Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
COLE
“Liana! Liana, answer me,” I bark into the phone as I race to her flower shop. All I can hear is her breathing. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. She would never ignore me like this.
Suddenly, a loud thump, and my heart drops.
I immediately call Ezra on another line.
“Yeah?”
“Liana called me, and there’s nothing on the line,” I bark. “I’m heading to her shop right now.”
“We’re coming,” he says quickly, and without question.
The brakes scream before I even see the storefront, rubber biting into wet asphalt, and I’m already unclipping the seatbelt before the car has fully stopped moving.
My boots hit the sidewalk, and I’m across it in four strides. Inside, August is at the front counter, glasses pushed up his nose, wrapping a bundle of flowers for a woman in a wool coat who’s asking him something about vase life. He is smiling. He is completely, obliviously calm.
He glances up and sees me in the doorway.
“Cole,” he says, confused. “What are you doing here?”
“Where’s Liana?”
He blinks at me, still smiling faintly, still not understanding. He gestures toward the back with the twine in his hand. “In the back. Grabbing ribbon. She should be right out—”
I’m already past him.
The corridor to the back room is narrow. The door bangs against the wall as I throw it open. The room is empty.
I stop.
My whole body goes still. My eyes move around the room. Catalog. Assess.
I notice a phone face up on the worktable. It’s her phone with the floral purple case. No. No. No.
My heart sinks when I see the shears. The blade is dark at the tip. Wet. A single slow drop of red hangs off the handle and falls onto the wood while I’m looking at it. I hope that’s not her blood, so help me God.
But beside the shears is her ring.
Suddenly the raw scent of another pack hits my nose. Like pine and gun oil. Then her scent of crushed roses threads through it all, so sharp it puts a fist around my throat, fear. Her fear.
“Fuck,” I growl.
August has followed me down the corridor. He stops in the doorway, and he makes a low, wordless, gutted sound.
“Oh, God,” he says in a panic, running around the back room. “Is she alive? Where is she…?”
“Stop,” I bark, needing him to be functional. We can’t spiral. Not yet. “We’re going to find her. I need you with me.”
He nods. His jaw is shaking.
I open the drawer under the worktable and pull out the security tablet. August comes around to stand at my shoulder. I open the back-door camera feed and scrub backward through the last ninety minutes.
Empty alley. Closed door. Nothing.
Then, eleven twenty-three, the frame changes.
A figure at the door. Tall, narrow-shouldered, wearing a dark coat collar. Bram. He crouches at the biometric panel with a small handheld device. Forty seconds. The lock disengages. He steps inside like he owns the place.
I switch feeds. Front of the shop. Three minutes later Hugo walks through the front door with a key in his hand.
My jaw goes tight. Nobody has that key code. I set that code myself six days ago. Somewhere, somehow, they got a copy, and I don’t know how yet, and that failure sits in my chest like a stone.
Back to the rear camera. Eleven twenty-eight.
Silus walks in through the open back door, unhurried, coat dark, hands in his pockets.
The audio is thin, degraded by distance from the mic, but I can hear her voice underneath it, sharp, furious, and then I watch her lunge with the shears still in her hand and slash at Bram’s forearm.
I watch him twist her wrist until the shears drop.
I watch Hugo’s hand clamp over her mouth from behind. I watch her try to fight them off.
I watch Hugo press a cloth over her nose and mouth and hold it there, and she goes still.
“No!” shouts August.
“Fuck.”
He carries her out the back door. I switch to the back alley camera. Eleven thirty-one, the SUV pulls out of frame and is gone.
I close the footage, hands shaking. “We need to get to her.”
The bell at the front of the shop rings hard enough to nearly come off its hook, and running footsteps hit the corridor, and Ezra and Julian are in the doorway of the back room together, chests heaving, and they both go dead still at the bloody shears.
Ezra’s growl comes up from somewhere low in his chest, a sound I’ve heard from him exactly twice in my life. “Where is she?!”
I turn the tablet toward them and run it again from the start. “They took her.”
Ezra watches without blinking. Without breathing, as far as I can tell.
When Bram’s fingers close around the ring on the screen, something happens behind Ezra’s eyes that I don’t have a name for.
When the footage ends, he steps forward, picks the actual ring up from where it sits, closes his fist around it, and doesn’t speak. His knuckles have gone white around it.
I pull up a second application on the tablet. One none of them have seen before. A map of New York blinks open, and a small green dot pulses steadily on the FDR Drive, moving north, passing the exit for the bridge.
“What’s that?” asks August.
“Her location,” I explain. “I put a chip in her locket while she was sleeping.”
Nobody says anything for a second.
Ezra looks at me. He doesn’t ask why I didn’t tell him. There isn’t time, and all we want is for her to be safe.
We’re through the corridor and out the front door in seconds, and I nearly collide with a body on the sidewalk. Her friend Mira.
She looks at my face, and she knows.
Her eyes fill instantly. “Where is she?” Not a question. A demand, breaking apart even as she says it. “Where is she? She’s not answering her calls.”
I have half a second to decide. I could send her home with something untrue and let her carry the not-knowing instead of the knowing.
“She’s been kidnapped,” I say, deciding to be truthful. “We’re going to look for her now.”
Tears run down her face. “Please find her.”
“Stay at the bakery,” I tell her. “Keep your phone on you.”
“Bring her back,” she says, voice cracking.
“I will.”
She turns and walks back to her shop, and I rush to the car.
We’re in the car in seconds, and I pull off the curb hard enough that the tires shriek against wet asphalt and a woman on the corner jumps back with her dog.
Ninety miles an hour through city streets that thin out fast once we hit the highway. The tablet on the console keeps the green dot steady, thirty-five minutes ahead, moving with the flat, unhurried patience of men who think they’ve already won.
We will close that gap before the sun is down.
My hands are steady again on the wheel.
Beside me, Ezra hasn’t opened his fist. His knuckles are still bloodless around the ring, his eyes locked on the windshield like he can see thirty-five minutes down the road if he just stares hard enough.
“It’s all my fault,” groans August, his eyes shut, his forehead pressed to the cold window glass.
“Listen to me,” I say, and all three of them go quiet.
“When we get there, everyone has a job. Julian, you’ll break the lock on any door we come across.
August, you’re the runner. The second she’s clear, you get her out, and you don’t stop moving until she’s in the car.
Ezra and I will fight anyone who gets in our way. ”
Nobody argues.
“We bring her back alive,” Ezra says quietly. “They’re all dead to me.”
Ezra opens his hand and looks down at the ring lying in his palm for a long moment, turns it once between his fingers, watching the stone catch the gray light through the window.
Then he closes his fist around it again and slides it into the inside pocket of his jacket, against his chest, where I know he intends to keep it until he can put it back where it belongs.
My foot goes down harder on the gas.
The road ahead has gone empty and gray, the sun already dropping toward the tree line, and on the tablet between us the green dot slows, and finally stops two miles ahead.
My chest feels like something is tearing itself loose behind my ribs with every second that dot doesn’t move. Every second she is there and not here is a second I cannot get back.