by Megan Crane
But at least they knew where.
Griffin was going to have to be happy with that.
Isaac kept a ten-mile cushion between them and the signal from Mariah’s phone. And when the signal finally stopped bumping its way deeper into the countryside, he moved in closer, then pulled over to the side of the road so they could rustle up intel. There was no need to go in hot and make everything worse than it already was.
It was the same protocol they would use in any situation, but this was the first time in Griffin’s memory that he felt each second that dragged by like fingers digging into his throat.
Deeper and then deeper still.
Oz sent satellite images of the big falling-down red barn out in the middle of the woods where Mariah’s signal was holding steady. The perfect place to take someone, Griffin thought, as they all stood outside the car on the quiet dirt lane. He adjusted the strap that held his rifle in place as if that, too, were choking him.
“We need to get eyes inside,” Isaac was saying. “We need to get eyes on Mariah. And I don’t think we want to wait for dark.”
“We’re not waiting,” Griffin bit out.
And he knew how bad it all was when no one even bothered to throw him any side-eye for leapfrogging the chain of command or throwing his weight around.
He didn’t care.
Isaac found a better place to stash the vehicle, and then the four of them set out, making their way through the woods the way they’d trained a thousand times before. It was a good five-mile hike, but it was flat here. Easy.
No snow and, better yet, no bears.
When they reached the clearing where the barn was located, Isaac gave the signal, and they fanned out.
Griffin knew what he was supposed to do. He knew it made sense to follow the established protocol, the way they had at the ex’s house. Do some recon, get a sense of what was going down and how many people were involved, ascertain proof of life, and then consult with his brothers before doing anything rash.
He’d never done anything rash in his life, until Mariah.
But once it was clear the two guards ambling around the field in a lazy patrol were the entirety of the security system, he didn’t have it in him to wait.
“I need a diversion to the southwest,” he said under his breath on their comm channel.
“Negative, dumbass,” Blue growled back, from his position to the southwest.
“I need it now,” Griffin retorted, already moving.
He heard Blue curse. And he didn’t have to hear Isaac or Jonas to know they shared Blue’s feelings on this.
Griffin cared about one thing, and she was inside that barn.
He scaled the tree before him, then swung out on one of the wide upper branches. He crouched where he was, waiting.
Because Blue might curse, but he wouldn’t leave Griffin hanging.
There was a sudden, loud sound from the southwest quadrant. It sounded like a heavy branch cracking—or someone cracking a heavy branch—and it easily got the attention of the two men patrolling the clearing. They whirled toward the disturbance, guns high, and moved in. Fast.
Behind them, on the far side of the barn, Griffin jumped.
He aimed for the questionable, patchy roof of the barn, spreading himself out as he went to make sure he landed lightly. He rolled almost before he hit, spreading out his body mass and getting the hell away from the point of impact in case anyone was waiting for him.
The roll took him toward the edge of the roof, and he didn’t wait for the guards down below to start paying more attention to their surroundings than to a mysterious noise in the woods. He swung himself down and straight through the looming opening high up on the barn’s side that he assumed had something to do with hay.
He landed the way he always did, light and easy, the weight of his rifle a comfort against his back, the way it was supposed to be. Then he waited for his eyes to adjust.
When they did, he found himself in a loft that ran the length of the barn. There was no hay, though he couldn’t tell if the dirt everywhere suggested it had once been here. There were rusted old farm implements shoved haphazardly against the walls and unidentifiable mounds covered in tarps.
And in the center, near an open trapdoor that led to the ground floor, was a woman duct-taped to a chair.
It isn’t Mariah.
It wasn’t Mariah, he told himself sternly a split second after his adrenaline kicked in like an elbow to his sternum.
And he would have known it was Mariah’s mother even if he hadn’t seen pictures or that video on Mariah’s laptop back in Grizzly Harbor. It was the narrow way the woman stared at him, as if she were gathering her wits before handling the armed man who’d just swung in to her hayloft.
Rose Ellen McKenna reminded him of her daughter in other ways, too. Suspicious blue eyes, a mutinous chin, and no apparent fear when she should have been pale with it.
Griffin didn’t move. He was listening while he held her gaze, trying to figure out who else was in this barn and, more important, where they were.
“Where is she?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.
Rose Ellen had duct tape over her mouth, but angled her head toward the floor below them with a certain regal air that Griffin recognized all too well.
He started to make his way across the loft, going carefully because he didn’t trust the wood beneath his feet not to creak and give him away. When he got close to Rose Ellen, he squatted down beside her and did a quick check for injuries. He found a few bruises, but nothing serious. And no blood.
She could still be hurt, of course. But he didn’t think she required medical attention.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” he promised her. “But I need to get Mariah out, too, so I might have to leave you up here and come back while I figure out how to do that. Do you understand?”
Rose Ellen nodded decisively. And something else flashed in her gaze that Griffin recognized all too well. Sheer fury. Like Mariah’s mother wanted to tear herself out of this chair and go handle whoever was downstairs herself.
He related.
“There are two men outside,” Griffin said quietly, right next to her ear. “I need to know how many more are inside. Nod when I get there.”
He lifted up a finger. Then another. Then one more, and she nodded.
Griffin eased himself over to the trapdoor opening and peered down, but he couldn’t see anyone. He could only hear them. Male voices, laughing with a sort of low, easy malice.
He turned back to catch Rose Ellen’s gaze, and waited until she nodded at him. Then he carefully, slowly moved back over to the far part of the loft so he could look outside and get eyes on the two men who had taken up their patrol again.
He spoke quietly into his comm. “The mother is here and unharmed. There are three douchebags downstairs plus the two outside. I can’t see Mariah without exposing myself.”
“Five on four isn’t a fair fight,” Jonas complained from his position to the east. “I can take five by myself. Where’s the fun in that?”
“I get the impression there’ll be fun to go around,” Blue chimed in. “Not much I enjoy more than relieving an idiot of his AR-15.”
“All I’ve seen so far is hired muscle,” Griffin said. “Which means that even if we relieve them all, we’re still going to have a problem. We don’t know who’s paying for this party.”
Griffin stayed in position but eased his head through the opening. Nothing had changed. A pretty day, a green field and greener trees, and no one in sight except the two goons. Now jumpier than before.
He shook his head as he ducked back into the shadows. “I don’t think you cart someone across the country to hang out with hired muscle in a barn.”
“Agreed,” Blue said.
Jonas made a low sound that Griffin interpreted as his agr
eement.
“Unless you hear something in there that changes the game, I think we wait,” Isaac said finally, once again making the call.
Once again based on Griffin’s intelligence.
But this time he had no intention of leaving Mariah out to dry.
Everyone muttered affirmatives, and then they all settled into radio silence.
Griffin spent another long while listening, tracking the sounds until he’d come up with a map of where the men were down below. He couldn’t hear Mariah, but he also didn’t hear anything that suggested she was being abused in any way.
If he had, he would have kicked a hole in the floor and gone down shooting.
When he moved again, his eyes were fully adjusted to the gloom of the barn’s interior. He walked the length of the loft once more, keeping his gaze trained to the significant cracks between the floorboards.
And this time, he saw her.
Mariah was tied to a chair of her own, also with duct tape. Her head was slumped forward slightly, making her hair a kind of wild blond curtain around her face. He couldn’t see any evidence of a gag, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t shoved anything in her mouth.
And when he stopped and stared hard, he could see that she kept testing the duct tape around her wrists and ankles.
If she was hurt, she wasn’t too hurt to keep looking for a way out.
And Griffin took the first deep, real breath he’d allowed himself since he’d realized she was missing.
The three douchebags were arranged around her. One was sitting with his feet thrust out before him like he was at a picnic, his back to an old stall. The big, burly one with a beard was muttering into his phone and pacing. And all Griffin could see of the third one was a hint of his boots as he walked back and forth in front of the barn’s big doors, suggesting he was the guard.
When he satisfied himself with what he could see through the floorboards, he carefully made his way back to Mariah’s mother, crouched down before her again, and eased the duct tape gag from between her lips.
She swallowed and worked her jaw. He knew from experience that she was trying to make her mouth feel like hers again.
Then she leveled those eyes that were entirely too much like her daughter’s at him.
It felt like a blow.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t scream and let them know you’re here, whoever the hell you are.”
Her voice was raspier, but it was the same honey-and-cream drawl that made a meal out of every word and then some.
Griffin didn’t shift his gaze from hers. “Because you want to live.”
“Not sure that’s on the menu, sugar.”
Sugar. He felt the last of the barriers he’d built inside himself crumble, and he didn’t fight it. Not there in a sweaty Georgia hayloft with a woman who looked too much like Mariah but wasn’t her.
He wanted to hear Mariah call him sugar again, assuming she lived through this.
Griffin intended to make sure she did.
“Did they hurt you?”
“It didn’t feel real good to get bashed over the head and tossed in the back of a pickup truck, but that’s any old Friday night around these parts.” Rose Ellen’s mouth curved into a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “But no. They didn’t really hurt me.”
He nodded gruffly, happier to hear that news than maybe he should have been. And relieved in ways he didn’t want to examine.
“Is she okay?” Rose Ellen asked, her voice scratchier than before. “I heard her when they brought her in, but . . .”
“She’s okay, as far as I can tell from up here.”
Rose Ellen swallowed again. “You’re going to have to put that gag back in.”
“I know.” Griffin shifted his weight to his heels. “But not yet.”
Rose Ellen’s eyes gleamed as if she were fighting back emotion, but all she did was offer a jerky sort of nod.
And then they both settled in for the wait.
Sixteen
The whole kidnapping thing, horrifying from the start, wasn’t getting any more fun as the hours dragged by.
Mariah was exhausted. More than exhausted. She wished she’d actually tried to sleep on the plane, where the man who’d abducted her couldn’t actually have hurt her. Not in any serious way, surrounded by so many people. But she hadn’t, and she knew that was making all the many ways she ached worse.
It had been bad in the trunk. Dark and bumpy and sweltering, and she kept slamming against the trunk’s interior no matter how she tried to brace herself.
But it had been worse when the car stopped.
Her heart had pounded so hard she worried she might be sick, but there was nothing she could do. The engine turned off. She stayed where she was, curled up in a sweaty ball she knew perfectly well wouldn’t protect her from anything, and waited for the man to come and open the trunk again.
When he finally did, the sudden shock of sunlight was so bright it made her eyes water.
And he wasn’t alone.
They’d hauled her out of the trunk, and Mariah couldn’t remember which one was which. It was all flat eyes and cruel faces, awful laughter, and worse, the sure knowledge that not one of them was going to help her. She kept hearing the same whimpering sound again and understood on some level that she was the one making it—but she couldn’t do anything about it.
There were men all around her. Men in a Georgia field that she could tell, with old senses she hadn’t used in years, was far away from everything. It was the silence. The breeze in the trees that carried no sounds from nearby roads. The way the men’s unpleasant laughter seemed to spread out all around them. At first she thought there were crowds of them, big and scary men with that same dead look in their eyes, like a forest all their own.
It took Mariah a long time to downgrade from crowds to maybe five, but that wasn’t much better.
One of them took hold of her with an unpleasant grip that wrenched her arm from her shoulder, and she blurred it out even as it was happening. There were too many of them for her to process anything too closely. It was as if her brain were curling itself into the fetal position when her body couldn’t. Her head was pounding, there was a humming noise in her ears, and it was easier to think about death in the abstract. It was easy to sit on a plane and imagine you were accepting the inevitability of your own end . . .
But there was so much light everywhere. There was sunshine and the smell of home, honeysuckle and deep green mixed in with the rich smell of the Georgia dirt. There was the soft press of the humid air against her face, feeling cool and very nearly refreshing after the trunk. There was the salt in her mouth, tracking down from the water in her eyes, and all these things seemed like reasons enough to live.
She wanted to live.
They’d hauled her into a big empty barn, and one of them had shoved her, hard. Mariah should have expected it. The force of it knocked her straight off her feet, sending her tumbling for the floor, where she’d hit her face on the way down before she caught herself on her palms.
She’d been so dazed, it had taken her a long time to realize that what she’d hit was a metal folding chair, set out in the middle of the barn floor.
But she had Griffin’s cool gaze in her head, watching her from the open door of the community center the way he had on so many afternoons. When she’d practiced situations like this over and over again. She heard Blue’s voice in her ears, ordering her to get up. Now.
She wanted to crumple on the floor, bury her head in her arms, and cry for a year or two about the flaring pain across one cheekbone and the panic and fear that felt like more bruises all over her body.
But there were men behind her. Awful men wearing the same nasty, pitiless expression as the first one, and she didn’t dare stay where she was.
She swiveled around as she rose, careful not to make it loo
k like she was trying to do anything but get up quickly, because the fact that she’d practiced getting up off the floor—a lot—seemed like a good thing to keep to herself.
But none of them were actually paying any attention to her. Not really.
They have you. You’re here. The voice inside her was far more matter of fact than she felt. Why should they pay attention to you now?
The men were talking to each other, but her head was filled with too much noisy chaos to hear what they were saying. The man who’d pushed her to the floor shoved her again, this time down into the chair. And he barely looked at her as he tied her to it, using strips of duct tape he ripped off with his yellowing teeth.
Mariah used it as an opportunity to count her blessings.
She was fully dressed and no one had seemed all that interested in changing that. No one had patted her down for any reason, which meant she still had her phone tucked into her pocket. She was still wearing a sweater over a T-shirt and jeans, and they’d tied her to the chair this way, suggesting no one was going to try to take her pants off.
Just now, anyway.
She tested the duct tape on her hands when the man walked away, wiggling it this way and that to see if she could loosen its hold. She couldn’t.
The sound of her voice when she asked “Where’s my mother?” electrified the cavernous space. It quieted all the men, and Mariah couldn’t say she particularly enjoyed the way they all swiveled around to look at her. Each one of them more terrifying than the next.
Maybe it had been better when they hadn’t paid her any specific attention. When they’d acted like she was nothing but an inanimate package someone had delivered.
“What did you say?” asked the man who had brought her here, in that oddly mild voice. The same one he’d used when he’d talked to her about the things he’d do if she defied him.
“I’m wondering where my mother is,” Mariah said, and she sounded weird. So weird that if she hadn’t felt herself speak, she might’ve doubted it was her at all.
It took her another moment to realize that she was shaking.