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She’d been doing pretty well with accepting reality lately.
This whole Mexico trip had been upsetting. In so many ways.
Kenna blew out a long breath. “Elevator?”
He shoved her again. “Stairs.”
Kenna winced. In the echoey concrete stairwell, she chanced a glance back at him as they rounded the landing between floors, headed down to one. “Where’s Javier?”
“Somewhere you don’t need to worry about him.”
“Unlikely. Unless you’ve returned him to his uncle or dropped him off at the best children’s home in the world.” Either way the kid wouldn’t emerge from this unscathed.
“He’s alive. I’ve got someone watching him.”
Kenna focused on holding the rail in case he tried to send her down the stairs at high speed. After all, his intention could have been to kill her in here, out of sight of anyone. Or injure her badly enough she would be incapacitated.
“Door.”
She pushed out into a parking lot behind the hospital. She thought she spotted movement at the edges of her awareness. A spark of disquiet that things weren’t quite right out here.
But were they friend, or foe?
Surely the FBI only wanted to ensure their people—including Jax—were all right. They’d proven already they didn’t care about her. Yet another person who believed she didn’t measure up, but she tried not to care about the opinions of people she’d never met. It didn’t matter if they assumed she would never rise to Jax’s level when she’d only fallen from grace so far that she now occupied the same dark places the bad guys did.
It could be Ramon’s voice in her head, his doubts whispered in her ear.
Or it could be the stone-cold truth.
She’d never felt this way with Bradley. But then, maybe with her being the daughter of a famous investigator and him being the son of a politician she simply hadn’t felt off balance. He’d been the one who had to prove to the rest of the agents they worked with that he wasn’t a political hire, good for FBI public relations. She’d been the blue-collar, grass-roots investigator with a nomadic childhood. He’d grown up with a silver spoon and roots.
Jax was a little more down-to-earth than Bradley, even if he’d been raised upper middle class. Certainly he’d never had his birthday at an Applebee’s.
Still, she felt more off balance with Jax now she wasn’t an FBI agent. She had more to prove these days, if she wanted to convince people they should be together. And yet, why did she even care what people thought?
Everyone they knew was all on board with the thing growing between her and Jax.
Her front collided with the trunk of a car. Not the pickup Kart had stolen from the ranch. She’d been too distracted with thoughts of Jax and their relationship—if she even wanted to think of it like that—to realize where he was walking her.
Now reality hit her all over again.
Kart clicked a button on a set of keys, and the trunk lid lifted. “Get in.”
She whirled around to him, already stating her objection. His gun hand slammed down onto her forehead and Kenna crumpled.
She felt herself being lifted, and then he dug in her pockets. She pretended she couldn’t fight back so he thought she was helpless. That meant swallowing back bile that threatened to make a mess everywhere—which she would have to lay here in.
The trunk lid closed.
She hissed out a breath into the darkness. Kidnapped again, but thanks to Maizie she could be tracked.
Kenna grinned, feeling a tiny chuckle bubble up in her throat. She tugged the pepper spray he hadn’t found from her pocket. He was going to regret this. She would get Javier back, and get free, and Kart wouldn’t be able to stop her.
The car swerved all the way across town. She guessed it took about twenty minutes, and then he hit the brakes and she rolled against the carpeted side wall.
Kenna rolled her eyes. He had to have done all that on purpose just to throw her off balance.
She heard him slam the driver’s door and waited for the trunk to open, ready to pounce at him and hit him with the pepper spray.
