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“Where is he?” My own voice was unrecognizable.
The man shook his head. “I don’t know. I swear I don’t. He never tells me where he goes, and he knows if I leave. I’ve tried.”
I broke away from the group, and as I dialed my phone, the others asked him for more details. Where the tracker was on or in his body and any details about his family.
Evelyn’s was the first phone that I tried, and it rang out. No answer. Panic spiraled inside me. She could be asleep. Next was Liam’s phone. No answer there either. That was a problem. Something had happened.
I already knew that it was true before I dialed Noah’s number, but I did it anyway out of sheer desperation. No answer. Fuck. Fuck.
Everything was spinning. Something had happened, and I wasn’t there. I’d fucked up. Nathan had seen through us and what we wanted and set this up. I needed to get back there. “We need to go.”
The others didn’t need to ask if I’d gotten an answer. They could read it on my face.
“Go,” Daniel said. “Grant and I will take care of things here.”
I didn’t wait, sprinting out the front door toward our concealed vehicles. They were almost a mile away. We’d parked there and hiked so there was no chance we would be seen. Once I’d reached the vehicles, the drive back to the ranch was the better part of an hour. It was a good thing that it was the middle of the night because there wasn’t a speed limit in the world that was going to hold me back.
Be wrong, I begged the universe. Please be wrong.
Maybe a cell tower had been knocked out or there had been a fire. Maybe there had been an earthquake and they were too busy to answer their phones. My mind made up increasingly ridiculous scenarios as I ran. I knew they weren’t true, but I held on to them anyway.
They were better than acknowledging the alternative.
That Nathan had played us and taken Evelyn. That once again, I hadn’t been there for someone who needed me. And that there was every chance in the world I would once again be too late.
Chapter 27
Evelyn
My head pounded, and everything sounded underwater. Flickering sounds and maybe a voice. Why did my head hurt?
I tried to move, but I couldn’t.
Memory dropped on me like a bomb. Nathan stepping out of the darkness with a gun. Liam crumpling to the ground, and Lena screaming. He’d moved so fucking fast. There was no chance. He’d hit me with the butt of his gun, and I’d felt a needle. I had only been conscious long enough to hear Lena try to run.
Lena.
I forced my eyes open.
The room was dim but lit with something. I didn’t recognize it. The ceiling was wooden and rough. A cabin, maybe? The cabin where they’d gone to capture him? If we were there, what had happened to Lucas and the others?
Panic spiraled up and choked me, and I forced it back. I had things to live for now, and I wasn’t going to let this break me. I was stronger than this.
I tried to move again, but my hands and ankles were bound.
Oh God. No.
My vision darkened. I was there again. He had me. Just like before. I wouldn’t be able to get away, and he would kill me. Tears flooded my eyes, and I blinked them back.
Breathe.
The air shuddered in my lungs like it was afraid to be there.
I turned my head toward the rest of the room, the movement as small as possible so that if Nathan was here, he wouldn’t know that I was awake. Lena was tied to a chair, gagged, but conscious. She saw me looking, and her eyes went so wide I could see the whites of them all the way across the room. But she didn’t move. She only glanced with her eyes to the right, and I followed her gaze.
Nathan sat in a chair next to the fireplace. In it was a roaring blaze, and it took everything in me not to scream, or faint. Pure dread was a feeling I would never be able to fully describe. It was like falling into solid ice, paralyzing and infinite. It was pain and panic all wrapped up into one.
Something was leaning in the fire. Heating. I hadn’t seen him heat the ring before, and this was so much worse. I wasn’t naked, but enough of my clothes were gone that he could—and would—damage me. I knew that.
