Chapter 16 #2
Gillian clicked off the phone connection and sighed.
She loved talking to Walker. They never seemed to run out of things to say to each other.
But now she needed to concentrate on the other cars around her and finding her way to the right address downtown.
With all the one-way streets, she frequently got turned around.
But this time, she was able to figure out where she was going without any issues and she pulled into the parking garage with plenty of time to spare before her appointment.
Gillian chose to park at the top of the garage, near the elevator doors.
There were fewer cars at the top of the structure, but that was all right with her.
Gillian had seen a documentary once on how shoddy architects had designed a parking garage and it had collapsed, trapping and squishing people on the lower levels.
It seemed safer to park at the top. Yeah, it was a longer fall down, but at least she’d be on the top of all the debris.
Her friends gave her shit about being so paranoid, but Gillian didn’t care. She’d get the last laugh when she was standing on top of the pile of rubble that used to be a parking garage.
She took the elevator down to the first floor and headed for the caterer.
An hour and a half later, and full of sugar from all the cakes she’d tasted, Gillian headed back to her car. They’d settled on two cakes for the party, one the double chocolate cake Gillian had guessed would be a favorite choice, and a simpler vanilla cake with chocolate frosting for the other.
Gillian was thinking about all the things she still needed to do to finalize everything for the Howards’ anniversary party as she stepped out of the elevator on the top floor of the parking garage—and didn’t see the two men in masks running toward her until it was too late to do anything.
The pepper spray Walker had given her was inside her purse, but even if it had been in her hand, she wouldn’t have had time to do anything other than brace.
One of the men grabbed her around the waist and clamped his hand over her mouth.
Gillian screamed, but the sound barely traveled further than the next car over.
The second man grabbed her legs when she began to kick and fight. They shuffled her over to a white panel van—how cliché—and stuffed her inside when the door was opened.
There were no seats in the back of the van and it was full of all sorts of tools.
Gillian had watched enough crime shows to know if the men managed to take her out of the garage, she was as good as dead.
They could bring her to the middle of nowhere.
Lord knew there were plenty of places in Texas that were totally isolated, even around Austin, that she didn’t have a hope in hell of escaping.
Panicked, she fought as hard as she could. She knew she’d made contact with her kidnappers because there was a lot of grunting and swearing.
“Hold her down!” one man said.
“I’m trying!” the other answered.
“Hit her!” a third voice ordered.
The third voice registered in her consciousness as being female, which was a shock, and for a second, Gillian thought it sounded familiar, but then she couldn’t think about anything other than the pain as a fist landed on her cheekbone.
Momentarily stunned, she stopped fighting. The door slid shut and she heard the engine rumble as it started.
No!
She tried to fight some more, but because of her momentary lapse, the men had gotten the upper hand. One grabbed her wrists and the other zip-tied them together. He tightened them so much, she squeaked in pain.
“Shut up,” one of her kidnappers growled into her face.
She spit on him.
He swore, and the last thing Gillian remembered was his fist coming toward her face.
Trigger couldn’t concentrate on the book he was reading to the group of second-graders gathered around him. He’d been set up in a corner of the classroom with five kids, and he loved their enthusiasm and the way they hung on his every word. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Gillian.
It was two o’clock, and she should’ve been done with her appointment at the caterer and back home well before now.
But every time he checked the app on his phone, it indicated she was still in the parking garage near the caterer. He figured she’d forgotten her phone in her car and maybe she’d taken her client to lunch after they’d chosen which dessert to offer at the anniversary party in a couple weeks.
But that didn’t really make sense. Gillian always had her phone with her.
As a small-business owner, she relied on email and phone to talk to new and current clients.
She might silence it when she was in a meeting, but she never left it behind.
And seeing that blinking icon on the app that said her phone hadn’t moved—long after her meeting should have ended—made no sense to him.
He hadn’t even been able to check in on her until noon, when he and the team had been released to grab a quick bite before heading over to the elementary school. At first he hadn’t thought much about where her phone was pinging, until he’d zoomed in and realized her phone was in the parking garage.
It wasn’t fair to the kids, but Trigger read the book in his hands as fast as he could.
He couldn’t let this go. When he was finished, he stood and spent a moment praising each of the kids around him, then he strode toward the door.
He flashed the “danger” sign to Lefty before he slipped out of the classroom.
He didn’t bother with texting; he clicked on Gillian’s name and brought the phone up to his ear.
With the way his skin was crawling, he didn’t really expect her to answer.
And he was right, she didn’t. Her voice mail kicked on after five rings.
He left a quick message telling her that he was worried about her and asked her to please call him as soon as possible.
He then sent a text telling her the same thing.
By the time he was done, Lefty and Grover had joined him in the hallway.
“What’s wrong?” Lefty asked, all business.
“I don’t know. It’s Gillian. She had an appointment downtown this morning and she should’ve been done by now. The tracking app shows she’s in the parking garage nearby. At least her phone is.”
“You tried calling her?” Grover asked.
Trigger nodded. “No answer.”
“Cops?” Lucky asked.
“You know as well as I do that they’ll just tell me she’s an adult and she doesn’t have to report her every move to me. She’ll have to be missing for twenty-four hours before they’ll consider taking my report,” Trigger said.
“But they could do a welfare check, right?” Grover asked.
“Maybe. I’m headed down there now.”
“You want us to come with?” Lefty asked.
Trigger nodded. “If nothing’s wrong and I’m overreacting, we can all have dinner or something. I’ve got my bag in my car already, since I was headed down there later anyway.”
“But if something is wrong, we’ll be there to have your back,” Grover said.
He then opened the classroom door and signaled to the rest of the team that they needed to move out.
Within five minutes, Trigger was surrounded by men who hadn’t thought twice about coming to his aid, even if they didn’t know what the issue was.
Lefty explained the situation and within five minutes, they’d all piled into both Trigger’s and Doc’s vehicles to make the trip down to Austin.
Trigger knew he was driving too fast but didn’t care. The closer they got to Austin, and with every call that went unanswered by Gillian, he knew deep in his gut that something was very wrong.
She’d been very good about letting him know her whereabouts. The situation in Venezuela had scared her, but Trigger didn’t think it had fundamentally changed the way she looked at the world. It was one of the many things he loved about her.
Fuck. He loved her.
From the first moment he’d pushed inside her body, she’d been his in a way no woman had ever been before.
Gillian still saw the good in people. In the world. She had an intrinsically positive outlook on life and felt as if everyone had good in them, that everyone was redeemable. Trigger knew differently, but he found her innocence refreshing.
He just hoped it hadn’t gotten her killed.
Gillian regained consciousness in a blink. She wasn’t confused, knew exactly what had happened, but couldn’t understand why.
Squinting, she looked around her—and her blood froze.
She was in some kind of rundown house. She had no idea where. There was trash and debris all around her, along with some shabby furniture. She was sitting in a very uncomfortable wooden chair with her arms secured behind her back. Her ankles were also tied to the legs of the chair.
But the most frightening thing about her situation was the plastic tarp under her feet.
She wasn’t an idiot. She’d seen Dexter, she knew what that meant. They were doing their best to contain her DNA so there would be no trace she’d been here.
Her limbs started shaking but Gillian couldn’t stop. She whimpered in fear.
Just then the door opened, and she stared at the men who entered and felt herself shake even harder.
With just a look, she knew the man in front wasn’t someone who felt any sympathy for her.
He was Hispanic, with dark hair and bottomless dark eyes.
It was if they looked right through her.
He didn’t see Gillian Romano, he saw an enemy.
Being so loathed and hated wasn’t a feeling Gillian was familiar with. She was a nice person. She went out of her way to make others comfortable and to make them like her. What she could’ve done to this man to make him hate her so much, she had no idea.
“So you’re Gillian,” the man said after he’d stopped in front of her.
Licking her lips, she nodded. Feeling thankful that she hadn’t been gagged, Gillian couldn’t seem to make her voice work.
“I hear you’ve been chatting with the Feds and DEA.”