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Oh, the joys of captivity.
I moved around slowly, trying to drag the shackled leg as much as possible so the cuff didn't move, looking in the cabinets, trying to see what options I had for self-defense or to pick the lock. Only plastic utensils, of course. He wasn't that stupid. The cabinets were full of paper plates and bowls, disposable cups. There was one pot and one skillet in a drawer next to the stove. The refrigerator was fully stocked, so at least I wasn't going to slowly starve to death on top of everything else. The water in the kitchen and bathroom worked. There was nothing in the medicine cabinet but gauze, bandages, and triple antibiotic. He didn't even keep the rubbing alcohol in there anymore, I guessed worried I might have seen that as an easy out- though death by rubbing alcohol was practically unheard-of.
Hell, if I wanted to end it, all I needed to do was fill up the tub, or stop drinking for a few days, or wrap my ankle chain around my neck. All much more fool-proof solutions to self-conclusion than drinking some bathroom antiseptic that would probably just make me vomit uncontrollably and maybe have a seizure... then survive. I was pretty sure I was going to be enduring enough torture by Damian's hands... I wasn't going to be inflicting it on myself as well
I walked over to the bed, a bed I was praying like hell I wasn't going to be having to share with Damian, and sat down on the side that used to be mine. I opened the nightstand, finding a necklace that used to belong to my mother and two of the paperback romances I had been reading before I got the hell out of there.
With a shrug and a resigned sigh, I pulled one out and climbed up in bed. If I was going to be physically captive, at least I had a mental escape.
Later, I fell asleep. And I dreamed of Cash saving me.TwentyCashThe son of a bitch owned a carpet store in town. How the fuck that didn't show up on Lo's radar was completely beyond me. I was sure she had been keeping tabs on him. She was too diligent not to. But she missed it. For years.
I pushed my bike way over the speed limit, road safety being the absolute fucking last thing on my mind. All that mattered was getting to her as quickly as possible, before that whackjob husband of hers managed to do any more damage than he had back at my place. If he put his hands on her... if he forced her to...
I forced that thought away as I turned into the industrial part of town, where Shane Mallick had a warehouse he had converted into a huge house for him and his woman, and tried to calm the pounding of my heart.
There was nothing about the carpet store that suggested it could be livable, but no way was I leaving without checking it out. The side door was steel-bar enforced and attached to a security system. On a frustrated sigh, I moved to the front of the building, picking up one of the penny bricks that made up an abandoned front flowerbed and tossed it through one of the front panels of glass, not waiting for it all to fall out before climbing through.
Just as I suspected... nothing.
“God damn it!” I yelled as I tore through the front and back rooms, looking for something, anything.
There was nothing. No doors, nothing but a few dusty shelving units and wall stands for the carpets. Fucking empty.
“There's fucking nothing here,” I growled into the phone, cutting off Malcolm's greeting.
“What do you mean there's nothing there?”
“I mean it's just a fucking empty carpet store. There's nothing and no one inside, Malc. She's not here.”
“She has to be there,” he insisted and I heard an edge of desperation in his tone.
“You're welcome to fucking come here and look, man, but there ain't shit.” I kicked the side of the service desk, enjoying the stab of pain up my foot. “What the fuck are we going to do now? Where else can we look?”
There was a long pause before, “I don't know.”
“What do you mean you don't know? You have to know. You guys know fucking everything.”
“He's a ghost, man. He even pays his bills in cash. There's nothing to go on. I tried.”
I tore out of the busted window, going to my bike and sitting on it for a long minute. I was in no shape to drive. I needed a direction to go in. I needed skulls to crack together. I needed some fucking... hope.
She couldn't just be... gone.
But the fact of the matter was- she could. She could very well be long gone. This Damian fuck obviously kept a lot of cash on hand. He could easily get out of town. He could take Lo and disappear and no one would ever see her again. The Henchmen tried to keep their noses out of everyone else's business, but that didn't mean we didn't know things, that we didn't know just how the other low lives handled certain situations, how they managed to up and completely fall off the face of the Earth when trouble caught up with them. And this Damian guy had years to do nothing but plan on what he was going to do when he got his hands on his wife again.
“Mother fucker,” I growled into the phone, not even realizing I still had it pressed to my ear.
“We're going to find her,” Malcolm's voice said, holding an authoritative edge that only managed to make me snort.
“You don't know that, man.”
“Cash, I fucking know it. Because this is, from this moment on, the fucking only case Hailstorm is working. Every man and woman will be putting their time and skills into locating her. We will find her. We never fail.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I wish fucking Jstorm was around...”
“Jstorm?” I repeated, looking up at the store with a churning in my stomach.
