Rescue Mission

by Danica Winters

  He could hear her breathing right on the other side of the door, like she was standing parallel to him, sharing this moment of pain. He wanted to open the door and pull her into his arms, but if he was touching her or even just seeing her, he wasn’t sure that he had the power it would take to say all the things he needed to say.

  “I think we need to go to the feds with all this.”

  There was a long pause. “No, not yet.” Her voice was high, the sound false. She was still not telling him something. He could hear the hesitation and the lies in her tone.

  “What company was it that you were working for—the one that is threatening you?” he asked, questioning his judgment in asking. If she told him, he might come under fire, as well. But if she didn’t, he wouldn’t know exactly who he was fighting.

  Her breathing quickened. “Er, Ben and I...were working for a company.”

  “What company?” he asked, not understanding.

  “Rockwood—the group that tried to have you and your brother gunned down.” She paused as if to let her words sink in for a moment. In interrogation, he would have called that tactical silence. He hated it, but not as much as he hated Rockwood.

  He ran his hand over his face, trying to stave off the start of a headache. “I’ve got to run. I left Joe alone in the hall. We can continue this conversation when you get out to the car. Hurry up.”

  When this woman screwed up, she screwed up royally. At least they had that one thing in common—they could both wreak havoc on their personal lives.

  He hummed as he made his way back out to the hall to fetch the keys, the song just a little ditty, a reflection of the hope he was feeling even during these dark times. It was crazy, but the fact that she had been working for his enemy—or rather, had been spying on Rockwood—made him feel better. Something about this entire scenario made him feel like they were approaching even ground. Maybe this, being here with Summer and Joe, was an opportunity to put all of their lives back in order and he could be her hero and show her how much he was willing to sacrifice to be with them.

  “All right, little guy, Mom is just about done. She’ll be out in a minute,” he said, walking toward the front door where the car seat had been sitting on the floor. However, the spot where he had put Joe was now empty and the door was ajar.

  He rushed to the door, jerking it wide open and looking outside as if Joe could have gotten up and somehow moved himself. But the baby and the car seat were nowhere in sight. Someone must have been watching, reached inside the moment his back was turned and taken his son.

  His heart shuddered, threatening to stop beating with the pain. Joe was gone.

  Chapter Eight

  His scream was something unlike anything she had ever heard before, a blood-curdling sound like a dying animal—and something that she never wanted to hear again. Summer rushed out, expecting to find Mike lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood or maybe being bludgeoned by a house bandit. Instead, he was standing beside the front door, his hand on the top of his head, staring at nothing.

  “What’s the matter? What happened to Joe? Is he okay?” She found herself beside him, but she had no idea how her body had gotten her there. “Where is he? Did you put him in the car?” she asked.

  Not waiting for Mike to respond, she rushed outside to the car, but it sat empty.

  Mike stared at the car, saying nothing for a long moment. “He’s...he’s gone. They must have just opened the front door and reached in. I didn’t lock it. I wasn’t planning on leaving him alone... I-I just...” His voice cracked as his breath seeped from his lips.

  Summer couldn’t hear anything over the din of terror ringing through her. Someone had taken their son. Someone had taken him. It had to have been Ben. But he had only threatened her. He hadn’t said Rockwood had concrete evidence about her being a double agent. If anything, he’d just seemed pissed about the breakup. And as much as he had scared her, part of her hadn’t really taken him seriously.

  If Ben had wanted her dead or to kidnap Joe, why would he have done it now?

  No. It didn’t make sense. Ben had always come at her head-on, he wouldn’t have just taken Joe and slipped away. It wasn’t his way of working. He would have wanted her to see him with Joe, to witness in horror as he took him away. He would have made a show of it, making her watch what she had caused.

  Besides, when they had been dating, Ben had always said he loved Joe. He had even gone so far as to talk about adopting him—not that she would have ever let that happen.

  But then there were times when Ben had made it no secret that he’d thought she was a terrible mother—especially when she had gone away for days without telling him where she was going. Little had he known at the time, but she had been meeting with her boss, Kevin, at the DTRA and reporting what she had learned about Rockwood.

  Maybe Ben had been pushed over the edge by seeing her with Mike. Maybe this was all some terrible and warped way for Ben to get his revenge.

  Her breathing started to quicken as panic wormed through her. She pressed her forehead against the cold steel of the car door as reality hit. This was her fault.

  What made it worse was that it was all because she had once again put her faith in Mike Spade. She had trusted him to watch her son. To keep him safe.

  This was Mike’s doing. He had left their son alone. She had told him that Rockwood was threatening to take Joe and yet he had not put her baby’s safety first. Then again, Joe had been in her apartment. She could have made the same mistake. And yet, she had to be angry at someone other than herself.

  She turned to Mike, hate filling her as she looked at his terror-stricken face. “You did this.”

  He didn’t speak. He didn’t bother to deny.

  He had to have known that what she said was true—they had lost Joe because of him.

  “We will get him back. I will get him back.” Mike sounded breathless, as if the vastness of loss had stripped him of his voice.

  “If you don’t, I will spend the rest of my life hating you.” She didn’t like the words that spilled from her like blood, but she couldn’t help it, she couldn’t control anything anymore, least of all what she was feeling.

  Her son... Her son was gone.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I just put him down for a split second. I didn’t think—”

  “I already know that much,” she seethed.

  Mike ran his hands over his face and held them there, covering his eyes for a long moment as though he could strip away the reality of what he had caused. “You have every right to be upset. I screwed up. But I will get Joe back. I will set things right. I will fix this. All of this.”

  She opened her mouth, ready to spit more fire at him, but he stopped her when he glanced over at her. He looked like he was in physical pain, like someone had slashed through his chest and removed his heart. She knew the look because she was feeling it too.

  “You can hate me all you want, but we have to work together to get Joe back. We are in this together.” Mike paused. “We have to be strategic about this. We have to think. We can’t let our emotions cloud our judgment. Not when Joe’s life, all our lives, are on the line.”

  “Since when has it been our lives? No one is trying to gun you down.” She was indignant in her pain, but she couldn’t stop herself. He couldn’t possibly be hurting as much as she was right now.

  Mike stepped closer to her and she backed away. He couldn’t fix this like he normally did, when he’d let her fall into his embrace. No. That wouldn’t work anymore. Her weakness for his touch had gotten them into this mess in the first place.

  “We need to call in backup. We need to get law enforcement involved. They need to know that Joe is missing.”

  “No.” The word was a knee-jerk response, but she meant it. “Bringing them in would be a slippery slope.” She stopped as she thought about all the diffe
rent facets of what it would mean to bring in the locals—few of the advantages would outweigh the profusion of potential negatives. “Your team has just about the same level of resources at their disposal. Do you think they would be willing to help me out? I can pay.”

  “You know if this thing goes even more haywire, the police will end up getting involved. I mean what if someone gets killed? How will we come out of this looking like the good guys if we work behind the police’s backs and they find out about it?”

  “I hear what you are saying, but I can’t expose what I’ve done.”

  “Not even if that leads to our son being returned safely?” Mike challenged.

  “How dare you. That was low, even for you.” She tried to control her rage. “I can’t expose what I’ve done because it might lead to worse things happening...to Joe.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mike huffed. “I didn’t mean it like that... I mean I did, I want Joe home, but I didn’t mean to attack you. I’m just as scared and upset as you are.”

  How could he be when he’d only just entered their lives? He didn’t know the feeling of holding Joe in the hospital when he had taken his first breath. He didn’t know what it was like taking care of a baby with a cold, worrying if he was going to make it through the night.

  As hurt as she felt, Summer didn’t voice her thoughts. He didn’t deserve to be lashed with them. He loved Joe. He loved their son just as much as she did.

  Love had the power to overwhelm a person in less than a second—and she had seen it engulf Mike when he’d first held their son. Their love for their son was different, though. Hers had had more time to grow and blossom. But love, she knew, wasn’t something tangible that could be measured by such feeble metrics like time. Love could only be measured by sacrifice. And here Mike was, willing to sacrifice his life for their son. No matter what she was feeling, the power of his love was undeniable.

  But she wasn’t ready to forgive him for everything he had put them through.

  “Do you think it was Ben who took him?” Mike asked.

  She shook her head, violently. “He would have made a show of it. But it very well could have been someone from Rockwood.”

  Mike scowled, and she could see the terror in his eyes at the possibility that just about anyone could have taken their boy.

  “Did you see anyone when you came outside?” she asked, trying to shift her focus to what needed to happen next to bring Joe back.

  “I didn’t,” he said, shaking his head. “Whoever did this had to be watching. Either they followed us or were staked out here and just waiting for an opening to get their hands on Joe.”

  Whichever it was, it didn’t matter. They needed to assume they’d been followed and that there probably had been someone staked out and watching her. The people she was working for, or had been working for, weren’t stupid, but they were dangerous and angry.

  She had been part of kidnapping cases before, not on the frontlines or in the role as a negotiator, but she had seen enough of these things to know that people—and kids, specifically—were usually used to barter for ransom. She doubted Rockwood would use Joe for ransom, but why else would they have taken him instead of killing him outright? They had to have wanted something.

  “They are going to reach out to us. Right now, I think all we can do is wait.” She couldn’t believe what she was saying. To wait went against every particle of her being as a mother, but it didn’t change the reality of what was happening.

  “Are you absolutely, one-hundred-percent sure that it’s Rockwood behind Joe’s kidnapping? You are sure that Ben wouldn’t have done this?” Mike countered. “You know I’ve always said that usually the most obvious suspect is the perp.”

  “I know you don’t like Ben, neither do I. But he loves Joe and I truly believe he wants me to be cleared of being a double agent. He wants me to come back to him. He is volatile, and he is angry, but he wouldn’t compromise Joe like this. And he wouldn’t compromise any possible future the three of us could have together. He loves us.”

  Mike nodded, but she could tell he didn’t really believe her. Or maybe it was that he just didn’t like what she was saying.

  “Ben is a lot of things, but I really don’t think he’s behind this. I don’t think he’s the bad guy here.”

  Mike shook his head. “I am not trying to make Ben the bad guy. I just want to make sure that we don’t waste time chasing the wrong people. But you seem to want to defend him all the time... If you still love him, that’s fine. Just admit it and then we can move forward with that awareness in place.”

  “I don’t love Ben.” She could feel the truth of her words, but she wasn’t sure Mike could feel them as well. “Ben was just a space filler, a soft landing, if you want to call it that. I needed someone who could staunch the loneliness in my heart after losing you, and he seemed to love me. Having him as my boyfriend made it easy to spy on Rockwood. Things with him checked a lot of the boxes for what I needed in my life.” It ached to admit her folly.

  “Summer...” Mike slipped his hand into hers.

  There was that touch. That damned touch. He was a master of making her forget herself with that simple thing. And he would always have that power over her, no matter how much she knew she shouldn’t let him.

  “Let’s just get Joe back, then we can think about everything else. As it stands, let’s just call a truce. Fair?”

  From where she stood, it was more than fair, it was a million miles past fair, given the circumstances. It was better to be a team than to fight with the one man she had always loved and always would.

  Mike could never know, but it was so easy for him to see if he wanted to—her love for him would always mean sacrifices. Sacrifices she would gladly make if it meant having him in her life.

  Chapter Nine

  Women made no sense at all.

  He’d always hated when other men had said things like that to him, but now that he was standing there and forced to see everything that was Summer, Mike really understood it. She was just a little bit, albeit justifiably, crazy. Luckily, she was the right kind of crazy for him.

  “Let’s go inside. I can make some phone calls to see if we can get my team on this and then we will go from there. How does that sound?” he asked, trying to help.

  She nodded. “I think we need to talk to the neighbors to see if anyone saw anything.”

  They could work on securing the scene all they wanted and collecting eyewitnesses, acting like this was a regular investigation that didn’t personally impact them. But this was their child and they needed to fly under the radar. The second they started going around and knocking on doors, their ordeal would be out in the open, and that could trigger police involvement. Whatever anonymity they’d been hoping for would be gone.

  There was a certain amount of power that came into play outside the rules and regulations of the legal system. And they would need all the leeway they could get when he got his hands on whomever had thought it acceptable to steal a baby out from under their noses. There was a certain level of hell reserved for people like that, and he would make sure they had the chance to experience the heat.

  Mike shook his head. “There wasn’t anyone around that I noticed. Whoever did this wouldn’t have been stupid enough to be seen and, as much as I want to ask around, I doubt we’ll get anything—the kidnapper seemed smart enough to watch for nosy neighbors. Plus, I think it’s best if we are just quiet and lay low a little bit. Like you said, we just need to wait for the call.”

  As if on cue, Mike’s phone pinged. The number, from Montana, was the generic type likely generated by some kind of app. He would have his team look into it, but he’d done this enough to know a spoof when he saw it.

  He clicked on the message; it was simple and yet terrifying.

  Baby safe. For now. You have 46 hours. Anything more and baby loses toes.

  S
ummer gasped audibly when he showed her the text.

  Yep. Someone was going to die for this. Actually, there would probably be several before he was done.

  He dialed the number, wanting to hear the voice of the person responsible for the hell he was going through. A man picked up, but Mike didn’t recognize the voice. “I assume you got our message and that your little girlfriend told you about what was going on and how she appears to have been playing on both sides of the fence. As it is, she is lucky to be alive.”

  “If you don’t return Joe in the next ten minutes, it is not us who need to be worried. It will be you and your damned crew. We will hunt you down—”

  “Hold it,” the man said, cutting him off. “Do you think it’s a good idea to threaten the person who has your girlfriend’s baby?”

  Damn it.

  Rational. He needed to be rational.

  First, he’d called Summer his “girlfriend,” which meant that he was either downplaying Mike and Summer’s past and using it to demoralize and deride him or that he had just been watching them for a finite period of time and had made incorrect assumptions.

  Second, the guy had called Joe her baby and not his son, which had to mean he didn’t know the truth. Together, this was good. Whoever it was didn’t have all the answers, which meant he hadn’t infiltrated Summer’s life too deeply. He was still only at surface level, which meant Mike and Summer had some degree of autonomy and leverage.

  Third, Summer had been right: the kidnapping couldn’t have been perpetrated by Ben. Mike had introduced himself to Ben as Joe’s father. Therefore, someone else was behind the kidnapping.

  The only good news was that their enemy didn’t know he could use Joe against him; as it was, he was looking at Mike like he was just a passive outsider—a mere boyfriend with little skin in the game. Well, he could play off their ill-conceived and poorly executed strategy.

  “Before you make any more demands, I need to know Joe is alive and doing well. What can you do to prove that he is safe?” He forced himself into negotiation mode.