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Fuck, fuck, fuck, Stacy, where are you? Ian cut a path through zombies, mummies, and vampires, scouring his search area for any sign of her. There was none. To compound his apprehension, his phone remained frustratingly silent. The secret hope he’d harbored that she’d sneaked away to a stall in the ladies’ room to put herself together and curse him to hell and back waned with each passing second.
If anything happened to her, he’d…he didn’t know what he’d do. His hand shook as he shoved it through his hair, pulling hard at the roots until his scalp screamed. They had to find her. End of discussion. There was no way his last interaction with the love of his life could take place in a back room at a strip club, her staring at him with a heartbreaking expression on her face, saying, “I’m sorry.”
Absolutely not. He’d find her. And when he did, he’d sit her down and they’d have an honest talk—no more games or tactics. He’d ask her, point-blank, what the hell part of their relationship scared her, and then he’d do whatever it took to calm the fear. They belonged together. They made each other happy. That wasn’t his selfish needs talking, but pure, indisputable fact.
The door leading backstage caught his eye. No security posted there, of course, because Vern made money optimizing the black ink on the club’s income statement, so he tended to go cheap on stuff like security. He relied on his bouncers to do periodic sweeps.
Someone had left the door hanging open, which was a no-no on any night, for the dancers’ security, but with all shows canceled tonight, nobody had a legitimate reason to be back there. He checked in with Trevor and the girls by text as he moved to the door. Nobody had seen Stacy. Ginger and Lee Ann were headed back to the bar in case she turned up there. Trevor and Kylie were on their way to the front of the club, to see if Stacy had gone outside for some air.
I’m checking backstage, he texted, and nudged the door open.
Chapter Eight
Stacy moved as slowly as she dared down the dim, narrow hallway, ever mindful of the gun pressed to her back. Cold seeped into her limbs, even as her side burned with a hot, persistent pain. She wrapped her arm around her middle and pressed her hand to the ache. Something warm and sticky pooled between her fingers. She lifted her hand away and squinted. Blood. She looked down at herself. A crimson stain bloomed over the left side of her white dress.
“I’m bleeding,” she said lamely.
The comment earned her a shove. “You’ll bleed even more if you don’t keep moving.”
Right. Worst Nightmare had cut her with something before drawing the gun just to make extra sure she’d be in too weak a state to fight back. The odds of her walking away from this encounter shrank a little more. Don’t give up. Unfortunately, a detached, fuzzy-headed sensation made formulating a plan difficult. Blood loss? Shock? It hardly mattered. Knowing the cause of her symptoms didn’t do anything to fix them.
Talk! her mind ordered, and she opened her mouth to obey. Then, in the next instant, a competing instinct warned, Don’t. Your mouth gets you into trouble.
Probably good advice, but she found she couldn’t march meekly to a quiet, deserted corner and let Worst Nightmare put a bullet in her. She had to speak up, try to slow this runaway train down. Kylie, Trevor, and Ian would link up at some point, realize she was nowhere to be found, and, please God…start looking for her. If she could just stall, and give them time to find her…
“Wh-why are you doing this?”
She received a whack in the back of the head with the gun in response. “Shut up. Keep walking.”
A wave of dizziness crashed over her. She sagged against the wall. Only sheer stubbornness
stopped her from curling into a ball and surrendering. She refused to give the crazy bitch the satisfaction of breaking her, so she dug in and waited for the hallway to stop teetering like a Tilt-A-Whirl. Eventually the dizziness subsided enough to allow her to straighten.
“If you fracture my skull, I’m not going to be able to walk anywhere,” she pointed out, impressed at how steady her voice sounded.
“Then I’ll drag you.”
Over my dead body. She pushed off the wall, placed one foot in front of the other, and made her way along the hallway. At least she knew the layout of the backstage area. Not that familiarity gave her much of an edge, because during two years of dancing at Deuces, she’d never discovered a magic portal to safety tucked behind the blackout curtain, but she considered it a small factor in her favor. She kept her head bowed, in part to look compliant and in part to try to get a lock on Worst Nightmare’s exact position behind her.
White wisps of…something…floated to the floor behind her. Whatever they were, they seemed to glow in the gloom. Feathers. Her wings were shedding. A bubble of hope rose in her chest. If anybody came backstage looking for her, they might spot the feathers and follow. Sure, it was a long shot, a damn small detail to pin all her prayers on, but right now, it was all she had. Ian was smart. He noticed small details.
A memory floated through her mind, rising above the pain and terror of her situation. The first time she’d spent the night at Ian’s place. They hadn’t been together long—just a month—and all their previous overnighters had taken place at her apartment. Backassward arrangement, since Kylie had been her roommate at the time, while Ian had lived alone. But her twin had spent most of her nights at Trevor’s place, and Ian had knocked her off her game so badly she’d clung to the home-court advantage like a security blanket. Still, on that first morning at his place, she’d wandered into his bathroom after a knee-weakening session of wake-up sex, and found her favorite soap, shampoo, and conditioner in the shower. Yes, he noticed small details. He drew the lines, made the connections. A guy like Ian knew something innocuous could send a big message, like “I care about you and I want you to stick around.”
She wanted to stick around too. She crossed her arm over her stomach, as if pressing her hand to her injured side, but every few steps, she used her fingertips to dislodge more feathers from the inside of her wing. Yes, Ian was observant, but that didn’t mean she shouldn’t give him all the help she could.
If he came looking…if anyone did. They might simply assume she’d left without a word—another selfish, irresponsible stunt from do-as-she-pleased Stacy. What if she’d tested everyone’s patience one too many times? Was anyone even worried about her, much less riding to her rescue?
As if to prove the thought, Worst Nightmare grabbed a handful of Stacy’s hair and brought her to a halt. Another tug yanked her head around until she faced the wall. Her eyes automatically refocused, but she knew where she was even without the benefit of twenty-twenty vision. Narrow metal rungs stretched up the wall and led to a small, wooden platform twenty-five feet overhead. The lighting techs used it to access the long lighting rig suspended from the ceiling over the stage.
“Climb.”
Oh, no. No one would see them up there. “I can’t. I’m afraid of heights.” Also, she was in no condition to scramble up a straight-vertical ladder. Numb hands, shaky legs, and the unrelenting pain in her side made the climb risky.
She released a shuddery breath when the pressure of the gun disappeared from the center of her back. Her shoulders dropped and she relaxed infinitesimally, just knowing the damn thing wasn’t poised to blow a hole through—
The cold, unforgiving metal pressed against her temple, scattering her thoughts like seagulls. She heard the click of the safety release.
