Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
Let’s split up to cover more ground. I go left, you go fuck yourself.
—Hux’s secret thoughts
Hux
I stared at the blinking red dot on my cell phone and wondered what in the hell she was doing at work still.
She hadn’t answered the last four times I’d called, and I was starting to panic.
She was supposed to have been here over twenty-five minutes ago.
She was never late.
I always knew where she was coming from and when she’d be wherever she said.
She was very open and honest about her whereabouts, and according to the last text I’d gotten thirty minutes prior, she was supposed to have been here.
I put the knife down, left the carcass exactly where it was, and slid off my glove. The apron came off next, and I walked out of the butcher shop and into the warehouse that would lead me to my truck.
“Hey, can you move these…”
“Not now, Mother,” I said as I continued walking.
“But Katana can’t,” she said. “And I…”
I walked right out of the building and to my truck.
I drove the four blocks to the clinic and parked behind Bernice’s truck.
She wasn’t inside of it, so I started to go to the clinic but stopped and frowned.
I pulled out my phone and pulled up my tracking app, noticing that the phone was pinging in the parking lot and not the clinic itself.
I followed the dot back to her truck and tugged on the handle.
The truck door opened, and her cell phone fell out of the truck onto the pavement.
My stomach soured as I bent down to pick it up.
She had it to where her cell phone never closed, so when I glanced at it, it was still pulled up to our text thread.
Bernice:
I’ll be there in five minutes.
Terror started to course through my veins.
I glanced into the back seat before going to the clinic to peer inside.
I pounded on the door when it didn’t budge.
I kept pounding on it, expecting to see her coming.
But she never did.
“What the hell, man?”
I looked over to find Odin coming out of the medical examiner’s office. “Is Bernice in there?”
He frowned. “No. She left with Sage.”
I shook my head. “Her purse and her phone are still here. Sitting on her truck seat.”
I pointed at her truck.
Odin stiffened.
“Let me call Sage.”
Sage had no more answers than Odin had.
That’s when the true fear started to set in.
Had someone found her?
It took us thirty minutes to realize that Bernice was nowhere to be found.
Not at home.
Not at either of my homes.
Not with Creed and Birdee.
Not at the store.
Not anywhere.
“Where do we even look?” Creed asked the burning question.
The bad thing was, I had no idea.
At first, I hadn’t been nearly as worried. I’d put the tracker in her shoe, and could easily track her using that. Except, she hadn’t been wearing the ones with the tracker in it. She’d been wearing a new pair that I hadn’t gotten a chance to put a tracker into yet.
Three hours later, a search party had been erected, and people were going door to door in the community.
The Dixie Wardens had formed a massive woman hunt, and they wouldn’t stop until she was found.
I only hoped that we could find her before she was dead.
Because that was the feeling that I had in my heart.
That whoever had her, only had one end in mind.
Six hours after her disappearance, I found myself in Bernice’s front yard, staring at her front door.
“Hey.”
I turned to find the Hubers there, staring at me.
“What?” I snapped.
Patrick looked at his brother and then back to me. “We had a thought.”
I swallowed back the immediate “fuck you” and forced myself to calm down.
They were my first suspects.
But all three of them had been getting drunk at Hopps since noon. There was no way that they were a part of her kidnapping.
“Well.” Patrick shifted from foot to foot. “There was this guy. A nurse. He was in Hopps ranting while we were there last night.”
A nurse.
I sat forward. “Small guy? Black hair? Soft?”
“Yeah.” Patrick nodded. “He was bitching about a woman. A house he just bought. And losing his job.”
Chan.
He was talking about the nurse they were going to fire today.
Bernice said they hadn’t, though.
He hadn’t been on my suspect list.
He’d been seen multiple places—mainly Hopps and The Mercantile—that I hadn’t thought to suspect him at all.
Plus, he just didn’t fit the bill.
Chan was gay, no doubt about it. He was also small and looked like he couldn’t hurt a fly. Let alone force a woman to do something she didn’t want to do.
But maybe…
“He bought that new place across from the Windsor Ranch.”
The old man’s property.
The one Denver had just been complaining about.
What the fuck?
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and called Denver.
He answered on the second ring. “Hey, I’m looking at…”
“Go to the ranch,” I said. “The old man’s place. Will you go look there? I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Denver paused. “I’m around the corner. Was she spotted?”
“No, but the Hubers just let me know that the nurse that they were going to fire today was living there, and that he was bitching about his job and Bernice while they were at Hopps last night.”
“I’ll go. I have Gentry and Boone with me.”
I nodded my head at the brothers. “Thank you.”
Patrick shrugged. “Just didn’t want you to keep thinking it was us.”
I didn’t say anything, just ran to my pickup and took off toward Denver’s place.
Instead of making the left into his ranch, though, I continued straight to the old man’s place across the road.
I pulled in and found trucks parked about halfway down the path.
I parked behind them because there was no other choice and took the rest of the way on foot.
When I got to where I could see the house, my phone rang in my pocket.
I didn’t answer it, though, because I spotted Denver with his phone to his ear.
“Denver.”
He looked up, spotted me, then shoved his phone back into his pocket.
I stopped next to him and said, “Did you find her?”
He shook his head.
“No sign of him.”
My eyes raked over the house, the barn, and the side structures that were used to store hay.
I threaded my fingers together and rested them on top of my head as my chest felt like it was about to cave in.
“Where the hell is she?” I asked in agony.
Just as I asked that, Chan came around the corner of a tree and spotted us.
He froze for a few long seconds, then started to run in the opposite direction.
Seeing as guilty people didn’t usually stick around to be questioned, I took off like a shot, utilizing my knowledge of the land as well as my track star status from high school.
I caught up to him when he reached the small hill that would peak before leading down into an alfalfa field that elk liked to bed down in at night.
I’d been in that alfalfa field more times than I could count hunting elk.
That, and retrieving elk with my friends that would later be processed.
So when Chan started to run down the side of the valley, I caught him in a matter of seconds.
I caught him by the hair and yanked him backward, stopping him mid-run and slamming him onto his back.
He hit with a wheeze and stared at me unblinkingly for a long few seconds before he croaked, “I won’t let you have her.”
And because he was all of a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet, I knocked him out cold with one punch.
By the time I got him to the top of the hill, I could hear the commotion.
I heard someone say “ambulance.”
Another one says “she’s alive.”
I started to run as fast as my legs and the weight I was carrying would take me.
When I got to the first person I saw—Boone—I tossed Chan at his feet like a sack of grain and sprinted to where I could see Denver holding a very bloody and unconscious Bernice.
She looked awful.
As I got closer, I could see the blood on her throat.
The line through the middle of it.
And my god.
She looked pale.
“Is she…”
Denver handed her to me. “She’s alive.”
She’s alive.
She’s alive.
She’s alive.
Maybe if I kept chanting it to myself, it would keep her that way.