Chapter 26 Ransom
RANSOM
The car is packed up, loaded with anything and everything we thought we’d need for this. It’s hard to know what to bring when you’re running away from your old life, but Vic insisted on being prepared.
We’re all piled in the car too, sitting at the drop point where we agreed to meet Willow to pick her up.
We’re here, and our shit is here, and we’re all ready to go… except for the fact that there’s still no Willow.
Malice is full of nervous, angry energy, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. Every time a car drives by, he cranes his neck to see if it’s Willow, and every time it’s not her, his mood seems to sour a little more.
“Has she called or texted at all?” he asks me for the fifteenth time in less than an hour.
I shake my head. “No. Nothing.”
“Fuck.” He hits the steering wheel with his fist. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Do you think…” I start and then trail off. I don’t want to say it, but there’s a lot that could have happened. She could have gotten caught on her way out. Her grandmother or one of the stooges who work for her could have intercepted her as she was trying to sneak away.
“Her last message said she was on the way to meet us,” Vic points out.
I nod. “She said everything was fine.”
“Well, clearly it’s fucking not fine since she’s not fucking here,” Malice snaps.
“Calm down.” Vic says it shortly, but I can tell he’s anxious too.
We all are. As more time passes and we have no fucking answers about where Willow is or what happened, the tension in the car winds tighter and tighter.
Silence takes over again, but it only lasts for a few minutes. Malice’s angry leg jiggling reaches a fever pitch and then he turns in his seat to look to at Vic.
“Check the security footage from around her apartment,” he says. “If someone stopped her or came and took her or something, I wanna know who the fuck it was.”
“On it.” Vic pops open his laptop and starts searching, his fingers flying over the keyboard as he does what he does best. The tension in the car doesn’t lessen, and Malice and I wait anxiously to hear whatever he’s found.
I can tell it’s on the tip of Malice’s tongue to urge Vic to hurry up, but before he can, our brother makes a noise of disbelief.
“What is it?” I ask, craning my neck to look. “What did you find?”
“She went to the church.”
“What the fuck?” Malice’s head whips toward him. “That can’t be right.”
“It is,” Vic mutters, his eyes scanning the screen.
“She didn’t get in the car we left for her.
It’s still sitting there. But I’ve got footage of her getting into the back seat of the car her grandmother had stationed outside her place.
And that same car brought her to the church.
There’s a building across the street from the church, and I can see her pulling up and then walking in. ”
There’s pin drop silence after Vic finishes speaking, as we all try to process what he said. Even he looks like he’s working through it in his mind, when he’s the one who saw it all on camera.
I know my brothers well enough to know that the same thought is going through all of our heads right now.
Why would Willow do this?
The silence stretches out for another few seconds, and then Malice explodes.
“What the fucking… fuck?!” he shouts. “What the hell was she thinking? We had a plan. We had a fucking deal, and then she goes and does this?”
He sounds furious, and I blink, still reeling from the shock. I can’t even be angry or sad or anything other than stunned.
She hates Troy. Why the hell would she choose to marry him instead of running with us?
Distantly, I hear Malice’s deep voice growling about how fucked up this is, but it’s not until Vic speaks up again that I’m able to really focus.
“It’s obvious why she did it,” he says softly.
Malice rounds on him. “What the hell do you mean, it’s obvious?
I was pretty sure we had a fucking agreement.
We agreed to give her a few more days, and if she couldn’t find anything to use against her grandma, we’d run.
She was out of time for her plan, so we had to do ours. And now she’s turning on us?”
Vic shakes his head. “She’s not turning on us, Malice. She’s just… going through with the wedding. I don’t know why she would choose to do that, but we can sit here and bitch about it, or we can go stop her.”
That gets through to Malice enough for him to nod.
He cranks the car up and guns the engine, peeling out so quickly that Vic and I have to scramble to hold on and not get tossed around.
Now that some of the surprise has worn off, I’m catching up with Malice in terms of how I feel. There’s anger and agitation, and above all, the feeling of not understanding what’s happened.
“She thought running was a bad plan to begin with,” I bring up, half thinking out loud. “Maybe she came up with a better one?”
“There isn’t a better fucking plan,” Malice snaps. “The fucking wedding is today. What did she think she was going to find out this close to the deadline?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t understand. There has to be a reason.”
“If there is a reason, then why wouldn’t she tell us? If she had another plan, she would have told us,” Malice insists. “That old bitch must have said something to her. Made some threat or something. There’s no other explanation.”
“There’s one other explanation,” Vic points out, interjecting in his quiet voice. “We protected her once with a massive lie. Maybe this is her way of doing the same.”
As soon as he says that, the sinking feeling in my chest gets even worse.
Because he’s right. We left Willow in the dark once to protect her, because we thought it was the best way to handle a shitty situation.
And it makes so much fucking sense that she would try to do the same thing if she thought she had to.
And I hate that. I hate being left in the dark because someone else made a decision to try to protect us.
I can tell Malice feels the same. His jaw is tight, his lips pressed together, and it looks like he’s about to explode all over again.
I brace myself, but the feral yell he lets out still makes me wince. He slams his hands on the steering wheel and floors it, sending us speeding down the road even faster.
We pull up to the church with a squeal of tires after what feels like way too long. Malice parks across the street, and we can see that the doors are closed already.
“Fuck. The ceremony must be starting,” I murmur.
“We need a plan,” Vic says. “We need to get Willow out, but there will be hundreds of witnesses. We can’t just run in there, guns blazing.”
“We don’t have fucking time—”
Vic cuts Malice off, talking over him. “We have to be smart about this. There’s only the three of us, and while I don’t expect those rich pricks in the audience to be armed, there could be security. We’re not taking any chances.”
“He’s right,” I throw in. “At the very least, we’re super outnumbered. And it’s important that no one is able to identify us later. We’ll need to keep a low profile if we can.”
Malice grumbles but gives in. It would’ve been a hell of a lot easier if we could’ve researched and prepped for this operation days ago, but since we didn’t, our best chance of getting Willow out now is to avoid doing something stupid.
“Fine. Then we sneak in,” Malice says. “We go in the back and keep to the side halls as we make our way to the main part of the church. We don’t let them know we’re there until the last possible second.”
Vic nods. “Then we grab Willow and get the fuck out the same way.”
“We’ll need masks,” I add. “It’ll make us harder to ID later. Vic, you’ll need to be ready to wipe some footage too.”
“I will,” he confirms.
It only takes us another minute to sketch out a rough plan.
It’s how we usually do these things, coming to an agreement together, but this feels a lot more high stakes than most of the things we’ve done in recent memory.
Even the last time Willow was kidnapped and we didn’t know where she was, we had more planning behind our rescue mission.
In this case, we just have to hope we can get in and out and away without it turning into a fucking bloodbath.
Malice pulls around to the back of the church, and we all share a look, arming ourselves and then tugging on ski masks.
I don’t really want to start mowing down wedding guests, especially since everyone at the ceremony is likely to be wealthy and well-connected, but if I have to… fuck, I’ll do what it takes to protect Willow.
The back door of the church is locked, but Vic drops to his knees quickly and busts out his lock pick.
Fortunately, the lock isn’t nearly as complex as some of the ones we’ve had to deal with, and it clicks open in less than a minute.
Malice yanks the door open as Vic tucks his tools away, and we all slip inside, sticking together.
It’s quiet in this part of the massive building, and I keep my head on a swivel, grateful for the old carpeting that muffles the sound of our footsteps.
I can hear the sound of music from up front, and I signal to my brothers and gesture with one hand. Vic nods, and as a unit, we start making our way toward the sound, keeping to the shadows.
Before we can get very far, a door swings open a few feet ahead of us and someone steps into the corridor. It’s a young man who looks like he was hired to serve drinks or something, and his eyes go wide when he turns and sees us.
Quick as lightning, Vic darts forward. He grabs the guy and puts a hand over his mouth, then finds a pressure point on his neck, holding his fingers there until the guy slumps in his grip.
Malice yanks open another door cautiously, and when it turns out to be a closet full of cleaning supplies, he motions for Vic to stash the unconscious staff member in there. Then we keep moving.
Luckily, we don’t run into anyone else, and we make it to what I’m pretty sure is the door separating us from the front of the church.
This close, I can make out the droning voice of the priest, speaking about marriage and the sanctity of that union.
Fury fills me, and I clench my free hand into a fist. It’s all a fucking sham, and I wonder if this priest knows that. Or if he even cares. Maybe he’s being paid off too.
We’ve kept this rescue mission covert for as long as we could, but this is the part where that has to end. Willow is out there, standing in front of a crowd of people, about to pledge herself to Troy Copeland—and the only way we’re going to get to her is by stepping out in front of that same crowd.
We hesitate by the door for a second, each of us taking a second to steel ourselves for what’s about to happen. My finger slides over the trigger of my gun, and I draw in a deep breath and let it out.
Then we nod to each other, the signal that it’s time to go.
Malice kicks the door open, and we burst through it. I fire two shots into the air, and the loud pops cut off the priest’s words. Screams break out among the guests almost immediately.
Willow is standing near Troy and the priest by the altar, dressed in an expensive looking wedding dress, and as more screams rise up, she turns toward us, her eyes going wide with shock.