Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
He’s smart as hell.
BAILEY
I fought as hard as I could as the two masked men hauled me to their car, which was parked around the corner. I tried to shout because surely if I could make a little noise, then someone would notice what was going on, but the fabric they’d shoved into my mouth stifled my cries.
Unfortunately, this part of Destiny Falls was quiet, and I couldn’t be certain that anyone would see.
One of them let me go to open the back door of the car and then withdrew a zip tie from his pocket. I thrashed, realizing that if I didn’t do something now, I’d have to rely on someone else saving me because I wouldn’t be able to do anything to help myself.
Wriggling awkwardly, I made sure to knock the GPS tracker Max had passed me deeper into my sports bra, where it would hopefully remain undetected. I’d meant to return it to Nate but had forgotten, and I was so grateful for that now.
It was the equivalent of a smart tag, which meant I couldn’t send an emergency signal out like I could with a personal locator beacon, but hopefully it would allow someone to track me.
The bigger man shoved my wrists together and held me firmly while his companion looped the tie around them and yanked it tight. I grimaced as it bit into my skin. Hopefully they wouldn’t leave it on for too long because my fingers were already tingling, the blood flow partially blocked.
The guy holding me wrestled me into the back of the car, then slammed the door and locked it. I grabbed the opposite handle, but it must have childproof locks, because it wouldn’t open.
The two men got into the front, the bigger one driving.
Now that I was no longer fighting them off, I was able to work the fabric—a shirt, maybe—out of my mouth.
“You don’t have to do this,” I panted, trying to catch my breath.
Neither of them responded. It was as if I hadn’t spoken at all.
I started to sit up, but the man in the passenger seat turned and grabbed a pocket knife from the drinks holder between them.
“Stay down,” he growled.
“Okay.” I lowered myself onto the seat, my mind whirling. “I don’t know if you heard, but I had a head injury, and I can’t remember anything. Not even your faces.”
It was a lie, obviously, but hopefully it had enough truth to it that they believed me.
“We can come up with another solution. You don’t have to h-hurt me.”
“We don’t want to.” The passenger sounded disappointed.
“Like, we never planned to hurt anyone. We just meant to stop you from running your mouth to the wrong person but then genius here lost his shit when you kicked his knee and now we’re in hot water.
We can’t take the chance that you’ll remember and report us. ”
I latched onto his comment, hoping to keep him talking. “Why are you doing this? It must be more than just vandalizing an old hut or you wouldn’t have cared so much about keeping me quiet.”
“The thing is, we—”
“Shut up,” the driver snapped. “For fuck’s sake, man. Keep your damn mouth closed.”
“What about my friend?” I prompted, hoping the driver wouldn’t be able to hurt me because he was too distracted by the road. “He didn’t see anything, and you hurt him pretty badly.”
I hoped he was okay. When they’d dragged me out of there, he’d been in bad shape, dazed and bleeding from where they’d hit him.
If anything happened to him, I’d never forgive myself.
That was assuming I survived.
The chattier man glanced at the driver but didn’t speak.
The car turned and then turned again. From my position, I couldn’t tell where we were, but before long, I was reasonably sure that we’d left the township. After all, it only took five minutes to drive from one end to the other.
Eventually, we made a left turn and continued along that road for quite a while. I tried the door handle again, hoping I’d just been too distraught earlier to figure out how to open it. Now that I was calmer, maybe it would work.
That wasn’t the case.
“You can’t get out.” It was the first words the driver had volunteered.
I tried to roll over, beginning to feel sick from the motion of the vehicle. We turned right onto a gravel road, and the car bumped along more roughly than before. The driver slowed but not by much. If he had to stop quickly, I was pretty sure the wheels would skid out.
Eventually, the car stopped. I wriggled down until my feet touched the door and shifted as best I could so that when it opened, I might be able to make a run for it.
The passenger got out and opened my door. I waited until it was open at least a couple of feet and then shuffled down until my feet touched the ground. I lurched upright and tried to tear past him, but he grabbed me around the waist and lifted me like I was a sack of potatoes.
“Let me go!” I shrieked, kicking at him as I tried to look around. The gravel road was narrow, with dense forest closing in on each side. The car was parked in a small gravel clearing bordering a cliff edge with a knee-high railing to keep people back.
I recognized this place. The railing hadn’t stopped people from jumping or falling off the cliff in the past. No one had survived the drop to the bare creek bed below.
An awful feeling curled in my gut, and somehow, I just knew.
They wanted to throw me off the cliff.
If they did, they wouldn’t have to worry that I might live through the impact like I’d survived their beating. There was just no way.
Seized by the need to get the hell away from that sharp drop, I grabbed at my captor’s waistband and yanked his pants up, hoping it might squash his balls. He grunted and released me.
I thudded onto the ground, a sharp stone embedding itself in my upper arm. My head thunked onto the earth, too, but thankfully my shoulder took the worst of the impact.
I started to shimmy across the ground, ignoring the way the stones scraped against my skin, but a foot landed on my hip and pinned me down.
“Fuck, you’re useless,” the driver complained, looking disgusted as his companion extricated his hands from inside his pants and cupped his groin gently.
“She went for my balls,” the other guy whined. “Come on, you know how that feels.”
I glanced at the trees. If they were distracted, would I be able to make my way into the forest and hide?
“Grab her legs,” the guy standing on me ordered. “We’ll carry her to the edge.”
His friend hesitated. “Do we really want to do this? I know we’re in deeper than we ever meant to be, but murder is kind of hard to come back from.”
“She could get us locked up.” The driver ground his foot into me. “If that happens, we can’t pay back what we owe and we’re dead. We need to find the treasure, get the hell out of here, and make sure there’s no one left who can identify us.”
“Treasure?” I asked dumbly. “What treasure?”
And what on earth did that have to do with me?
A memory flitted through my mind of Grace smiling as she told the others at her table in Drunken Destiny about Pearl McIntyre’s supposed lost inheritance. The treasure her father had bequeathed to her that had never been collected.
But surely they couldn’t mean that. For one thing, it was only a story, and even if it was real, why the hell would the treasure be buried in the forest?
“That’s just a legend,” I said because, honestly, who believed in tall tales about missing treasure? “It doesn’t exist.”
The shoe pressed down on me again, hard enough to hurt. “Quiet.” He beckoned the other. “Come on. Let’s get her to the edge.”