by K. C. Crowne
My hands were tied behind my back, and they’d bound my feet as well. I tried to pull my hands free first but had no luck. My bonds wouldn’t budge. Whoever tied me up knew what they were doing. The restraints on my feet were looser, so I wiggled a bit, hoping to break free. Several minutes passed, and while I could move my feet a little, there was no pulling them free.
They hadn’t gagged me, which made me think we were in the middle of nowhere, somewhere no one could hear me. I didn’t scream, which might be someone’s first instinct, because I didn’t want to alert them to the fact that I was awake. The longer I was alone in the room, the better my odds of breaking free were, which made my chances of surviving all the better.
I just had to get out of my bonds.
I continued struggling with the ropes on my feet, while also moving my hands around, wiggling and squirming, doing everything I could think of to make the restraints loosen their hold on me. If I could slip one hand out, I’d be golden. I just needed one hand to untie the rest.
The sound of footsteps approaching caused me to pause. I was no closer to being free than when I woke up, but I had to stop. I couldn’t risk rousing suspicion. But there was no reason to feign sleep. They’d know I was faking— there was a reason I wasn’t an on-screen actor, after all. The door swung open, hitting the back wall with a loud clang and an explosion of white dust from the drywall rained down on the floor beneath it.
The man standing in the doorway was large and foreboding. I recognized him for what he was in an instant, even without the mask. His jet-black hair was slicked back with some kind of oil, and he had a mustache like some silly movie villain. This had to be a movie set, I thought to myself. Villains didn’t really look like that in real life, did they?
He cracked a smile at me, which brought out the lines in his face, aging him by at least a decade. He was forty or a very well-preserved fifty.
“Glad to see you’re awake, Hazel,” he said, pulling a chair from the hallway.
The metal raked across the floor, sounding like nails on a chalkboard, making me cringe in pain. My headache worsened.
“What do you want from me?” I growled.
The man sat down in the chair across from me, crossing his legs at the knee and resting his hands comfortably, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. It was just another business meeting for him. No, don’t pay attention to the girl tied in the chair folks, everything was fine.
“Your brother is Boone Hudson, correct?”
“Yes,” I said slowly. After the words spilled from my lips, it sunk in. If this obviously dangerous man knew Boone’s name, maybe he was the reason my brother was missing. “What did you do with him?” I croaked.
The man cackled, an unpleasant sound that rang out like thunder and echoed off the empty walls. “Oh, dear, if we had him, we wouldn’t have come after you,” he said. “But since we are having trouble locating your brother, we had no choice to reach out to you.”
“What do you want with Boone?” I repeated.
“We just want to ask him some questions,” the man said, holding his hands up as if to show me he wasn’t armed.
“Seems like you and your thugs want to do more than talk,” I said. “Judging by the way you ‘reached out’ to me. My head is killing me by the way, asshole.”
He shrugged. “Don’t worry, we just want to talk to you. We have no intention of harming a hair on your pretty little head. Not if you cooperate.”
“I don’t know where Boone is, and even if I did, fuck you,” I spat, acid in my voice.
The man cocked an eyebrow. “You’re a feisty one, aren’t you?”
“Why don’t you remove these restraints and see how feisty I can get,” I challenged
“No, no, that won’t be necessary,” he said. “Like I said, we don’t want you hurt. We just want to send a message to your brother.”
“Fuck you,” I said again. “In case you didn’t get it the first time.”
“Oh, that can be arranged, Hazel,” he threatened. “But don’t worry, you don’t have to do anything for us. We’ve already sent the message we wanted to send.”
“What message is that?”
“That we know we can hurt him by hurting you,” he said, smiling gleefully as if he’d just given me the best news of the day. “And that we can do whatever we want with you.”
Determined not to give him the satisfaction of knowing I was afraid, I squared my shoulders and jutted out my chin.
“Then why don’t you?”
“Because the best bait is live bait, don’t you see?”
“So you’re going to keep me here, locked away to lure Boone to you? That’s your master plan?”
“No, not at all,” he said calmly. “In fact, you’re free to go whenever you wish.”
I narrowed my eyes and pulled at the restraints to underscore his words. “Sorry if I don’t exactly feel free right now.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll remove those restraints once you’re far away from here,” he said. “I think we’ve successfully gotten Boone’s attention by now.”
I wasn’t so sure, given the fact that Boone wasn’t talking to me. But I wasn’t about to argue with him. If he thought Boone knew about my capture, so be it. If it meant they set me free sooner, that was even better.
“Oh, one more thing,” the man said as he was got to his feet. “Whatever you do, don’t go to the police. We have eyes and ears all over the place, and if we find out the cops are involved…” he leaned forward, his face just inches from mine. Well, as you know, we know where to find you, as well as your father, your stepsister, and Christina.”
My blood ran cold.
He left the room, but two other men came in. They were the same skinny ones who’d snatched me from my house. They were wearing ski masks to cover their faces again. Without saying a word to me, one of them gagged me and the other put a bag over my head. Once again, my world went black, but I felt them moving me around. No stun gun this time, thank God.
They carried me outside, and I tried to get a feel for my surroundings— any sounds or smells in the area that might tell me where I was. The only sounds I could make out, though, were of men talking and a car engine running. The air smelled like gasoline, that stench blotting out anything else I might have been able to catch a whiff of. They pulled me from the chair and one of the men carried me to a car, and I caught a sniff of stale cigarettes, but nothing more. Nothing concrete that could lead me back there or to them. I wasn’t sure if it was planned that way or not, but they had covered their tracks well.
They shoved me into the backseat of a car, even going so far as to buckle me in. The car’s engine was running and was the same one I’d heard before. Car doors slammed around me and someone slid into the seat beside me. He also smelled like cigarettes, but there was something else too. Cologne or maybe deodorant. It wasn’t much, just a fresh, clean scent with a hint of musk and something else. Was it pine? Yes, he smelled a lot like Pine-Sol. If he thought that made him smell good, well, he was wrong. It was hard not to gag from the scent of him. The last thing I wanted to do was puke into the bag covering my head.
The car lurched forward, and I did my best to follow along, trying to get a sense of the direction we were headed. We traveled one, long, straight road, all gravel from the feel of it. Then it turned to shitty asphalt. Then a left, another left, a right, another right. We took one turn after another for what felt like an eternity, and it was hard to keep track of them. I suspected that was the point— to confuse me and keep me from getting my bearings. Maybe they were cleverer than I gave them credit for.
“We’re almost there,” a man up front said. “Get her ready for the drop.”
The bag on my head was suddenly torn off and I could see again. It took my eyes a second to adjust to the light, or rather, lack thereof. It was already dusk, but there were streetlights, which meant we were in a town somewhere.
Familiar stores and shops lined the street and I suddenly kne
w where they’d taken me. I was in town now, not far from home. Not far at all. We’d been driving for about an hour or so, maybe a little more, but I was close to home.
There were two men up front, I noticed. One hadn’t said a word the entire time and I’d had no idea he was even there. Three men for little old me. I was almost flattered.
“Be quick about it,” the man up front said, glancing in the rearview mirror.
I saw his eyes through his ski mask. Brown eyes that looked almost black. He looked away when he caught me staring as if he was afraid I’d be able to ID him just from the color of his eyes.
He commanded, “Drop her now.”
The man next to me drew a knife and cut through the restraints at my feet. Before he could sit up, I kneed him in the face with as much force as I could muster. He cursed and blood wetted the front of his mask, slipping beneath it and staining the front of his shirt. He grunted and sputtered, then pulled his hand back as if to smack me, but the guy in front had stopped the car and grabbed him.
“Don’t harm her. If Boone doesn’t turn himself in, then you can have all the fun you want,” he ordered. “But until then, we don’t want any questions.”
The man with the bloody nose scowled at me, his eyes narrowing in the eyeholes of his mask. I didn’t need to see his face to know it was contorted with rage. Good. Fuck him.
The man from the front seat came around and opened my car door. He looked down at me for a long moment. “If anyone sees us, you’re dead,” he said, his voice low and threatening. “I don’t care what the boss says.”
“Just be good and you’ll be home free,” the driver shouted at me. “Don’t be stupid, girl.”
With one swift movement of the guy’s knife, I was free. Before I could take the swing we both knew I wanted to take, he pushed me out of the car door onto the hard ground. I hit the asphalt with a grunt and scrambled to my feet as the car peeled out and sped away. No license plate, nothing to identify the vehicle besides it being a black BMW. Yeah, that’d narrow down the suspect list.
I looked around, and while I was in familiar territory, I was just outside of town. It was about a half mile into the small downtown area, then another two miles up the mountain to home. It was getting dark, and my body hurt from the ordeal. I just wanted to get to the house.
Shaking, shivering, and still in a fair amount of pain, I walked toward town, looking at the lights in the distance. It wasn’t a cold night, but I held my arms close to me for comfort. There was a chill throughout my entire body that I couldn’t get rid of, no matter how hard I tried. A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature.
My head was spinning, and I had no idea what had just happened. I was alive, though, and that was all that mattered. Except for the fact that gun toting goons were after Boone. Those men wanted my brother for some reason, and I wasn’t exactly sure why.
I knew better than to message Boone. I figured they were somehow monitoring his communications and telling him what happened would play right into their hands. No, no one could know about it, I decided. I wasn’t sure how I would figure it all out on my own, but I would. I’d find out what Boone was hiding from and try to fix it. I knew powerful people in Hollywood; surely, it was something we could solve together.
It had to be.
It took a few minutes for me to reach my small town. I wasn’t sure where to go at first. I saw a diner but realized I had no wallet or anything on me. I couldn’t even get something to eat if I wanted to— and I wanted to. I was hungry, dammit. I couldn’t walk in there looking like I did and without any money. I didn’t want to arouse suspicion.
Then I saw the sign— Lila Samuels-Hudson, Realtor— and it was like a beacon of hope. Lila and I had never been all that close, but she’d asked me to get together with her at some point, and I didn’t want to walk home. I just needed the perfect story to keep her from thinking anything was wrong.
Thankfully, her office was open. A bell over the door tinkled as I pushed open the glass door and stepped inside. A wide smile on her face, my stepsister stepped out of a nearby office, looking as perky as ever with her waist-length blonde hair and big, blue eyes. She stared at me in shock at first, and there seemed to be some disappointment in her expression as well. But she quickly brushed all that off and plastered her always-fake, friendly realtor smile on her face.
“Hazel!” she squealed, running over to me and wrapping me in a hug.
The pain in my body made me groan and wince, but if she noticed, she didn’t seem to care. If anything, she seemed to grip me tighter after I grimaced.
“What brings you in to my office today?” she beamed. “Change your mind about wanting to buy some property?”
“Uh, no, I was just in the area and decided to stop by,” I said, taking a deep breath when she finally released me from her bear hug.
She gave me a once over and frowned at me. “You’re looking a little rough, sis. Is everything okay?”
“Oh yeah, I’m fine,” I said, waving her off. “I just went for a run into town, but I lost track of time and I’m not sure I can make it back before night falls.”
“You jogged all the way here? It’s almost dark. That’s not safe on these roads.”
“I know. What was I thinking, right?” I laughed.
“Do you want a ride home?” she asked.
“Yes, please. I mean, if you don’t mind,” I said.
“I don’t mind at all. I was just getting ready to close up here,” she agreed. “Want to grab a bite to eat on the way home?”
“I’d love to, but I left my wallet at home,” I fixed her with a faux-sheepish look..
Truthfully, I just wanted to get home. I could eat there. Spending time making small talk with my stepsister was the last thing I wanted to do after being held captive for God knew how long. I glanced at the clock and tried to piece together my day. Her voice cut into my thoughts and made me lose the thread.
“That’s alright. You can pay me back later,” she said.
She gave me a once over, her eyes roaming up and down my body, and I became increasingly aware of her designer duds compared to my worn-out jean shorts and dirty t-shirt. She seemed to notice as well.
She smiled. “Maybe we’ll get carry-out. What do you say?”
“Sure,” I said, not wanting to be rude. My stomach had been growling earlier, before I was kidnapped, and I hadn’t had so much as a cracker since then. Even though I felt very little in the moment, I knew I should eat.
After dragged out of my house, shocked unconscious with a stun gun, held captive, and thrown out of a car, I really didn’t want to endure eating dinner with my stepsister. Some small part of me would have preferred to be back in captivity. But at the very least, we’d be doing it at home.
“Great, I know this great pizza place that opened up last year,” she said, grabbing her bag from a nearby office. She shut off the lights and continued to talk as we exited the building, and she locked up behind us. “You haven’t been here in so long,” she said. “Believe me when I say a lot has changed.”
I looked around and saw many of the same shops and restaurants that were there before I left but kept my mouth shut. I simply smiled and nodded. I wanted to be polite to her. After all, she was doing me a favor. And she was doing so without asking any questions, which was even better. If she wanted to talk about the town for the entire ride home and while we ate, I would be happy to listen.
Lila clicked on her key fob, and the lights of a white Mercedes SUV flashed brightly. I stood there, stunned for a moment.
“What is it?”
“When did you ditch the pickup truck?” I asked.
“Oh, a while back,” she said, giggling and waving my question off with a flick of her wrist. “You’re not the only one who can have nice things, you know.”
There was just a hint of coldness in her comment, as if she was enjoying one upping me, but as I slipped into the passenger seat of her vehicle, she was all smiles.
&n
bsp; “Business has been good, I guess?”
She waved me off again. “Of course,” she said. “I’m good at what I do.”
I had a hard time believing that real estate in our middle-of-nowhere mountain town could be that good, but what did I know? I knew next to nothing about the real estate market.
“Well, I’m happy for you, Lila,” I said, and I found that, surprisingly, I meant it.
My stepsister had moved from New York City to Colorado when her mom married my dad, and she always seemed to resent leaving the big, bright city for the middle of nowhere. She had an insatiable craving for the nicer things in life, as did her mother. It was always a bone of contention between us and she always had to remind me of everything she’d given up when her mom decided to uproot her life and move her to Bumfuck, Colorado. It would seem she eventually learned to love it.
She didn’t acknowledge my statement at all. Her smile faltered for a bit and there was just a hint of the real Lila underneath. I always knew she was two different people. There was the sweet, happy-go-lucky girl she liked to show the world. But she also harbored a miserable person on the inside. I’d felt sorry for her in the past, which was one reason I’d tried everything I could think of to help her when we were growing up. I did it even though she was always looking down on me. As if growing up in the bright lights of the city somehow made her inherently better than me.
“So when are you going back to Los Angeles?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet,”
“Must be nice just to take weeks of vacation at a time,” she said.
“Yeah, well, the rest of the time, I work my ass off.”
“I work hard too, you know,” she said, side-eyeing me as if slighted by my comment. “You’re not the only one who works hard.”
“I didn’t say that I was,” I said. “Just that when we’re filming, I can be on set for twelve to fourteen hours a day, most of it falling through glass windows or jumping off buildings.”
“All that is fake, though,” she said. “You’re never in any real danger.”