20. Killian
20
KILLIAN
I come to all at once, and it takes me a second to work out what has yanked me from my sleep so suddenly.
“Jesus, what is it?” I mumble, rolling out of bed and making my way over to the door. Someone is pounding on it—Jake, if I had to guess, since he’s usually the one to act with this much urgency. Slowly, I shrug off the sleep that’s still clinging to me, and pull the door open.
Sure enough, standing on the other side is Jake—and judging by the look on his face, something bad is going on. I plant my hands on the doorframe, staring at him and raising my eyebrows.
“What is it?”
“Get dressed,” he shoots back at me. “Meet us in the office. Vanessa and Callie have been kidnapped.”
My heart stops. He goes to turn around and make his way down the stairs, but before he can go anywhere, I grab his arm.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I demand. “You can’t just turn up here and drop that on me and expect me to?—”
“I don’t have time to explain now,” he replies, his voice taut. “Just come down. And make it quick.”
I know there’s no point arguing with him. When he has it in his mind that things are going to go a certain way, the best I can do is just try to keep up. I throw on some real clothes and take the stairs two at a time, to find Mason and Jake waiting for me in the office. Mason is pacing, and he nods to the coffee sitting on the edge of the desk.
“You’ll need it,” he tells me grimly.
I rub a hand over my face. “What time is it…?”
“Six,” Jake replies. “I was getting ready to head out on patrol, but I thought I’d come down here and check on the cameras we set up first. Make sure they were working, you know? And when I scrubbed through the footage…”
“It’s easier to show him,” Mason cuts in, and he steps over to one of the monitors, which is paused on an image of Vanessa’s front yard. I can see the path that leads down to their place weaving out of the forest, and as Mason taps it on, I watch as Vanessa and Callie come into view.
They look…happy. Peaceful. Wearing the clothes they were last night, when we saw them last. If I’d known something was going to happen to them, I would never have let them go alone…
I do my best to focus on what’s happening on the screen in front of us. I can’t get distracted by my emotions. I need to keep my head, no matter how tempting it is to lose it. I fix my gaze on the screen and watch in horror as the events of the night unfold in front of me.
I notice, almost at once, that there’s a man hiding in the shadows of the tree line—neither of them notice him, but my gaze is highly attuned to catch anything that seems out of place. My eyes flick back and forth between the man and the girls, and then Vanessa seems to spot him. She turns to confront him, and he emerges from the woods. My heart thuds hard in my chest when I see her move to step in front of Callie, doing everything she can to protect her from what is going to happen.
But the man is quick and brutal—he slams a bag over Vanessa’s head and pins her arms behind her back, slipping plastic cuffs over her wrists to pin her in place, and roughly grabs Callie by the arm to drag her along with him. The sight of him laying hands on that little girl, it’s enough to send a blaze of anger through my system. I want to tear that motherfucker apart for so much as thinking he can go after either of them like that…
And then he leads them off into the forest, and they’re gone.
“Holy fuck,” I mutter. “Who—what?—”
“Drink your coffee,” Jake replies. “I’m going to fill you in on what we know, and then we get out there and find her.”
“You really think we have time to wait?” I exclaim, stabbing my finger toward the screen. “After what we just saw?”
“If we go running in there all guns blazing with no plan, we’re going to get ourselves killed. Or worse, them,” Mason replies, gripping my shoulder. “We need to be careful. It’s not just about us. It’s about Callie and Vanessa.”
I close my eyes for a moment. I know he’s right, but it’s the last thing I want to hear right now. All I care about is running off into these woods and finding them before something happens. If they get hurt, or worse, I…
“She told me about why they came here in the first place,” Jake announces, cutting off my line of thought.
I turn my attention to him. I have to stay focused. Even as the emotion threatens to get the better of me, I have to keep my cool, or I could lose them both.
Lose them both.
The thought hits me like a ton of bricks as Jake fills me in on everything he knows—the story that Vanessa wrote, coming out here to lie low and get away from the cartel, all of it. I can’t make sense of it, not a single part. It has to be some kind of nightmare.
Why wouldn’t she have told us all of this? Maybe she was in denial. Maybe she thought, if she could just pretend it wasn’t happening, she would get away without getting hurt.
But now, she and her daughter are in danger. And it’s up to us to get them out.
“So what’s the next move?” I demand as soon as he finishes up. The coffee is going cold in the cup—I can’t even think about drinking it right now.
“We need to find out where they were taken. Best way to do that is to figure out who the person who took them was. He’ll have a base he works out of, and chances are that’s where they’re at right now,” Mason replies, slipping into work mode just like that.
“You pulled some screenshots from the video?” I ask, and Jake nods.
“I’ve already sent them off to some of the cops we were working with last year on that land dispute,” he replies.
“How long is that going to take?”
He shrugs. “Could be a couple of hours?—”
“We don’t have that kind of time!” I protest. “We have to get moving now. Give me their number. I’m calling them.”
Jake knows better than to argue with me when I’m in this kind of mood. He pushes the phone over toward me, and I grab it and dial the number.
“Hey, Darrel,” I greet our contact on the other end of the line. “You get those photos we sent through earlier?”
“Yeah, I did,” he replies, sounding confused. “Is there something we need to know about?—”
“Might need your help yet, but we’re going to handle it for now,” I reply. “We just need to know who that guy is. You got anything on file for him?”
“I’m running the picture now,” he replies, and I can hear him tapping away at a keyboard. He hums to himself slightly as he goes through the files, and I grit my teeth. I just want to know what the fuck he has. I know I can’t blow up at him—we need this contact—but at the same time, if I could reach through the phone and slap the information out of him, I would.
“Shit, yes, we have something,” he replies, after what feels like an endless silence. “He’s one of the cartel members we’ve been watching—Lucas Holt.”
“What do you know about him?” I shoot back. “Where is he located?”
“Not much,” he mutters. “We have a couple of hotels he’s stayed at over the years, and a warehouse he did some work from?—”
“A warehouse?” I demand, my ears pricking up. “Where’s that?”
“It’s just outside of the forest, on the way into the city,” he replies. “I’ll send you the location.”
“Good.”
I hang up the phone, and a few seconds later, it buzzes with an address. Mason and Jake look to me, and I peer down at the new information.
“Here’s the warehouse he worked out of,” I tell them, my voice taut, as I push the phone across the table toward them. “Not too far from here. If we get moving, we can be there in an hour?—”
“We need to plan this,” Mason warns me, cutting me off before I can go any further.
I grit my teeth. I don’t know how much longer I can take this. Sitting around, waiting for everything to fall into place, when we don’t know what could be happening to them.
“We need to get out there,” I shoot back. “They could be…shit, they could already be?—”
“Don’t think like that,” Jake cuts in, stopping me as my mind spins off down a million different possibilities. “The cartel that took them, they want to make a point. They want to make sure everyone knows what happens if you speak out against them. That’s going to give us some time, while they plan what they’re going to do with them.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, pinching the bridge of my nose between my fingers. I know he’s right, but the thought of them toying with Vanessa, toying with Callie, it makes me sick to my stomach. How could it not? That little girl, caught up in something so dark and so bleak…she doesn’t deserve this. Neither of them do.
“Then let’s get to it, now,” I reply, moving over toward the map and locating the spot where the warehouse is meant to be. “How do we approach? What’s the plan of action when we get there?”
“Let me get eyes on it,” Jake replies, moving in to the computer and pulling up the overhead maps we have of the area.
As I watch my brothers move into place, starting to piece all of this together, I know I should be relieved—I know this should soothe the panic that’s threatening to get the better of me.
But all I can think about is them. Vanessa. Callie. Out there, terrified, with no idea what’s going on or what’s going to happen to them.
For all that I might have said getting involved with them was going to be nothing more than a bit of fun for the summer, the way I feel right now is a fair warning that something deeper has started to bloom inside me—and I don’t know if I can stop it.
Nor do I know if I want to. Because those two, the way they’ve changed things around here—there’s not a chance in hell that I’m going to let that slip through my fingers.
No matter what it takes. And no matter what it costs from us.