Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 113464 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 567(@200wpm)___ 454(@250wpm)___ 378(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113464 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 567(@200wpm)___ 454(@250wpm)___ 378(@300wpm)
“Anyway, I haven’t forgotten you aren’t on the market, even if I am waiting for Kristoff to thank me for those suits you bought him.”
It isn’t my imagination. The light leaves her eyes a split second before she pulls free, examining her wine glass and avoiding my gaze again. “I don’t know if you’ll see him anytime soon.”
“Why not?” Something about the way she says that—her flat voice, the sadness running like a river under her words—reminds me I haven’t paid her a lot of attention since she got home. I haven’t asked the important questions, and now uncertainty stirs to life in the back of my mind. “What’s going on with you two? Do I need to have a conversation with him?”
“Not everything can be fixed with a conversation.” She smirks, and there is a deep wisdom and understanding in the way she looks at me. “Not even the kind of conversation you would have.”
I’m wondering if I’ve kept her as far from my work as I’ve always imagined.
“What are you trying to say?” And now I’m prepared to close out the night by paying Kristoff a visit to make sure he pays me back in blood. “What happened when you were gone?”
Instead of being straight with me, she wraps her shawl a little tighter around her shoulders. “Where’s Bianca?”
“Don’t change the subject.” Although, that is a good question. I didn’t expect her to take this long. “She went to the ladies’ room. Can you go check?”
“What, you mean you’re not going to storm into the girls’ bathroom? You own the place.” Still, she gets up from her stool and walks to the back while shaking her head.
She doesn’t reach the swinging door before an ear-splitting shriek slices through the air. The wailing of an alarm. Diners look up from their plates, and a few of them push out of their chairs and climb to their feet. The hostess cuts across the room, ponytail swinging, and instinct forces me to follow her.
“Someone tripped the emergency exit,” she calls out, but the siren almost swallows her voice.
Tatum stands in the bathroom doorway, holding the door open with one hand. She grabs my sleeve as I pass. “Did you say she was in here? Because she isn’t.”
No, not this. Anything but this.
I break free of her grasp and run the rest of the way down the hall, past the empty banquet rooms, and out through the emergency exit, which empties onto a line of dumpsters and employee parking. “There!” I shout to Romero when he falls in next to me, pointing to a pair of taillights dwindling to pinpoints before they blink out. “There she is.”
I don’t know how I’m so sure, only that I am. Part of my soul is in that car, and somebody is taking it away from me. The weight of that knowledge threatens to buckle my knees.
“Dad, what’s happening?”
I spin in place to find Tatum shivering despite the heavy humidity. Thunder rolls across the sky before the sky opens, and rain spatters the ground, adding to the sense of everything falling the fuck to pieces.
“Somebody took her.” I take one more look in the direction the car disappeared before pulling Tatum back inside the building. “But we’re going to get her.”
“Why?” Her lips pull back from her teeth in a horrified grimace. “I don’t understand!”
“Neither do I. I’m going to need you to listen to everything I say and do what you’re told.” With one hand firmly around her arm, I direct her back to the dining room. Some heroic soul cuts the alarm, but somehow the silence is more deafening.
Romero and I exchange a look. “The tracker,” I remind him, and immediately he pulls out his phone.
“What tracker? What is happening?” Then, before I can order her outside to our car, she gasps. “Maybe it was Lucas.”
I can hardly keep up with the rush of thoughts running through my head. All my frenzied subconscious can latch onto is that name. Lucas.
“What does he have to do with this?”
“We saw him today outside the store. I didn’t think—I mean, I figured—”
“Slow down.” I take her face in my shaking hands. “Breathe. Tell me what happened.”
“He just came out of nowhere, and he looked crazy. But I kind of laughed it off because I figured he was just being a loser and trying to get her back.” Her chin quivers, her eyes welling up with tears. “That’s what he’s doing, right? He took her so that he can convince her to stay with him?”
Fucking hell, and I did not know. “She didn’t tell you?”
“Didn’t tell me what?”
“It was Lucas who hit her with the car,” Romero says, rather than leave the announcement to me.
“Are you fucking serious?” Her scream echoes through the dining room. We already had an audience. What’s more attention on us? “Why didn’t she tell me?”