Chapter Thirty #2
“Hi,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper.
“Tell Kenzi and her friends what I told you to tell them. Be a good girl, or you get the punishment again.”
Whatever ‘the punishment’ was must have been awful because her entire face twisted, everything in her recoiled.
Poor Cassie.
She visibly swallowed before taking a breath, looking right at the camera and seeming to recite something, like she had been forced to learn it and repeat it over and over before she was deemed ready to say it to the camera.
“If you want to see me again, you need to deposit seventy-five thousand dollars of Bitcoin into the account listed in the email. If you don’t.
” She swallowed hard again. “If you don’t do this by midnight two days from now, I will be disposed of.
” That was obviously the end of the video, but my strong-spirited Cassie wasn’t done.
She rushed on, her voice so steeped in desperation that it actually made tears sting my eyes.
“Kenzi, please, please, you don’t know what he… ”
The rest of her sentence was cut off because a black-clad midsection of a man moved forward, blocking her image from the camera.
The last thing the video had to offer was the high, loud, dragged-out scream from Cassie.
“Got that?” Tig asked, his voice clipped, obviously speaking to Barrett.
As for me, I was hearing him as through from the other end of a very long tunnel, everything suddenly far away and muffled as I stared down at the phone that Tig removed from my numb fingers.
He took screenshots of the video URL and then the information about the Bitcoin account.
“I know Bitcoin is locked the fuck down tight, but figure this the fuck out.”
That was all he said, ending the call, tucking both the phones away, then turning his full attention to me.
Now, I definitely liked having his full attention, but at that moment, all I could focus on was her broken face, her desperate pleas, her scream.
His hands moved out, framing my face and forcing it upward, looking to gauge my reaction, it seemed. When he saw the tears clouding my vision, there wasn’t any hesitation. His arms left my face and wrapped around me, hauling me into his chest, and wrapping me up tight.
Crushed, completely and utterly shattered, I sank into him and trusted him to try to hold me together.
“Let it out,” he murmured against my hair where the side of his face was resting.
My lips had been pressed together, trying to keep any sounds inside as I kept my eyes shut so tightly they hurt to keep the tears from streaming.
But the second I was given permission not to have to be so strong, I did as he said; I let it out.
I had no idea how long we stayed there. Tig’s phone went off half a dozen times, all of them ignored, as his hands just continued to hold me, stroking up my spine as he whispered words of comfort in my ear.
As for me, I just… purged it all. There was an almost scary helplessness about the way the tears wouldn’t stop; the sobs wouldn’t quiet; my body completely convulsing with the power with which they came out of me.
It could have been minutes or hours.
By the time I completely tapped out the deep well inside, my feet were hurting, my face felt sore from the saltwater, and I knew my nose was puffy and red and that I looked a complete and utter mess.
Feeling the change, one of his arms stayed around my lower back as an anchor but allowed enough room for me to move backward. As soon as I did so, his other hand reached up toward my cheeks, swiping away the traces of tears and likely a goodly amount of eye makeup as well.
“I know that was hard, honey,” he said, his voice a low rumble, a secret between the two of us even though there was no one else around.
“But I need you to look at this the way me and everyone else involved is looking at this. Contact is good. Proof of life is good. It is easy to focus on the bruises and cuts and how she begged for help. That’s normal.
But you need to move past that. The video came from somewhere.
It was filmed somewhere. It was uploaded somewhere.
There will be traces somewhere—email addresses lead to IP addresses.
If that doesn’t work, the account on Bitcoin, while really hard to get into, is not impossible.
Bitcoin connects to your virtual wallet which turns it into actual money.
And to have a wallet, you need to have a bank account.
Nothing done online is completely anonymous.
That was horrible. That sucked. But it is the first solid lead we have had in a week.
Now you got that shit out, it is time to focus. Yeah?”
Okay.
I know my friend who was kidnapped and tortured had just begged me for help, and that was supposed to be the only thing I could focus on.
And there was a lot of that fogging my brain.
But one other thing was getting through.
Tig might genuinely have been the most impressive man I had ever met.
Because he reacted in multiple ways at once.
He jumped into action and got Barrett on the case.
But once he had that handled, he put all distractions away and reached for me and held me and reassured me.
Once he finished with that, he gave me a firm reality check, knowing I could handle it.
While I was human and had moments where I needed to be able to emote, to break down, I wasn’t the type of woman who needed to be handled with kid gloves.
I liked that he simply got that about me.
I liked how he gave me what I needed, be it comfort or a slap upside the head.
That really said something about a man, that he understood you. Especially so early on.
So I took a breath so deep that my lungs burned; I pushed my shoulders back, and lifted my chin. Then I nodded. “I’ll drive. You have calls to answer,” I reasoned.
He surprised me when he didn’t do the typical ‘your ass in my ride, I’m driving’ macho bullshit I maybe had been expecting. He simply reached into his pocket, produced the keys, and pressed them into my hand.
“Let’s move,” he said, moving toward the car and stopping to open the door for me before getting into the passenger side.
He immediately brought his phone up and called back whoever had called him as I struggled to readjust the seat in his car so a mortal-sized person could both simultaneously reach the pedals and see over the steering column.
“Barrett’s,” he told me as I reversed out.
And while I had never actually been there, I knew Barrett had set up shop almost directly across from the police station, so that was where I went.
When we pulled up, Tig jumped out as I cut the engine. My door opened before I could even reach for it.
“Got those stilts on,” he said when he reached up toward me, and I raised a brow in question. “Let me help you down.”
Then he did, and in we walked.
Barrett’s office was a lot like the man himself—a bit haphazard, messy, all over the place.
He hadn’t exactly gone all out with his decor.
There was a desk with two chairs and a cabinet that ran all along one wall, covered in mostly stacks of paper, some of them old enough to have browning edges.
The walls had boards covered in more paper in some other language I wouldn’t even pretend to know the origins of.
There were no fewer than seven, yes, seven, coffee cups stacked all over his desk, some almost tipping over.
Sawyer and Barrett were different in almost all ways.
Where Sawyer had always been a bit of a shit-starter, but otherwise calm, organized, intimidating, action-oriented, and fearsome, Barrett had always been quiet, studious, more into computers than people, never seeming to put any effort at all into forging friendships, and showing no signs of any visible aggressive tendencies.
Sawyer went off into the military, and none of us ever really saw Barrett anymore once he finished school.
I had no idea what he did from the time his brother left until he showed back up, and hired him to work in his office.
But Barrett, being a bit particular and difficult to work with, had chafed against Sawyer’s rule and eventually struck out on his own.
But, apparently, that didn’t stop Sawyer Investigations from using him on a contract basis because of his very specific set of skills.
It was a small space, made more minuscule still by the people inside it.
Sawyer and Brock were on either side of Barrett at his desk.
A small, slight, dark-haired, tattoo-covered woman was sitting on the floor next to two energy drinks with a laptop on her outstretched legs.
Directly beside her was none other than Alex.
Alex, I knew, because her man was Breaker, a huge guy with blond hair and a long blond beard who was fiercely alpha in all the best ways, who was best friends with Paine. Alex was a bit blunt, sarcastic, hilarious, and a deplorable cook.
She had become like extended family to me thanks to the fact that Breaker and Shooter were close with Paine for forever and, therefore, always invited to dinner at my mom’s.
When they eventually settled down with their women, the women came too.
Breaker brought Alex. Shooter brought Amelia.
One big, happy family of ex-gangbangers, hackers, snipers, and contract muscle.
What a strange life I led.
It became easy, at times, to forget all that.
There was another guy sitting in one of the guest chairs with his own laptop and what could only be called a Big Gulp of coffee that I didn’t know, but he was somewhat young, dark-haired, and attractive, but with an almost intimidating aura of intelligence around him.
Tig pretty much had to press me into the spare chair as he moved to stand with his business partners, all of them watching the screen as Barrett worked.
No one said a word.
Not a single word.