Total pages in book: 59
Estimated words: 55912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
I knock on the door and wait. “Mom?”
No answer. No big deal. She’s exhausted. I probably shouldn’t even be waking her up. I should let her sleep and recover, but now my heart is pounding for a different reason. It has nothing to do with steaminess. I knock on the door again and again.
“Mom?” My voice is getting louder now. I look down the hallway at Jamie. He marches toward me. “She’s not answering.”
“Simone?” he yells, far louder than me. “Simone, are you in there?” He grabs the door and pushes it. It’s locked. He rams his shoulder against it. Demon barks when the lock explodes from the wood.
The door swings open. The room is empty. The window is open. Mom’s gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jamie
I rush over to the window, searching the trees. Whoever did this worked cleanly. There are no footprints on the ground or signs of a vehicle. They’d picked the lock on the window, opened it quietly, and slinked in. Then perhaps they injected Simone to stop her from screaming.
Lena walks right up to me, grabs my shirt, and pulls me close to her. “You have to find her. You have to! I don’t know what to do. I wish there were something I could do.” She shoves me, but it’s more like she doesn’t know what to do with her hands. “Do you think she saw us… without us knowing? Then she left?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “I was distracted.”
She glares at me. Then, her gaze focuses on the bedside table. She walks to it quickly, brushing past me. The darkness in me pulses up and roars at me to grab her, pull her close, and kiss her again. Forget it. “What’s this? Sorry, kid, but I had to—”
I snatch the note from her, reading it quickly. The handwriting is messy and jagged. Sorry, kid, but I had to take the old lady. I don’t want to kill anybody except for you. You know why. You’re not better than me. You never were.
I stumble back and almost fall against the wall, gritting my teeth and shaking my head. Lena gently takes the note from me. “Jack, from the photos? He wants to kill you?”
“There’s no way this was him,” I snarl. “No damn way. He’d be pushing ninety by now. Your mother’s not heavy, fine, but doing all this at ninety? Maybe he’s working through somebody if he’s still alive.”
“I don’t understand,” Lena says. “I thought Jack was a father figure to you?”
“He was. He taught me how to shoot and how to survive. We worked together, helping people in the early days. Then Jack started taking borderline jobs, jobs where there was no clear right or wrong. He’d vandalize an ex-wife’s house for the ex-husband, stuff like that. I begged him to stop. He told me he’d always been a bad, bad man. It was in his roots. Later, I learned he’d committed two murders in his twenties.”
I clench my fists, remembering the pain that slammed into me when I read the file. Lena gently places her hand on my arm. “There’s a phone number on the back.” She shows me the note. “It must be him or whoever this is.”
“I tried to find him,” I say, “after we split, but he was always good at hiding. I hoped he rode off into the sunset and gave up this work. What if I was wrong? Maybe he’s some rich, bitter millionaire now, playing sick games.”
Lena presses the note into my hand. I look down at the cell phone number.
“I don’t understand how he’d know about this place. The car didn’t have a tracker on.”
“What if they followed us?” Lena asks. “Is it possible?”
“I would’ve spotted them,” I growl.
“But is it possible?” she says. “You were distracted.”
I sigh and nod. She’s right. That’s part of what will make her such an amazing wife. She’ll call me out when I need it. “Maybe with a small drone. You could hang back and keep your distance. It would take two people: one to drive and one to pilot the drone. Keep the drone low. It would be difficult to fly, but yeah, it’s possible.”
I groan and pop my neck from side to side. “We should’ve gone straight to the bunker.”
“There’s a bunker?”
I look at her coldly. “Where do you think you’re going when the bullets start flying? I should’ve put you both there right away.”
“You need to call that number,” she says, that familiar pain in her eyes. “Mom can’t keep going through this over and over, this endless suffering. It’s not fair. She doesn’t deserve this.”
“She’ll be safe soon.”
“She was safe,” Lena yells, “and then we decided to put ourselves first. I was out there sucking your dick when they were taking her!”
I step forward and gently touch her shoulders. When I pull her into a hug, she sinks into it, but only for a second, maybe less. Then she pushes her hands against me and leans away. “You have to call that number.”