“Where does that route go?” Jax asked from across the table.
Ghost pulled up a map and drew a line northwest along Highway 93. “If he stays on 93, he’s got options. Evaro, Arlee, St. Ignatius. Or he could cut west toward the Missions.”
“That’s a lot of ground,” Anson said.
“It is.” Ghost looked at Naomi. “Which is why we need to narrow it down.”
Naomi was already dialing. She walked back into the living room with the phone pressed to her ear. “It’s me. I need you to run a name.”
The silence stretched. Bear counted his heartbeats. Twelve. Fifteen. Twenty.
Naomi came back. Her face had gone pale, her mouth a thin line.
“Talk to me,” Walker said.
She looked at Bear. Then at Ghost. Then back at Bear.
“We have a name,” she said slowly, “but I’m struggling to wrap my head around it.”
Bear stood. His chair crashed backward, and he didn’t hear it. “Who?”
thirty-three
A hand over her mouth…
Greta jolted awake from the nightmare and reached for Bear.
But he wasn’t beside her.
And she wasn’t in his bed. Or even her bed. She was face down on concrete, shivering.
What the…?
She tried to lift her head, and pain spiked through her skull, made worse every time she tried to move. So she didn’t move. Didn’t lift her head. Just focused on lying there, pressed flat against cold stone, and tried to piece together how she ended up here.
Atlas barking, waking her.
Getting out of bed, finding him?—
Her breath caught, and tears burned in her eyes. Her dog. Her puppy. Hurt and bleeding in the hallway.
She had to press her face harder against the concrete to keep from making a sound.
Someone had hurt her dog. Someone had broken into her house, hurt Atlas, and taken her…
Where?
Where the hell was she?
She forced herself to breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth, like she taught herself to do on high-altitude climbs when panic started to claw at her chest. The pain in her head pulsed with each heartbeat, but she pushed through it, taking inventory.
Her left wrist hurt. She moved it, testing, and metal clanked.
She cracked her eyes open.
A bare bulb hung from a cord overhead, the filament buzzing faintly. The chain ran from a cuff on her wrist to a steel ring bolted into the concrete wall three feet behind her head. She yanked on the chain. The ring didn’t move. The bolt didn’t shift.
She sat up slowly.
