by Stacia Stone
“I’m not done,” I snap. “My father keeps some personal files at his office in D.C. Have you searched there? Everyone’s on vacation this week, so it shouldn’t be hard to get into.”
“He’s not that stupid,” Savage scoffs. “He wouldn’t keep evidence of his crimes locked up in his office where anyone can find them.”
I turn to glare up at him. “And maybe that sort of thinking is exactly why he would. You haven’t searched there yet, have you?”
“No,” Savage admits, glaring at me.
“Anywhere else?” Hunt presses. “This is your life we're talking about, so think hard.”
I try to think. There’s no doubt in my mind that they’re searching for something that simply does not exist. But sending them on a wild goose chase buys me more time to keep breathing until the police finally catch up with us.
“We have a storage locker in Tennessee. It was taken out under my mom’s maiden name and my dad never had that changed after she died. We keep some antique furniture, family heirlooms and stuff like that there. If he wanted to hide something away that’d be the best place.”
Hunt shifts his position slightly and the crunch of gravel under his boots is loud in the silence. I can tell from the subtle way he backs up that this is the first he has ever heard of a storage locker. I’ve been in it a dozen times and it contains nothing more incriminating than some old photos of my dad wearing bell bottoms back in the ‘70s.
“Give me an address.”
I wasn’t born yesterday. “I’ll take you there.”
When I mount the courage to turn and look at him, Hunt is staring down at me. The look on his face is assessing as if he can read truth or falsehood on my face. The storage locker is real enough even if I know he won’t find what he wants there. I try to infuse as much innocence into my expression as possible.
Please, please, buy it.
They all exchange looks over my head, but I can’t tell anything from their expressions. Finally, after what seems like an eternity, Hunt lets out a long sigh.
“Here’s the plan,” he says. “We’re going to split up. You two head to D.C. and search the senator’s office. I’m going to take the girl and check out this storage locker.”
“What if this is all bullshit?” Savage grinds out through clenched teeth.
“Nothing’s changed if she’s lying. The only difference is she’ll get a bullet in her head tomorrow instead of today.”
I don’t like the sound of that.
Concern is etched into the lines of the quiet one’s face, though I get the feeling it’s not concern for me specifically. He grips Hunt’s shoulder. “May I speak with you privately?”
Hunt doesn’t seem happy about the request, but motions to Savage. “Watch her.”
Savage takes the gun and keeps it aimed on me. “No problem.”
“Don’t shoot her.”
“You’re no fun.” Savage laughs, and it’s a truly terrible sound.
The two men walk back towards the car. It’s not far enough that I can’t catch bits and pieces of their conversation.
“—I know what I said, but this is what’s happening now.”
Hunt’s voice travels better on the air. I can hear him more clearly than the other man’s quieter tones. I can tell the bigger man has replied but can’t make out any details.
“Well, it’s this, or I just put a bullet in her head right now. Tell me which you’d prefer.”
Another response, soft like a whisper.
“I’ll be careful. It’s only a couple of days. I can lock her in the trunk if I have to.”
The two men slowly walk back towards us with a crunch of gravel. I’m hauled unceremoniously to my feet.
“We’ll take this car, in case it got made,” Savage says.
To my surprise, Hunt’s hand on my arm propels me away from the car and into the darkness. He must have cat vision, I think, as we walk a few yards down the gravel road. He pulls out a flashlight with his free hand and flicks it on. The small cone of light illuminates the narrow road lined with thick trees that could go on for miles, for all I can tell in the dark.
After a few minutes of walking, we follow a bend in the road and come upon an old gas station that looks like it was abandoned a long time ago. A nondescript sedan is parked to one side next to a rusted dumpster. He shoves me toward it and I have to take quick, stumbling steps to keep up with his long-legged stride.
He unlocks the passenger door and pushes me inside the vehicle. A pair of handcuffs appears in his hand and I wonder if he’s been carrying them around this entire time. Never know when you might need to tie someone up against their will. The thought inexplicably makes me want to laugh, which probably means I’m in the beginning stages of a complete meltdown.
Hunt loops the handcuffs through a metal bar of the seat frame. The chain on the handcuffs pulls tight when I try to raise my arms higher than my lap. Anybody looking through the window wouldn’t be able to tell that I was handcuffed inside. And I can’t signal for help.
Smart. It makes me think he’s done something like this before.
Once satisfied that I’m completely secure, Hunt slams the door shut and walks around to the driver’s side. He settles into the seat with a weary sigh. He seems tired and I wonder if I can take advantage of that. He has to go to sleep sometime.
A hard knock on my window startles me. Savage must have followed us. His manic smile looks even more eerie through the dirty glass. Hunt rolls the window.
“We meet back here in forty-eight hours,” Hunt says. “There’s a set of burner phones in the glove box. Let me know if you find anything or run into any trouble.”
“Yes, sir.” Savage’s smile is more like a baring of teeth. His eyes move down my body, lingering on the handcuffs on my wrist before returning to my face. “If anything happens to Hunt, I will hunt you down, little girl. And you’ll get a lot worse than a bullet in the head. Understand?”
I swallow hard against the painful lump in my throat. “Yeah, I understand.”
“Good.”
He puts his hand in through the window and I instinctively flinch away. He laughs and just reaches for the glove box above my knees. He pulls out two prepaid cell phones that are still in their packaging. If you buy them with cash, calls on those things are almost impossible to trace. Favored by drug dealers, gang members and terrorists the world over.
That’s what the news had called them — terrorists. Maybe it wasn’t too far from the truth.
Savage is illuminated in the headlights as Hunt backs the car up. His eyes glow like they're lit with demon energy and the smile on his face is frankly predatory. I know the next time I see that face, it’ll be the last thing I see.
Chapter 11
I don’t trust her.
But I don’t want to kill her.
Those two conflicting thoughts have been at war inside me almost since the day we decided to snatch her up.
This whole thing was a mistake, it would take an idiot not to realize that. But I’m in it now and there’s no turning back.
And I realize that the story about the storage locker is very likely complete and utter bullshit. When you put a gun to someone’s head, they’ll say pretty much anything to save their own skin. The desperate urge to survive is just a part of human nature. Otherwise we wouldn’t exist as a species. I can’t blame her for that.
I watch her out of the corner of my eye as I drive. Pre-dawn light is just starting to rise over the horizon and it sets her features off in a soft glow that makes her look almost ethereal. She’s like a butterfly trapped under glass and slowly suffocating — fragile, beautiful and uselessly clinging to life.
I’m deliberately not thinking about what’s going to happen next. Whether the storage locker turns out to be a stalling tactic or not, the road we’re on only leads to one place. I can’t send her back home, not if it means putting my entire team at risk.
I had assumed she’d fall asleep, but her eyes are wid
e open and staring off into space. Her head rests against the window. The unnatural position of her arms probably makes it too difficult for her to get comfortable enough to sleep. The handcuffs are a necessary evil. She’s already proven that she can’t be trusted.
“You ever gonna tell me what you’re looking for?”
Her voice surprises me after nearly an hour of silence. It’s soft and husky, like she just smoked a cigarette and scorched her throat. I bet that’s how she sounds when she first wakes up in the morning. I desperately want to know what she’d look like rolling over in my bed after I kept her up half the night doing everything that one person can do to another. That thought has me hard instantly and I have to tamp down on the sudden surge of desire.
“Why do you want to know?” I ask.
She shifts in the seat “If I’m going to die for something, it only seems fair that I know what it is. You don’t seem much into fairness though.”
“You’re right about that, sweetheart.” My tone is flippant, but inside my emotions are seething. It’s not like she’d believe a word I have to say, anyway. “Maybe you should focus on worrying about yourself.”
My eyes stay trained on the road ahead of us, but I feel her gaze move over me. Her attention is like the stroke of a feather, so soft that you could almost miss it.
“What service were you in?” she asks.
I glance at her, surprised and a little dismayed. “The fuck are you talking about?”
“Your hair, the way they all call you sir, even how you walk. And then there are those combat boots you always wear that look like you’ve owned them for a decade, except the soles are brand new because you just had them replaced.” Her voice is soft but there’s a hardness to it that says she’s had it with being messed with. “My uncle was in the Navy, but I wouldn’t guess that about you. Army or marines, probably. Maybe Special Forces?”
I fight the urge to gape at her. Clever little bitch. “You’re smarter than you look.”
The ghost of a smile crosses her lips. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“How does a senator’s daughter get so good at reading people?”
“What do you think is the point of a campaign event?” The handcuffs make a soft jingling sound as she shifts so her back rests against the door. “You’ve got to be able to tell at a glance who’s a blowhard about to waste your time and who’s just one more crappy speech away from cutting you a gigantic check. You’ve got to be good at figuring people out. I spend more time listening than I do talking, which makes it easy. If people forget you’re there, they’ll reveal almost anything.”
We’re two people caught on the fringes for entirely different reasons, deliberately trying to be overlooked. Maybe I have more in common with this girl than I thought, not that that’s going to save her.
“Is that what you do for your father, help him figure people out?” I’m curious even though I know that the worst thing I can do is get to know her.
“I’m just a sweet, innocent girl from a good, Christian family.” Her voice is sarcastic. “People don’t pay attention to me. I’m boring. Which means that I can do a lot of listening and observing without anyone realizing that I’m even there. It’s a good skill to have.”
I raise an eyebrow. “But you like computers better than people.”
She deliberately rattles her handcuffs. “Wouldn’t you?”
“I see your point.”
It takes an effort to keep my gaze fixed on the road. My eyes keep moving toward her like they’re stuck in a gravitational pull. Every time I try to sneak a glance, I find her watching me. I have to admit it’s a little unnerving.
“Is that where you all met, in the military?”
She might be the most persistent girl that I’ve ever met. “You ask too many questions.”
“Nothing better to do.” She shrugs. “Did something happen to you? Something bad?”
Freezing cold runs through my veins. My hands feel sort of numb and tingling where they grip the steering wheel. I am not doing this. Not with her.
“Leave it alone.”
She’s still watching me, obviously alert for anything that my face might give away. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
The country road we’re on seems to stretch on forever. I’m suddenly very aware of the fact that we’re stuck in a car together for several hundred more miles. Maybe I should have just stashed her in the trunk.
“Why do you keep asking?”
“Maybe I just want to know what made you like this.” She swallows a little too hard and I realize it’s not all bluster. Some of this is the fear talking. “You’re planning to kill me at the end of all this, right? What’s the harm in talking?”
I realize in that moment that she wants to understand me. Maybe she’s convinced herself that the monster under her bed can’t possibly be real. There has to be a human man behind the curtain. It’s the only way for her to keep making sense of the world. She’s desperate for me to not just be the evil kidnapper with no redemption story.
But whether I’m the good guy or the villain, this is only going to end one way.
“Nothing happened to me.” I lie because telling the truth isn’t an option.
“Did someone hurt you?” Her voice is small, like she’s forcing herself to barrel forward. “Was it torture?”
Something must flicker across my face because she immediately seizes on it.
“It was torture, wasn’t it?” She studies my face. It makes me feel like a specimen she’s trying to catalogue for her collection. Who is this girl?
“No,” I snap.
“It was torture,” she muses, almost to herself. “But not you, someone else. Something you saw.”
I’ve had about as much of her mouth as I can take. “Drop it or I’m putting you in the trunk.”
“You think my father was involved, right? With whatever horrible thing you don’t want to tell me about.” She bows her head to stare down at her trapped hands. The cuffs have already left a ring of reddened skin around her wrists from the friction. “But you’re wrong. He’s a good person…a good man.”
My voice is grim. “There are no good men in war.”
“Does that make it easier?” she asks, gaze penetrating. “Absolving yourself of all responsibility.”
I find myself inexplicably angry — at the senator, at the responsibility that weighs down on me like a funeral shroud, and at her.
“You think pissing me off is a good way to stay alive?”
“Is there a good way to stay alive?” Her tone is biting. “You did have a gun to my head a few hours ago.”
Anger and frustration flare between us. Maybe she’s just at the end of her rope, sick of being sweaty, hungry and stressed, pushed beyond the boundaries of anything she’s ever had to tolerate before. I understand, but I also want to strangle her.
And maybe I want to fuck with her a little in the way that she’s fucking with me.
“And what kind of man forces his daughter to follow behind him on the campaign trail like she’s a puppy being taught how to heel?” I keep my voice light, even as darker emotions seethe inside of me. “What kind of man packs someone he loves off to a school that he knows she’ll hate because what he wants for her is more important than what she wants for herself?”
“You don’t know the first thing about my life.” Her teeth practically grind together. “My father loves me.”
“He loves that you’re obedient,” I scoff. “What would happen if you woke up one day and refused to be his perfect conservative Christian princess? If you refused to attend anymore campaign events or go back to that ridiculous school? If you decided to act like an adult and actually do what you want for a change? Would he be such a perfect daddy, then?”
“Fuck you.” Her tongue snaps around the word, tasting it. I get the feeling that she doesn’t curse very often. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I’d say ditto, sweetheart, but you’re dead wrong. I do kn
ow something about you.” Maybe it’s just me directing all of my anger and frustration at the only target that’s available, but I have this irresistible urge to hit her where it hurts. It’s not even personal, I just want to take my mind off my own shit. “There’s something wild in you just waiting to get out.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No? What kind of sweet, innocent girl gives head like a goddamn pro?” I grab her chin when she tries to turn away. My voice is mocking. “How many boys did you manage to practice on under daddy’s nose?”
She wrenches away and moves over in the seat so she’s pressed against the door. The gesture is more symbolic than anything else. Neither of us is getting away from the other in this damn car. We’re two wild animals trapped together in a cage. It’s only a matter of which one of us will maul the other one to death first.
“If I said I’d let you fuck me for your freedom, I bet you’d take me up on it. You’d grab my dick like it was a one-way ticket on the underground railroad.”
“Fuck off.”
Two curse words in as many minutes, I must really be getting to her. “If you won’t answer my questions, why should I answer yours?”
“You’re just wrong,” she says, her voice cold as Arctic ice. “There weren’t any boys and there never has been…I’m not like that.”
I catch the hesitation in her voice and pounce on it. “That’s not the kind of thing that a girl just figures out on her own. Unless you watch a ton of porn, or something.”
A fiery blush spreads up her chest and causes twin circles of red to bloom on her cheeks. She turns away to face the window but not before I catch the guilty look on her face.
That is fucking hilarious.
“Porn, really?” I can’t stop the hearty laugh that bubbles up from deep within my belly. After a minute, I’m practically crying from laughing so hard. I can’t remember the last time that I found something this genuinely amusing. There’s a joy in laughter that I’d almost forgotten.