Page 77 of Her Forever SEAL

“Guess not.”

They didn't talk much while they waited.

Forty minutes passed. Then fifty.

His phone buzzed. He looked down at the screen. Not a call. A text from an unknown number.

There was a photograph.

Kayla was on a concrete floor. Her rain gear was gone and she was still in her lacrosse uniform. Her knees were pulled up slightly. Her eyes were barely open, half-lidded and glassy, looking like she was not quite present. She looked so small. So much younger than fourteen.

Then he read the text beneath it.

Trade. You for her.

24

Kayla came back to herself slowly.

She blinked. There was something in her eye. Her hand didn’t move like it was supposed to. It moved with her other hand instead. That was when she realized they were tied together. Zip-tied. When her finger came away from her eye, she saw blood on it. Not wet. Dried.

Assholes.

Cat!

She remembered the last minute before everything went dark. Cat going down in the parking lot. Trying to hold onto her. Trying to save her.

Hurt.

Not dead.

Kayla sagged with relief. That was when she noticed just how cold she was. Her clothes were heavy and wet from the field, and this place might be inside, but it was pretty damn cold. She looked down and saw she was on stones. Not tiles. Stones.

Then she noticed the smell.

She knew that smell.

She'd smelled it before, standing between Cat and Cat's mom while a tour guide in a burgundy polo shirt explained the difference between French and American oak barrels and how the wood itself changed the flavor of the wine. Cat had whispered something in her ear that had made her laugh, and Cat's mom had shushed them both.

She was in a wine cellar.

Her eyes adjusted slowly to the low light. Barrels stacked on either side of her, row after row, curving away into the dimness. Stone floor. Stone walls. She tried to get up, but her ankles were tied. At least her wrists were tied in front of her.

She rolled around like a worm until she was against one of the barrels, then she scooched up into a sitting position. She took inventory.

Doors?

Windows?

One door that she could see. At the far end of the cellar, heavy wood with iron hardware, closed. No windows. Two industrial light fixtures overhead, the kind that gave off more shadow than light.

She shivered again. A big racking one that she couldn’t stop.

She pulled her knees up to her chest and held them there with her bound wrists and tried to make herself smaller and warmer simultaneously and neither worked very well.

Okay, she told herself.

Think.