27. Az
— ? —
Az
The arm comes around my throat from behind before I can turn toward the footsteps.
One second I’m kneeling beside Eli on the floor outside the utility room, the pendant’s green light still blinking, and the next second there’s a forearm crushing my windpipe and a hand clamping over my mouth and I can’t scream, can’t breathe, can’t do anything but claw at the arm that’s dragging me backward toward a truck I didn’t hear pull up.
“Stop fighting,” Cody says against my ear, and my whole body goes cold. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
I bite down on his palm as hard as I can and he swears, yanks his hand away for one second, and I get half a scream out before he clamps back down, tighter this time, and I taste blood, his or mine, I don’t know.
“Jesus Christ, just get her in,” someone says from the truck, and when I twist my head enough to see the passenger seat, the world stops making sense.
Brynn.
Brynn Hollister, blonde hair pulled back in a neat ponytail, turning around in the seat like we’re carpooling to brunch, like this is normal, like she didn’t try to slap me beside my own coolers three months ago.
“Careful with her,” Brynn says, and her voice is… gentle. Sweet, and wrong. “She’s almost at term.”
Cody half-carries, half-drags me to the truck and shoves me into the back seat. I kick at him, catch his shin, and he grabs my ankle and twists until I cry out.
“I said stop fighting,” he snaps. “I don’t want to hurt you, Azalea, I really don’t, but you’re going to cooperate or this gets a lot worse.”
“The hell I am,” I spit at him, and he laughs, actually laughs, like I’m being cute.
“There’s the fire I remember,” he says, and the look in his eyes makes my stomach turn. “Always liked that about you.”
“Cody, the zip ties are in the glove box,” Brynn says calmly. “And there’s a blanket behind the seat if she gets cold.”
She says it like she’s reading a grocery list. Like she’s thought about this. Planned it.
Cody zip-ties my wrists in front of me, tight enough to hurt, not tight enough to cut off circulation, which tells me he’s done this before or practiced, and then he’s in the driver’s seat and we’re moving, cutting down the service lane as shouting breaks out near the east gate, and I’m watching Juniper Hill disappear through the back window and trying to breathe through the panic clawing up my throat.
Eli.
Eli was breathing when I left him. Is he still breathing? Has Dez reached him?
Through the rear window, I catch Dez running toward the house. A guard turns toward the truck, too far away to reach us before the bend hides him.
My hand moves instinctively to my chest, to the pendant that’s been warm against my skin for weeks, and I feel it there, still there, and I hold the button for three seconds with my bound hands.
Please work. Please, please work.
A green blink shows through my fingers just before the road climbs between the hills.
“I packed everything,” Brynn says, turning around in her seat to face me with a smile that makes my skin crawl.
“The hospital bag, the receiving blankets, the little hats. I found the sweetest organic formula because I know breastfeeding can be overwhelming for first-time mothers, and I want you to be able to rest.”
I stare at her. I can’t make words come out.
“I’m going to be so much better at this than you,” she continues, and her voice is so earnest, so sincere, like she’s confiding in a friend.
“I’ve been preparing for years, you know.
Reading all the books. Taking the classes.
Eli doesn’t know it yet, but he will. Once he sees me with the baby, once he sees how natural I am, he’ll understand. ”
“You’re insane,” I manage, and my voice comes out rough, throat bruised from Cody’s arm. “You’re actually, certifiably insane.”
“Don’t be mean,” Brynn says, and she sounds hurt. Actually hurt. “I’m trying to help you. This has been so hard for you, I can tell. All the stress, the fighting, the drama. You need someone to take the load off.”
“By kidnapping me?”
“By taking care of things,” she corrects gently. “You’ll see. When this is all over, you’ll thank me.”
I look at Cody, who’s watching the road with the focused expression of someone who knows exactly where he’s going. “And what’s your excuse?”
“Money,” he says simply. “Your husband’s got plenty of it, and he’s going to share.”
“Your mother put us in touch. Said you needed bringing down to earth. Brynn needed someone you’d never let near the gate, and I needed the payout. Everybody gets something.”
“He won’t pay you. He’ll kill you.”
“Nah.” Cody glances at me in the rearview mirror, and his smile is all teeth. “He’ll pay. They always pay when it’s the pregnant wife.”
“And after?” I ask. “You think she’s going to hand me back?”
He shrugs without looking at Brynn. “After I get paid, you’re her problem.”
We drive into the hills, the roads getting narrower and darker, and Brynn talks the whole way.
She tells me about the nursery she set up in her apartment, “sage green, so calming, with the most beautiful mobile of wooden stars”, and the pediatrician she researched and the mommy-and-me classes she already enrolled in.
She tells me about how she and Eli used to talk about having kids on tour, how she knows exactly how he likes his coffee in the morning and his tea at night, how she’s been in love with him since they were kids.
“I told him when we were nineteen,” she says, almost dreamy. “At this party after a show in Austin. I said, ‘Eli, I love you,’ and he looked at me like… like he’d never seen me before. Like he didn’t know what to do with it.”
“Because he doesn’t love you back,” I say, and I mean it to be cruel, but my voice just sounds tired.
“He does,” Brynn says with absolute certainty. “He just doesn’t know it yet. You got in the way before he could figure it out, but that’s okay. I forgive you for that.”
“Brynn-”
“Once the baby’s here, everything will make sense. He’ll see you couldn’t handle it, see how natural I am with her, and he’ll come home. To me.”
I close my eyes and try to breathe. Try to think.
Eli is on that floor. Help is on the way, I heard the radio, but I don’t know if they’ll reach him in time. My phone is in Cody’s pocket. Both pendant alerts went through. Someone has the road we were on, but we’ve turned twice since that green blink. They still have to find me.
Please. Please find that road.
“Here we are,” Cody says, and the truck stops.
I open my eyes.
It’s a cabin. Small, wooden, tucked into trees so thick the approaching dawn can’t reach us. No other structures in sight. No lights, no roads, no neighbors.
Cody’s uncle’s hunting cabin, I think, remembering something he said once when we were dating, how he used to come up here as a kid, how his uncle taught him to shoot, how nobody could find you if you didn’t want to be found.
My blood goes cold.
He hauls me out of the truck, and my legs are shaky beneath me, thirty-six weeks pregnant and terrified and trying so hard not to show it.
Brynn climbs out of the passenger seat with a duffel bag over her shoulder, a hospital bag, I realize, navy blue with a name tag still attached, and I feel sick because it’s another bag just like the one the deputies took from the nursery.
She bought a replacement. Packed it. Brought it here.
“The bedroom’s all set up,” Brynn tells Cody as he pushes me toward the cabin door. “I came up yesterday to put fresh sheets on and clean the bathroom.”
“Great,” Cody says, sounding bored. “I don’t care about sheets. Where’s the chair?”
“By the window, like you asked.”
Inside, the cabin smells like dust and pine cleaner and something musty underneath.
There’s a curtained sleeping alcove at the back.
The rest is one room, a kitchenette along one wall, a ratty couch, a fireplace that doesn’t look like it’s been used in years, and in the corner by a window with blackout curtains, a wooden chair.
Cody pushes me into it and zip-ties my ankles to the legs before I can kick him again.
While he turns away, I fold my thumb tight against my palm and test the plastic at my wrist. It hurts. I keep working at it whenever neither of them is looking.
“Phone doesn’t work up here,” he says, like he’s commenting on the weather. “Almost no reception inside. Your calls won’t get through. So don’t waste your energy trying to call for help.”
He pulls my phone out of his pocket and waves it at me, battery at 34%, no bars. Then he sets it on the table just out of my reach, and the cruelty of it is so calculated that I want to scream.
“I’m calling him after dark,” he says. “Let him spend the day wondering whether you’re alive. He’ll pay anything by then.”
“How much?” My voice sounds steadier than I feel.
“Two million.”
I actually laugh. It comes out sharp and ugly, and Cody’s face darkens.
“What’s funny?”
“You could’ve asked him for two million before any of this and he probably would’ve said yes. He’s an idiot about money. But this?” I shake my head. “This isn’t about money. This is about her.”
I look at Brynn, who’s unpacking the hospital bag onto the kitchen counter like she’s setting up for a baby shower, onesies and diapers and tiny socks in a neat row.
“She’s using you,” I tell Cody. “You know that, right? Whatever she promised you, whatever she said, she doesn’t care about the money. She cares about taking my baby.”
“I’m not taking anything,” Brynn says without turning around. “I’m receiving a gift. Eli’s gift to me. To us.”
“There is no us, Brynn. There was never an us. He doesn’t love you. He’s never loved you. He married me.”
“Because you trapped him,” she snaps, finally turning, and her face is different now, harder, uglier. “Because you made him feel obligated. And now this baby-”
“We were married for five years before this pregnancy, Brynn. We chose to have this baby together.”
“That’s what you tell people.” Her voice goes gentle again, patient, like she’s explaining something to a child. “But I know the truth. I’ve always known. He tells me things he doesn’t tell you.”
“When? When does he tell you things? He fired you. He kicked you out. He only spoke to you when you called to threaten us!”
“He will,” she says with absolute certainty. “Once this is over, he will.”
I want to scream. I want to cry. I want to break these zip ties and tear her throat out with my bare hands.
Hours drag past. Cody keeps looking at the time, refusing to call yet, while Brynn fusses over the sleeping alcove as if she expects us to stay.
They argue whenever he mentions leaving.
By the time the light at the curtains begins to fade, their partnership is wearing thin, and I feel a cold, cutting clarity slice through the panic.
A tightening across my belly. Deep. Painful. Different from the Braxton Hicks that have been plaguing me for weeks.
No. No, no, no…
I breathe through it, trying not to react, trying not to let them see. It passes after thirty seconds, maybe forty, and I tell myself it’s nothing. Stress. Fear. The body’s response to trauma.
But another one comes twenty minutes later. And then fifteen minutes after that. And then…
My water breaks on the cabin floor with a gush I can’t hide, can’t pretend isn’t happening, and Brynn gasps and claps her hands like it’s the best news she’s ever received.
“See?” she says, beaming. “She’s ready for me.”
Cody looks at the puddle spreading across the floorboards with plain disgust. “You’re kidding me.”
“She’s not kidding,” I gasp, because another contraction is building and this one is worse, so much worse, and I grip the arms of the chair and try to breathe through it. “I’m in labor. Real labor.”
“Now?” Cody demands. “It’s not due for another month!”
“Babies come when they come, genius.”
He swears, a long creative streak that would be impressive if I weren’t currently trying not to scream, and pulls my phone off the table. “Enough. We get the money and we leave-”
“He’s not going to pay you,” I tell him through gritted teeth, the contraction finally easing. “He’s going to find you.” I jerk my chin at Brynn, who’s digging through the hospital bag with manic excitement. “She’s going to be why.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you picked the wrong partner.” I meet his eyes, and I make sure my voice is steady, cold, certain.
“She doesn’t care about your money. She doesn’t care if you live or die.
The second you become inconvenient, she’ll throw you to the wolves.
And Eli is coming. You know he is. He’s going to find me, and when he does-”
“Shut up.” Cody crosses the room and grabs my chin, forcing my head back. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know him.” I don’t flinch. “I know what he’s capable of. He won’t stop looking for us. What do you think happens when he finds the man who took his pregnant wife?”
Cody’s jaw tightens. For just a second, I see fear in his eyes, real fear, the kind that tells me he’s starting to understand exactly what he’s gotten himself into.
Then Brynn’s voice, light and happy: “I found the receiving blanket! The yellow one with the little ducks. Isn’t it precious?”
And another contraction rips through me, and I scream.