gave her fresh incentive to carry on.

  A minute later she realized that every time she maneuvered with her chin, she’d simultaneously been wriggling her fingers beneath their duct-tape binding. The movement had been instinctive, no clever planning involved, but the results were glorious: the tip of her left thumb and index finger suddenly burst free of their constraints. Her wrists and hands were still tightly bound, but two fingertips were free!

  It was all the leverage she needed. She hooked her index finger behind the tape in the place where she could feel give from the layer she’d already managed to split. Then she ripped with all the force of her combined anger and fear. The tape tore away from the towel. Within moments, the towel was on the bed and she could see again.

  Her clock had been put back on the nightstand, and the night-light near the bedroom door provided what seemed like a blaze of light in comparison to the utter darkness she’d just escaped from. Presumably her father had flipped the breaker on the electric panel, restoring power as he left the house. She wondered why he’d been so anxious to keep her in total darkness as he whispered his threats. Did he simply want to increase the level of her fear? Or was there something about his appearance he didn’t want her to see?

  In fact, question crowded upon question now that she wasn’t too panicked to think. Why had he never raised his voice above a whisper? Yes, it had been eerie to hear powerful threats issued in a menacing whisper, but something about his decision never to speak in a normal voice was nagging at her. It was important, she thought, but she couldn’t quite grasp why. Not yet, but she would get there. She would understand and hold him to account eventually.

  Kate got out of bed, chagrined to discover that she was literally shaky around the knees.

  She ordered herself to put some steel in her flabby muscles since she couldn’t afford to waste valuable time indulging in a panic attack. She needed to set herself free, not wallow in the aftermath of shock.

  She crept down the stairs, elbow on top of the banister to provide orientation, but mentally she visualized herself storming to victory. Once in the kitchen, she flipped on the light and then used her mouth, along with her bound hands, to extract her razor-sharp boning knife from the storage block on the counter.

  She had anticipated that it would be difficult to insert the point of the knife into the tape in a place where she wasn’t also piercing her own skin. In fact, though, there was a convenient hollow made by the angle of her wrists, and inserting the knife turned out to be easy. The difficult part was moving the knife in a cutting motion so that the tape split and her skin didn’t. In the end, after a lot of uncomfortable trial and error, she realized that the trick was to hold the knife absolutely still and move her hands.

  Once she’d figured out the mechanics, making the first crucial cut became relatively easy, or at least not impossibly hard. And as soon as she managed to cut the tape sufficiently to pull her hands somewhat apart, making a bigger cut in the remaining tape took only seconds. She’d done it!

  Freedom was glorious for about two seconds. Then the adrenaline that had been fueling both her ingenuity and her stamina abandoned her. Her knees went back to wobbling and she staggered over to the kitchen table, collapsing into the nearest chair. For a few minutes she didn’t even try to control a severe attack of the shakes.

  Finally, she found just enough strength to get up again and walk over to the kitchen phone. She dialed the number that would bring help and waited for an answer.

  “Hello.”

  Her breath expelled in a relieved sigh. Luke was there, and she didn’t feel even a twinge of guilt that he sounded groggy with sleep. “It’s Kate. I need you, Luke. Please come.” She gave a laugh that immediately degenerated into a sob. “He came to my house.”

  “Who came, sweetheart?”

  “My father. This time he spelled it out. He threatened to kill me. Please come.”

  Her message delivered, she hung up the phone. It was only then that she realized she hadn’t waited for Luke to respond. She wasn’t worried. He would come; she knew she could count on him.

  She sat down again and stared into space, thinking and waiting. Waiting for Luke.

  Twenty

  I t was a good thing the predawn streets had been almost free of traffic, Luke thought as he pulled up at the curb outside Kate’s house. He had no conscious memory of making the drive over here,
but he was pretty sure that even Kate wouldn’t have been able to complain about his speed on this occasion. He ran up the steps and rang her doorbell, banging the knocker for good measure when she didn’t respond within thirty seconds.

  Kate opened the door and walked straight into his arms. He was so relieved to find her at least superficially unharmed that seven months of separation and hurt vanished to a burial ground in the furthest reaches of his mind, interred by overwhelming sensations of love and longing. He murmured her name and folded her against him, nestling her head against his down jacket in an embrace that seemed both inevitable and utterly right.

  She was icy cold, her fingers so chilled they were almost bloodless. He unzipped his jacket, pulling it apart and wrapping her inside its warmth. She gave a little sigh of contentment and rested with her cheek against his sweatshirt, huddling close and wrapping her arms around his waist as she soaked up his body heat.

  She didn’t speak, and he refrained from bombarding her with demands for information, offering her instead the silent reassurance she seemed to be seeking. There were at least a dozen questions that would require answers sometime soon, but right now he didn’t care about the precise details of what had happened here tonight. He already knew Ron Raven had invaded her home and threatened her with harm and that was enough for the time being. Soon, very soon, he could start the inquisition, but for a while it was enough to know that he was the person Kate had turned to when she needed to feel safe. He kicked the front door shut behind them and leaned against it, cradling her protectively. He stroked her hair and gently kneaded her shoulders, intent only on providing warmth and comfort, helping her to rebuild her emotional defenses.