Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Hayden
T he first thought that managed to penetrate my brain as I came to was the blurry feeling that Junior was not happy. That was nonsensical, of course. The baby had nothing to do with whatever set-up this alpha had put together for the kidnapping fantasy.
Except it wasn’t a fantasy. I’d deleted the Dark Fantasies Club app from my phone ages ago. And the very idea of hooking up with any alpha other than Mace was just gross.
“…said to do something firm and decisive that would convince him to do things our way,” an angry voice argued somewhere at the other end of what felt like an impossibly large room.
I ignored the voice for the moment, since it was so far away, and concentrated on trying to get my body to move. I felt impossibly heavy, like even my insides weighted a ton.
“That’s exactly what I did!” the angry voice shouted. There was a pause, then, “No, you listen to me.”
He said that, but then he was quiet.
I rolled to my side, dragging my eyes open to get a look around. I was in what looked to me like a disused storeroom of some sort. The walls were white-painted concrete blocks, the floor was plain concrete, and somewhere above me, fluorescent lights buzzed.
“You have to trust me,” the voice said, just as annoying as the lights. “This will get results.”
I blinked a few times to try to clear my vision. The room was bare, with just a few metal shelves with barely anything on them. I lay on a bare mattress. It wasn’t a half bad mattress, either. I kind of wanted to close my eyes again, ignore the persistent pain in my gut, and go back to sleep until whatever weird fantasy I’d signed up for ended.
But it wasn’t a fantasy, my brain told me, cutting through the lingering effects of whatever I’d been injected with to knock me out. That part of the whole thing came back to me and made me restless and motivated to pull myself together enough to sit up. I’d been fake-kidnapped plenty of times, but I’d never had the alpha drug me to knock me out so he could move me.
I’d been kidnapped for real. That thought almost made me laugh out loud. I kept my mouth tightly shut, though. Because I’d done this before in make-believe form, and I knew that staying quiet and drawing as little attention as possible was the safest way to go.
“Nothing is wrong with him,” the angry voice said again. “He’s fine. He’s sleeping.”
Another pause as I pushed through the fog to sit.
“Just sleeping. I don’t know. He’s pregnant. Maybe omegas just sleep a lot when they’re—don’t talk to me like that! I told you I would convince Canton to close up shop and sign on with us, and—no, I haven’t approached him directly, do you think I’m?—”
I nearly laughed again as I managed to get my body upright. Whoever was on the phone was getting his ass chewed out, and not in a good way.
It was still a little hard to think, but I knew enough from playing with this scenario to know that thinking was the best way to get out of a kidnapping situation. So I scanned the room, looking for the door—it was all the way over on the other side of the room, and it didn’t have a window—and searching for anything that I could use as a weapon if I needed to defend myself or fight my way out.
There wasn’t much. If I’d had time, I would have tried to take one of the metal shelves apart, but without tools, I didn’t think that would happen. A few of the shelves had cardboard boxes on them, but from their markings, it looked like they contained paper towels and toilet paper. I mean, if there was a mess that might come in handy, but I wasn’t exactly going to be able to wipe the angry guy to death.
“Fine, send someone,” the angry guy huffed at last. “Maybe then you’ll see that I mean business.”
From the sound of things, he ended the call and wanted to throw his phone across the room. He huffed out a breath then muttered something under his breath. Then he stepped out from around the corner of the shelf and into my line of sight.
For a moment, his eyes went wide when he saw I was awake. “Don’t even think of trying to escape,” he said.
I could have laughed. Junior shifted, like he wasn’t amused. A twinge accompanied his movements that had my heart racing all of a sudden.
“You’re Colin, aren’t you,” I said, catching my breath and trying to shift to a more comfortable position. Nothing seemed comfortable at the moment, though. “I’ve seen your picture,” I went on.
“You will call me Mr. Gregory,” Colin snapped, striding closer to my mattress. “And unless you help me convince Mace to end his start-up and hand over his research and contracts to me, you won’t be calling anyone much of anything.”
I could only stare at Colin as he came to stand towering above me by the side of the mattress. He wasn’t naturally intimidating, but I broke out into a sweat anyhow and winced as I tried to sit still.
Think. Thinking was the only way to get out of a kidnapping.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, holding up one hand, like the two of us were having this little chat over ice cream. “You want Mace to close up Canton Enterprises and, what, go to work for you?”
“Not for me, for the people I work for,” Colin snapped.
“Victory Holdings,” I said.
“How do you know—” Colin stopped, pressing his lips together.
Okay, so I was dealing with a kidnapper who wasn’t particularly bright. I tried to remember anything and everything Mace had told me about his ex business partner. They had met in grad school and hit it off at first. They had gone into business together, but Mace had ended up doing all the work. Colin was interested in money above all else. And he had an ex-wife and kids, but that probably wasn’t relevant, except that it showed he was a jerk.
Grad school meant he was intelligent, but the pistol he had tucked into the waistband of his jeans said he was very, very stupid. No one who actually knew how to handle a gun stuck it in their jeans. Colin likely had no training with weapons, he’d just watched too many movies.
All of that added up to the terrifying fact that the angry man in front of me was probably the most dangerous person I’d ever found myself trapped in a room with. He didn’t know what he was doing, which meant everything could and probably would go wrong.
My insides twinged with pain again as I shifted to find a better position. “Okay,” I said, glancing up at Colin and trying to stay calm, though I felt anything but calm. “You want Mace to come work for you guys.”
“He owes it to me,” Colin said. “He had no right to back out of our partnership.”
Stupid and with a chip on his shoulder. Great.
“And you think that kidnapping his pregnant omega is going to convince him to go back into business with you?” I asked, trying not to let on how idiotic I thought he was. Never tell a man with a gun you think he’s an idiot, even if that gun is pointed directly at his own junk.
“It’s his research I want,” Colin said, shifting restlessly, opening and closing his hands like he wanted to strangle someone. “I’m entitled to half the profits of everything we worked on together.”
It wasn’t the time to point out that Mace was the one who had done the research.
“So that’s why you have me sitting here on a mattress, shaking off the effects of being drugged….” I was going to say something else, but a squeezing pain suddenly filled my insides.
No. Absolutely not. I wanted to scold Junior and tell him that now was not the time.
“Two things,” I said, panting a little and trying to shift so that I could stand. I had the instinctive need to walk around. Maybe that would stop the contractions.
“Stay right where you are!” Colin shouted, yanking the gun from his jeans and pointing it at me.
I instantly froze, raising my hands in surrender. Having a gun pointed at me by someone who didn’t know how to use a gun was horrifying.
The burst of panic sent another sharp rush of pain through me.
“I’ll stay here,” I said, grinding the words out through the pain. “But one, I think I’ve gone into labor, and two, isn’t this a bit of an overreaction when all you’re dealing in is security equipment for things like hospitals and corrections facilities?”
It was a long shot, but maybe if I showed Colin he was making a mountain out of a molehill, he’d realize how insane his actions were.
And to be honest, I was becoming quickly convinced that Colin actually was suffering from some sort of mental illness. But that only made the fact that he was pointing a gun at me even more terrifying.
I had already started planning how I could get the gun away from him when Colin shouted, “It’s not about the security equipment, dummy! It’s about the backdoor I programmed?—”
He clamped his mouth shut in a hurry, his eyes going wide.
Well, shit. That was a whole other level of seriousness. And it made the pieces suddenly click into place. Colin wasn’t upset because Mace had taken his ball and gone home. He was angry because somehow he’d, what, coded a backdoor into the security systems Mace planned to sell? Designed them with a way for hackers to get into the systems another way? I knew nothing about programming or tech. I just knew that if Mace managed to sell his equipment to the government and the military, like he wanted to, and Colin had written a backdoor into the whole thing, some very bad people would pay a lot of money for access to the government.
“Look, I’m just the office manager for the new company,” I said, not liking how panicked I sounded. “I don’t know anything about the tech or programming side of things. But wouldn’t the government or whoever discover the backdoor and fix it before they implement any of the technology?”
“Not if the company they hire to fix the problem had a vested interest in keeping the door open,” Colin said, adjusting his grip on the gun.
There were so many holes in Colin’s plan that Swiss cheese would be jealous. I could only assume Victory Holdings knew about the backdoor and planned to exploit it.
Then again, the way Colin had been so angry with someone on the phone a few minutes ago, maybe Victory Holdings wasn’t any happier with his antics than I was.
Another squeeze of pain stopped my thought process for a moment. Part of me was glad the mattress was bare and unimportant, because the likelihood of my water breaking all over it any second now was pretty high.
“What’s wrong?” Colin asked, waving his gun in a way that had me feeling sick. “Stop making that face.”
“I told you, I’m in labor,” I panted.
“No, you’re not,” Colin insisted, his eyes going wide and his face pink. “You’re faking it so you can try to escape.”
I laughed and gripped my belly. “Sure. That’s it,” I said, trying to steady my breath as the wave of contraction passed. That didn’t stop me from sweating and panicking, though. “I always fake labor in order to get out of a kidnapping.”
“You’re not having a baby right now!” Colin shouted. “I don’t have time for this!”
“What do you have time for?” I asked, glaring up at him. “Where are we anyhow?”
I hoped slipping that question in would get me some answers, but even if Colin wanted to give them, there was a loud, pounding knock on the door.
“Don’t you make a peep,” Colin hissed, keeping his gun pointed at me as he started for the other side of the room.
If Colin had been an experienced kidnapper, and if I’d had any faith that whoever was pounding on the door was on my side not his, I totally would have screamed. But I wasn’t the stupid one in the room, so I kept as quiet as a mouse as Colin marched over to answer the door.
“What the fuck is going on here?” a deep voice answered when Colin cracked the door. “Lyle says that?—”
“Shh!” Colin cut him off. “Not here.”
He then did the very stupidest and absolutely best thing he could have done and left the room, shutting the door behind him.
I scrambled to my feet. Well, as much as I could scramble with my enormous belly and the tension of an impending contraction. I doubted I’d be able to just walk out the door, especially since I could hear Colin and his friend arguing on the other side. There had to be something in the bare room that could help me, though.
And then I saw it, as if some miracle had sent me exactly what I needed. Colin the Idiot had left his cell phone on a plain, metal desk on the other side of the shelves from the mattress. I let out a strangled laugh at my stroke of luck and waddled as fast as I could to grab the phone.
Of course, once I had it, it struck me that I didn’t know Mace’s number. I didn’t know anyone’s numbers. The only number I had memorized was my parents’ house, my childhood home.
It was better than nothing, so I dialed, then grimaced as another contraction started. Were they supposed to be this close together so soon? I braced a hand on the desk, then leaned hard to try to stop everything that was happening.
“Hello?” Simon’s voice sounded from the other end of the call.
“Simon!” I shouted, gasping. “Thank God it’s you and not Dad or Papa.”
“Hayden? Is everything alright? You sound?—”
“I’ve been kidnapped,” I blurted over him. “For real this time. By Colin, Mace’s ex business partner.”
“What? What the heck? Where are you? What’s going on?” Simon instantly went into a panic.
“I don’t know where I am,” I said, glancing to the door as the shouting in the hall grew pitched. “I was at the Grand Hotel with Mace for a fundraising dinner. Colin injected me with something to knock me out, but I don’t know how long I was out or how far he dragged—wait! What time is it?”
“Almost ten,” Simon said. “Where is Mace? Is he there with you?”
“Ten!” I gasped in relief. “That means I wasn’t out for much more than an hour or two. I don’t think Colin took me that far from the hotel. In fact, maybe I’m still at the hotel, I don’t know. I’m in what feels like a disused storeroom. It’s all concrete, there are metal shelves with a couple boxes of paper towels and toilet paper, and there’s a fairly nice mattress on the floor.”
“Did you call the police? Does anyone know what’s going on?” Simon asked in a panic.
Okay, maybe there were two stupid people in the room. I should have called the police first, not my brother. I’d make sure to do that next time I was kidnapped.
“I don’t know if?—”
The storage room door banged open a second later, and Colin marched back into the room, seething with almighty fury. “What are you doing?” he demanded, raising his gun to me. “Put that down.”
“He’s got a gun and it’s pointed at me,” I said, my voice thin and terrified.
“What? Hayden, you’ve got to get out of there!” Simon shouted, “You’ve got to?—”
His words turned indistinct as I put the phone down. I deliberately didn’t end the call, though, and I hoped Simon was smart enough to go quiet so that he could stay on the line and hear anything else that happened. I even moved quickly away from the desk to distract Colin from the open call.
“Did you and your buddy sort things out?” I asked, hoping to distract him further. “You good?”
“Get back to the mattress,” Colin ordered me. “None of this is any of your business.”
He headed for the desk, like he had noticed what I was doing by keeping the call going and intended to stop it.
“Alright, alright, I will, but?—”
I let out a cry and gripped my belly as a sudden gush of wetness spilled out of my ass, wetting my trousers.
“Shit,” Colin said, eyes going wide.
“No, amniotic fluid,” I groaned, continuing gingerly toward the mattress. “I told you I was going into labor.”
“You can’t,” Colin insisted. “Not now. Not here.”
I cursed inwardly as he made it to the desk to grab his phone and tapped to end the call. I just hoped Simon had gotten enough to figure out where I was. Although it wasn’t like Simon had any sort of fancy tracing equipment like they had in the movies.
By the time I made it to the mattress, that was the least of my worries. I wasn’t even overly concerned that Colin still had his gun as he followed me to the mattress.
“Stop!” he shouted at me as I sank to rest on my hands and knees on the marginally softer surface. “You can’t have a baby in here, right now.”
“I hate to break it to you, but babies don’t listen,” I panted, although the contraction that came with my water breaking was passing. “You can wave your gun at me all you’d like, but it’s not going to make a difference.”
Colin suddenly stared at the gun he was carrying, like he’d forgotten it was there. He lowered it, then stuck it in the waistband of his jeans again.
“Don’t you know it’s a bad idea to—” I started to tell him, though it would have worked in my favor if he shot his balls off.
I stopped midway through the thought as a surge of what I could only describe as presence filled me and my eyes popped wide.
“What?” Colin demanded. “What’s going on?”
At first, I thought it had something to do with labor. But no, it wasn’t pain or anxiety or fear that washed through me. It was a sure and steady presence. Mace’s presence. It felt like a compass inside of me pointing to true north. Or rather like I was true north and Mace was pointing toward me.
“He’s coming,” I gasped, practically groaning with relief.
“What, the baby?” Colin asked, his voice rising an octave.
He took another look at me, then bolted for the door, slamming it behind him as he fled.
I shook my head and slipped to lie on my side. Colin could run and attempt to escape all he liked, but I felt it ringing throughout me, like an actual, tangible thing. My alpha was coming, and he was going to rescue me.