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However, there was a second captor out there. A second threat. It was bad enough when she admitted that she suspected it might be Mason Walsh when—up until that moment—Lucas had been sure that Walsh was locked behind bars, right where he wanted him.
But for Maria to harbor such suspicionsandfor Tessa to say that name over a buzz before the radio went dead?
Sly had Maria. Rick had Grace.
Lucas wouldn’t stop until he was sure that his wife was just as protected. And, slipping away while Kade, Natalie, Sly, and Marie’s voices melded together in a conversation he was no longer a part of, he pulled his car keys out of his pocket as he headed right for his Mustang.
* * *
Maria was safe.Based on what he had just heard, Tessawasn’t.
There were plenty enough vehicles for the HSD to make their way back home. Not waiting to stick around for any of them—and hoping Maria would understand why he disappeared as quickly as he had—he raced through the trees until he found his Mustang waiting for him.
Hopping inside, he made the trip back to the Harts’s place in record time.
Lucas didn’t even bother killing the engine. Leaving his car in the middle of the road once he saw the house, he threw open his door and ran up the walkway.
He stopped short when he reached the porch. There, hidden in the slight shadows, was something dark. Something bulky. Picking it up, he saw that it was a Hamlet communicator.
And Tessa had made a page before the line went dead.
Tossing it back to the ground, he grabbed the doorknob, shoving the front door to Rick and Grace’s house open.
His eyes darted all over the room. He saw the baby still sleeping blissfully in the cot laid out in the middle of the floor—placed there so that Willie and Tessa could watch over Su without being relegated to the nursery—and Willie in the middle of a conversation, speaking into her own radio.
Her back was to him, though she turned quickly when the door flung inward.
“Willie?” Lucas demanded. “Where’s Tessa?”
“Hang on, Sly,” Willie said quickly, speaking into the receiver. “Lucas just walked in.”
Obviously.
“Where’s my wife?” he asked again.
“I don’t know. That’s what I was just telling the sheriff. She went outside… I don’t know. Fifteen minutes ago? Twenty? She never came back and I was getting worried—”
“Where’s the sheriff then?” Lucas asked, cutting Willie off.
She was so startled at this simmering rage seeping through, she shook her head, glasses sliding down the slope of her nose. “I… Ophelia. He was bringing Maria back to Ophelia. He asked me, if I saw you first, to see if you’d go over and check her out, as her brother and the doc. But he hasn’t seen Tess—”
That was all he needed from Willie. With the communicator on the porch, the fact that she was already gone, and Kade’s report that the last thing she said was Mason Walsh’s name… add that to Maria being convinced that Walsh was one of her captors and Lucas was beginning to think that there might have been another abduction.
And this time? It wasTessa.
No. No fucking way. He swore he would never let anyone take his wife away from him, and he meant it.
One of the last things he remembered Maria saying after her rescue before it all became just white noise to him, was that she had been held at the Hamlet Inn all this time. She wasn’t sure how—and Lucas knew that Sly would be paying its proprietors a visit fairly shortly—but if Mason could keep her trapped there, would he try to bring Tessa there next?
He didn’t know, but one thing was for sure: just like he did for his sister, he wouldn’t stop until he found his wife.
* * *
She wasn’tat the Hamlet Inn. As much as she had awful memories of that place, she would’ve preferred that to where Mason drove her before instructing her to get out of the car again.
He’d driven her to the entrance to Hamlet, parking his car so that they were within walking distance of the gulley. Then, with his loaded gun digging into the back of her sweater, he marched her to the absolute edge of it.
Standing there, barely two feet away from blackness, she waited for him to say something. Anything. He’d stayed quiet the entire drive over and, somehow, that was infinitely worse than hearing his voice again.
