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“Oh. no. Don’t shoot. Please.”
His smirk should have tipped her off. Unconcerned, he advanced on her. He raised his hands while he mocked her, and she saw he’d retrieved his pistol but holstered it.
“Don’t come any closer,” she said, fingering the trigger and glad she had a double action gun that didn’t need to be cocked. It was all she could do not to drop the thing with how hard her arms shook.
“Oh, but I think I will.”
He took another step, and she pulled the trigger.
The man laughed, the sound low and evil, as he dashed at her. He knocked away the useless weapon. Almost as quickly, his hand slapped over her mouth, and he pulled her back against him. “Funny thing about being left to my own devices in your house for so long. I was able to mess with your alarms, unload your weapons. And now that I know you won’t come along easily…”
“As if I ever would have—” she yelled into his palm, struggling to escape him.
A sharp, stinging prick poked into the side of her neck, cutting off her words.
“This is another thing I’m good at,” he told her as her legs buckled and the room grayed. “It’s why the send me.”
She clawed weakly at his arm, trying to escape his hold. She screamed, but a thready, barely audible cry was all that escaped her throat.
“Don’t fight it. Just relax, and next thing, you know, you’ll be exactly where you’re supposed to be.”
Eighteen
“Dev! Hey, sweetness! Feeling better?” Cannon called when he and Hawk burst into the house a few hours after they left. Hawk rolled his eyes. His partner always bounded through the door, loud and boisterous, like a loping retriever puppy.
Silence greeted them.
“Devon?” Hawk called. His brow furrowed at the continued silence. It was too quiet. Was she napping? He sprinted upstairs. She wasn’t in their bedroom, and she wasn’t in any of the other rooms. Not even her panic room.
His heart wrenched. Where was she?
Breathing hard, fear threading ice into his veins, he raced back down the steps to find Cannon returning from the hallway where Dev had her office.
“She’s gone,” Hawk rasped, his chest heaving when he got back downstairs, abandonment hitting him hard. “She…left. She’s gone.”
“No.” Cannon shook his head, meeting Hawk at the foot of the stairs. He grabbed Hawk’s bicep, bracing him. Cannon knew. He knew how Hawk’s mom had left one day with his younger siblings, disappearing and leaving him behind. He knew why Hawk had landed in a gang when he was so young, and why he was the possessive, bossy man he was. He knew Hawk’s scars.
And he knew Hawk was about to freak the fuck out.
Cannon’s fingers squeezed. “Listen to me. Focus. Don’t go there. Devon is not like your mother. She’s not running away, and we’re not losing her. Just look around. Think. We would have seen her leave. Her truck’s still here. Look.” He gestured out the window toward her snow-covered vehicle that she rarely drove since the guys were always with her. All of three of their vehicles were parked outside.
“We would have heard someone drive up if she called for a ride,” Hawk agreed, nodding. His initial panic shifted from the echoes of pain from abandonment and morphed into something darker. Fear for Devon rolled over him like a dark oozing fog he’d never escape.
He looked around, taking in everything. As he examined the room with clearer eyes, everything was wrong.
Dev’s winter boots were beside the door, and her thick winter jacket hung from the coat tree. “We need to check the rest of the house and see—”
He cut off. Devon’s gun was on the floor beside the leg of the console table beside the front door, the table’s drawer hanging open. They never left it out. It certainly wouldn’t be on the floor.
Turning slowly, he studied the rest of room. The rug runner was wrinkled into ridges as if something had been dragged over it. The lampshade on the nearest light was dented, the entire fixture off-center on the tabletop. The books Dev kept next to it were knocked to the floor.
And the alarm…
“The alarm system didn’t beep when we came in.” Usually it trilled a warning to remind them to enter the security code.
His stomach plummeted to his feet, rage joining the fear that had already taken hold of him. The volatile mix erupted through him, and dredging up things better left dead. The persona he’d thought dead and buried rose up and snapped into place.
The world would burn.
