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It was dark. Late. There wasn’t much he could do to help the search just then, so he kept Tessa as his priority.
She was sleeping now. Though it took a while for her nerves to subside long enough for sleep to take her under, she was sleeping—but hecouldn’t.
At times like these, his brain was impossible to shut off. Since there was no use in trying, he didn’t.
Instead, he thought about what heshoulddo.
Sly insisted that he searched all of Ophelia. Lucas trusted that the sheriff did, but he also knew that the man was running on emotion instead of logic. Once he saw that Maria was missing, it was a good chance he was blinded to anything beyond the empty house and the paints—and his planted business card—that was left behind.
The business card pissed Lucas off. There was no reason for it to be there. Tess’s reminder that the cards arrived long after their last trip to Hamlet made one thing clear in his mind: this abduction was personal. Whoever took his sister either wasn’t a local and had somehow crossed paths with Lucas in Dayton—or theywerea villager who left with the sole purpose to find some way to tie Lucas to the scene.
Butwhy?
If it was because they wanted him called back to Hamlet, it was a waste of effort. They had to have known that taking Maria alone would’ve been enough to bring him home. If Sly had called him days ago, he would’ve already been there.
And if the unknown perp was trying to frame him… well, good luck on that. Everyone in Hamlet knew that Lucas would never stand by and allow someone to hurt his baby sister. He certainly wouldn’t do it himself.
There was no denying that someone did, though.
An outsider—because, whether they were a local or not, anyone who visited the former De Angelis family home with ill intent was an outsider—had broken into Ophelia to leave that card and Maria’s paints behind. Sly might not have found another clue there… but could Lucas?
It was worth a shot.
He wasn’t worried about getting inside, either. Maria had no idea that there was a kill switch built into the lockdown system he insisted be installed all those years ago, but Lucas would’ve had to have been a fool to trust his sister’s safety to a system he couldn’t control himself.
Whether it was two in the afternoon or two in the morning, if he wanted in, he was getting in. And if his search turned up nothing, and the other villagers were still combing the woods nearby, the trees near the gulleyside, the mountains themselves… maybe he would take Rick up on his offer to join the deputy in the search.
Throwing his blanket away from him, he kissed Tessa’s shoulder, taking her cinnamon scent into his lungs before he sighed, then slid quietly from the bed.
His wife needed her rest so he would leave her to it.
But Lucas?
He neededvengeance.
CHAPTERSIX
In a locked room, on the other side of Hamlet, Maria De Angelis couldn’t sleep, either.
The curtains were drawn in the hotel room. Though she hadn’t been inside of one of the Hamlet Inn’s rooms in years—not since she and a few of her classmates stayed over after their small “prom” senior year, an idea one of her outsider friends had from her old school—she was pretty sure the ones in this one weren’t standard. They were black-out curtains instead, fastened so that there was no seeing out—or in.
Her captor purposely kept the lights dimmed, too, so it was difficult for Maria to tell whether it was daylight out or night. She’d barely gotten a few hours of sleep at a time since she came to after the masked man drugged her. She was too frightened to willingly close her eyes, and only passed out when the combination of fear and exhaustion got to be too much.
How many days had she been locked inside the room?
She had no idea. Basing it on the regular meals that her second captor—the masked man—brought for her and the first one, she knew it had to have been a couple of days. Two. Maybe three.
Still, the answer was:too many.
Except for when she was guided to use the bathroom, she’d spent her entire time locked in the hotel room on one of the double beds. The other belonged to her second captor; the masked man always disappeared and reappeared through the connecting door that was also kept locked on the other side.
Not as though Maria could get to it. With a pair of handcuffs keeping her hands tight, and a length of chain and another pair keeping her in place on the bed, she was trapped.
What made it worse was that Boone never seemed to sleep, either…
Nathaniel Boone was a hulking beast.Un mostro. Her second captor—and the man who had already brought trouble to Hamlettwice—was responsible for Maria. Though she’d begged and pleaded and asked as many questions as she dared to when she first woke up, all he did was leer and tell her to be a ‘good girl’ and she’d be fine.
He wouldn’t tell her why she was tricked in such a way, or why she was taken only to be held captive in one of the empty rooms at the Hamlet Inn. He didn’t seem surprised that she recognized it, or worried that anyone knew she was there which only terrified her more.
