by Jami Alden
Ethan silenced her with a hand over her mouth. “Kara, it’s okay,” he whispered as he subdued her panicked struggles. Not an easy feat, even for a man of his size and strength. Kara was a tall girl, strong and athletic, with the added fuel of fear running wild inside her.
He clamped his arm around her waist and pulled her hard against him, murmuring in a low, steady voice, “Kara, it’s okay. We’re here to to help you.”
Derek held his hands up and approached slowly, making shushing sounds. After a few seconds, Kara got it, and her struggles slowed, though she still held herself ramrod stiff against Ethan.
“I’m going to take my hand away,” Ethan said, “and it’s very important that you don’t scream, okay? No one knows we’re out here and we don’t want to attract any attention.”
She nodded against his hand. “Who are you?” she asked when he removed his palm.
He quickly introduced himself and Derek. “Your father hired us.”
“Is he dead? The guy, he wants something from my father—a chip or something. There was supposed to be an exchange, but they said he was dead—”
Ethan held up a silencing hand. “Your father is fine,” for now, “he’s safe at our office. But we need to get you out of here.”
“You said they’re here,” Derek said. “Who’s here?”
“They’re going to sell us,” Kara said, her voice breaking. As she talked, Ethan and Derek directed her back toward the gate they had come in through.
Ethan’s mouth pulled into a grim line. “Us? You’re not the only one?”
“No. They brought two more girls yesterday. We’re all part of this online community.”
“The V-Club, yeah, we know all about it.”
“So you know what they’re planning to do to us?” she asked. Derek nodded and caught her arm as she stumbled on a root.
“You have to go back for them,” she said. “Jessica and Emily—Emily’s only, like, fourteen. We can’t leave them.”
“No one’s leaving anyone,” Ethan said. “Moreno,” he said, voice sharpening. “Meet us at the northeast gate. I want you to take Kara back to Gemini headquarters. We’re going after the other girls.”
Within minutes Moreno arrived, appearing out of nowhere, seeming to melt out of the woods.
“How many we got up there?” Derek asked.
“Besides the guys at the gate, we have at least one armed bodyguard inside with Connors, and two guys in the Lexus, assume both are armed. One is definitely muscle.”
“Crater Face—he’s got a gun,” Kara said.
Ethan looked at her inquiringly, and she described the guy with the bad skin she’d somehow managed to get by while he was in the process of transporting the girls. “He was chasing me in the car, but then all of the sudden he stopped and turned around.”
“He’ll be looking for you,” Moreno said. “Let’s get going.” He took Kara gently by the arm and started to lead her away.
“Will they be okay? You won’t let anything happen to them, will you?”
“Your friends will be fine, Kara,” Ethan promised. “We won’t let them be taken. Your father will be waiting for you back at our offices.” He addressed Toni and Danny through his mike. “Ben is twenty-five minutes out. Call Marcy and tell her Kara’s on her way. Call the police and explain the situation. Derek and I are going in for a closer look.”
Moreno and Kara slipped through the gate and down the steep slope as Ethan and Derek took off for the main house. As they got closer they slowed their approach, taking cover where they could. The SUV Kara had mentioned was parked in the drive. The girls were already inside.
They crept around the back of a horse barn whose stalls had been converted into a four-car garage to plan their approach.
“At least three, maybe five armed,” Derek mused, checking the magazine in his Sig and flipping the safety off. “Not the worst odds we’ve seen.”
“Not even close,” Ethan said. “Besides, we have surprise on our side.”
The front door opened and a man hurried down the wide wooden steps of the front porch. About five ten, with a thick neck that bulged over the back of his shirt collar, the man had dark, greasy hair and a dark, acne-scarred complexion.
“Crater Face,” Derek mouthed to Ethan.
The thug was hurrying for the beat-up SUV.
Keeping low, Ethan crept along the side of the barn and ducked down next to the SUV, skirting it as Crater Face opened the driver’s-side door. As he took a step into the car Ethan came up behind him, locking his arm around the guy’s throat and bracing the other hand behind his head. Crater Face struggled, heaving his thick, heavy body against Ethan’s hold.
Ethan breathed slowly, calmly, focusing all his energy into the muscles of his arms as he choked away the guy’s supply of oxygen. Finally he slumped, a dead weight in Ethan’s hold. Ethan and Derek quickly bound his hands and feet, stripped him of his weapons, and heaved him into the backseat of the SUV.
He and Derek sidled along the house, peering in windows until they located Connors and his visitors. They were in a room at the back of the house, and Ethan and Derek had to strain on their toes to see inside.
Here the ground began to slope, then dropped away sharply. The room opened up onto an expansive redwood deck with twenty-foot wood pylons that braced it into the hillside.
Inside, Derek could see Connors seated, talking to another man, a well-dressed business type in his late forties. Next to Connors was the big, beefy guy from earlier, while a slick, dark-haired guy stood in the opposite corner. The way he watched Connors, Ethan made him as Gray Hair’s bodyguard.
Ethan studied the other man carefully. The man was decent-enough-looking with his good suit and silk tie. But even through the glass Ethan could pick up the sick glint in his eyes as he walked a slow circle around the two terrified girls, both dressed in white nightshirts similar to the one Kara had been wearing.
What kind of fucked-up psycho got off on kidnapping avowed virgins and raping them?
He looked at Connors’s cool, almost reptilian look of satisfaction. What kind of monster tracked the girls down to feed someone’s sick fetish for profit?
He looked at Derek and knew from his cold, closed expression that his brother was thinking the exact same thing. “I could go up into that tree,” he said, indicating a massive redwood. “I’m pretty sure I could take out all of them.”
“Too risky,” Ethan shook his head. “You don’t have your scope, and the glare of the window could throw you off. You could hit one of the girls.”
Gray Hair looked pointedly at his watch, and Connors made a conciliatory gesture and pulled his phone out of his pocket. He punched in a number, frowning as he held the phone up to his ear. He flashed his friend a reassuring smile that was a little tight around the edges. He hung up the phone and said something, made a placating gesture to the other man.
Gray Hair shook his head and said something to his thug, who pushed away from the wall and pulled out his gun, sweeping it in the direction of the girls, who huddled in the center of the room.
Connors dropped his congenial facade and got between the thug and the girls, his face going red as he said something to Gray Hair. The thug raised his gun, pointing it at Connors now as Gray Hair motioned him out of the way.
Connors countered by yanking his own pistol out of his waistband and leveling the muzzle at the thug’s nose.
“Guess that answers whether or not he’s armed,” Derek said.
Through the double-paned glass, Ethan could hear the muffled shrieks of the girls, the shouts of the men. Then, without warning, so fast they barely saw it, Connor’s big, beefy bodyguard shoved Connors aside, lifted his Uzi, and sprayed the room with machine-gun fire.
The girls screamed and hit the deck as Gray Hair took one in the chest. His bodyguard managed to squeeze off a round before doubling over, shot in the stomach. Connors grabbed the dark-haired girl by the arm and the blond girl by the hair and dragged them to th
eir feet as he shouted orders at his bodyguard.
Ethan and Derek took off at a dead sprint around the house, guns drawn as they circled, and entered through the open front door. Ethan entered first, moving softly through the front entryway before motioning Derek to follow.
They pressed back into the walls flanking the closed door to the office. It sounded like chaos inside, the girls screaming in spite of admonishments in German and English to shut up. Men groaning while Connors barked at his bodyguard in German.
The door burst open and the girls spilled out first. Without hesitation, Ethan grabbed them and thrust them into a nearby bathroom, then ducked as bullets peppered the wall above his head.
“Run, Wilhelm!”
The bodyguard didn’t even see Derek on the other side, didn’t see him fire the shot that blew the bodyguard’s hand off and sent his Uzi flying.
Screaming in pain and cradling his mangled hand, the man didn’t stop. Like a crazed, wounded bear he charged Derek, closing his hands around his throat. Ethan scrambled to get a clean shot as his brother’s eyes started to bulge.
But Ethan didn’t need to bother. Though his face was rapidly turning purple and a vein throbbed in his forehead, Derek’s hand was absolutely steady as he brought his gun up to the thug’s chest and pulled the trigger.
The man’s hands slipped from Derek’s throat as he fell to his knees, dead. “We need to get Connors. He went out the back.”
They stepped over the thug’s body like it was a bag of garbage and ran past the other wounded men, through the sliding glass doors that opened onto the deck. They ran to the edge and looked over. There was a break in the ground cover where Connors had landed. Dark footprints led into the dense woods.
“Toni, Danny,” he said into his mike, “the girls are safe. Derek and I are fine.”
“Speak for yourself.” Derek coughed.
“We have two wounded, one dead. Connors got away on foot.”
Now would be a good time for the police to show up. As if on cue, he heard the din of approaching sirens. He looked out into the woods, searching for a sign of movement, a sign of Connors, but could see nothing. His fist clenched around the railing of the deck, and he felt like kicking himself. After all this, Connors had still managed to slip away.
Toni watched as Marcy Kramer grabbed Kara and held her to her thin chest, laughing and weeping as she stroked her daughter’s hair. Marcy had only just learned the truth about her daughter’s disappearance, and Toni had spent the last thirty minutes keeping tabs on her, preventing her from finding the conference room where Jerry was being held. Toni was pretty sure that if Marcy found Jerry, she’d stab him to death with a letter opener or a ballpoint pen.
It was a good distraction, especially when, fifteen minutes ago, an explosion of shouts and gunfire had come over the radio. The auditory assault sent Toni’s fear spiking as she listened, helpless, wondering who was wounded? who was dead? Who was having the life choked out of him by someone screaming in German? Who took the shot that was fired so close to one of the brothers it sounded like it was happening inside the conference room?
Marcy had looked on in confusion as Toni stood frozen in fear. Even Danny, big, tough, scary Danny, hadn’t been immune, coming over to stand next to Toni and gripping her hand until Ethan’s voice had crackled over the radio.
“Toni, Danny, the girls are safe. Derek and I are fine.”
Connors had fled on foot but Toni didn’t care as long as Ethan was okay. Tears of relief pricked her eyes at the sound of his voice. She tried to brush it off, tell herself she was just as relieved Derek was okay, but she knew that was a lie.
She cared about Ethan. Way too much for someone she’d only known for four days. A scary, deep kind of caring that was bound to leave her with a mile-wide hole in her chest if she wasn’t careful.
Then Kara and Ben Moreno arrived, putting aside any opportunity for deep emotional analysis. Marcy hugged and rocked her daughter, sobbing how sorry she was. Kara patted her mother’s thin back and buried her head in Marcy’s shoulder as if she were seven instead of seventeen.
Toni went over and gently guided Kara to a chair. “Why don’t you sit down and take a breather before the police get here to take your statement.”
Kara sat down, and Toni knelt beside her chair and slipped her arm around Kara’s shoulders. She looked tired, her hair tangled around her face, bruises and scratches marring her legs and arms, but otherwise okay, considering. Still, Toni wanted to make sure. “Did they hurt you?”
Kara looked up at her, her lips trembled. In that moment she looked much more like a little girl than a woman. “No, not really. I mean, they didn’t rape me or anything.” Fat tears rolled from under her lashes. “But I was so scared. Especially when the other girls got there and I realized they weren’t going to let any of us go.”
“But you managed to get out of there,” Toni said.
“Fought off a guy twice her size,” said Ben admiringly as he offered Kara a glass of water. Ben was cut from the Gemini mold, tall, dark, and lethal-looking. But his dark eyes were warm as they looked at Kara.
Kara took the water and smiled, hero worship shining in her eyes. “Jessica and Emily are okay, right? Ben says Ethan and Derek found them.”
Toni nodded. “The police are up at Connors’s place now, and both Jessica’s and Emily’s parents are on their way up.”
Kara’s shoulders relaxed and her grip loosened on her water glass. Her eyes turned somber as she looked up at Toni. “Can I see my dad?”
Toni looked at Marcy, who gave a grudging nod. “He’s down the hall.”
She took Kara’s arm and led her down the corridor. “He’s in a lot of trouble, isn’t he?” Kara said, pausing before the closed door of the conference room.
“He’s not the only one,” Toni said meaningfully.
Kara did a decent job of feigning confusion.
“I saw the pictures, Kara. I know the V-Club isn’t the only thing you’ve been up to.”
Hot color rushed into Kara’s face. “Does anyone else know? My dad will kill me.”
“Your dad is very happy to have you home safe. Not to mention that he has much bigger things to worry about. But after this is over, you and I are going to have a serious talk.”
Kara nodded and grabbed Toni in a fierce hug. “Thanks for looking out for me.”
Toni hugged her back as tears burned her eyelids, and she opened the door to the conference room so Kara could see her father.
Their reunion was cut short by the arrival of the police, and Toni spent the next few hours giving her statement and providing the police with everything she knew about Jerry Kramer, William Connors, their arrangement to sell intellectual property to terrorist organizations, and Connors’s twisted plan for revenge when Jerry balked at delivering the goods.
She watched as the cops loaded Jerry into the back of a squad car, knowing he would be on the phone to his lawyer in record time. She had little doubt that his elite legal team would broker a deal and that Jerry would be let off with little more than a slap on the wrist. But the damage to his reputation would be irreparable, and the press would crucify him. There was satisfaction to be had in that.
She only hoped Kara and her younger brother didn’t suffer anymore in the aftermath.
Her stomach churned as she downed what had to be her fiftieth cup of coffee, and she wondered how soon they could wrap everything up and go home. She was grungy and exhausted and she wanted to crawl into bed for the next week or so.
Preferably with Ethan.
But there was no sign of him, and they hadn’t heard a word since he’d informed them the police had arrived at Connors’s compound. He and Derek had turned off their radios, and Toni imagined they were busy smoothing everything over with the cops. No mean feat, since there were three gunshot victims to explain.
Finally, the police were ready to let Kara and Marcy leave. Toni walked them out to Marcy’s car and hugged Kara again before she got i
nto the passenger seat of her mother’s BMW station wagon.
“I’ll come by tomorrow, okay?” Toni said, and Kara nodded.
She turned and found herself locked against Marcy’s thin, trembling frame. She placed her hands awkwardly on the smaller woman’s shoulders.
“Thank you,” Marcy said, her thin arms surprisingly strong as she wrapped them around Toni’s waist. “Thank you for looking out for her.”
“It’s what you hired me for,” Toni said, Marcy’s emotional display making her more uncomfortable by the second.
“No,” Marcy said, pulling away and wiping her eyes. “I’ve been too caught up in my own problems, not paying attention to what’s going on. I believed Jerry when he said she’d be home in a few days. But if you hadn’t kept digging…” her mouth pulled tight, and Toni knew she was fantasizing about cutting off her ex-husband’s balls. “You saved my daughter, Toni, and I won’t forget that.”
Marcy gave her a last, heartfelt squeeze and climbed into her car. Toni turned to go back into the office. The police needed a few more details about Connors’s financial records before she could go.
“Looks like you have a satisfied client.”
His voice curled low in her belly and pulled her mouth into a smile as she turned around. Eyes sunken with fatigue, sweat streaking his face and staining his shirt, Ethan was the most glorious sight she’d ever seen.
He reached for her hand and she went to him without hesitation, letting him pull her into his arms. She leaned in to his chest and started to shake, the sound of gunshots ringing in her ears as she relived those short, terrifying moments when she and Danny could hear everything but had no idea if Ethan and Derek were okay. “I was worried,” she said. Understatement of the year.
Ethan wrapped his arms tightly around her and she felt the warm press of his lips on her cheek. She tilted her face up to meet his kiss, needing to feel him, taste him.