Cherry Adair - T-flac 09 (32 page)

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Mouth dry, heart thumping, Caleb went into the cockpit. “…ten more minutes,” the captain told his crew. “If they haven’t found the missing passengers by then we’ve been given permission to take off.”

“Weird, isn’t it?” The male flight attendant twisted his wedding band around his finger as he glanced from the pilot to the copilot. “How could a woman disappear out of the restroom in a crowded terminal and no one see her?”

“The police are curious as to why she and the two men she was traveling with don’t—”

Enough. Caleb was gone.

He materialized inside the terminal beside a magazine stand and then went in search of his men. How the hell could this have happened? With such a powerful protection spell on her, nobody should have been able to get near her.

She’d run.

The little fool had run.

“Strike her again,” a man’s voice said flatly.

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Heather came to in a surge of sheer terror; heart manic, icy sweat bathing her body as she was hit across the face. She barely had time to register what had happened when she was hit again. This time she screamed. The back of her head slammed into something hard and she bit her tongue. Salty, metallic blood filled her mouth, and the cry of sheer terror lodged in her throat. What was going on? Her fuzzy brain tried to make sense of where, when, and who she was.

Her stomach tensed just before she was slapped again.

She attempted to open her eyes, but they immediately filled with tears of pain, flooding her vision. Bam!

She heard a loud crack, and realized it was her head breaking the back of the chair she was in. The violence had come out of nowhere.

“What the—?” Her tongue, swollen, refused to articulate the words. The blows came, methodically, without giving her a chance to think or protest. Dizzy and disoriented, she tried to figure out what was happening.
Nothing
made sense. Her entire world revolved around her pain.

Fire blazed across the entire right side of her face. Ears ringing, arms stretched behind her, legs numb.

Heather catalogued the feelings, envisioning herself strapped to a straight-backed chair, arms tied, ankles tied. How long had they been hitting her? What was the human capacity for suffering? She’d never felt this much agony in her entire life.

She screamed again as an especially hard smack brought her around. Her brain started piecing together fragmented shards of memory. The airport, running from the bad guys and Caleb, the restroom, the nun and the cleaning lady—how had she ended up here?

“Hold,” the flat voice instructed.

She carefully turned her head, frightened to the core. Who wouldn’t obey a cold voice like that?

Heather peered through slitted eyes in his direction. She was already terrified. Now her fear ratcheted up another notch as she recognized the man who’d shot her father. She blinked rapidly, attempting to clear her blurry vision. It was hard to hold onto a thought, hard to concentrate, yet she knew she had to.

Touching the tip of her tongue to her split, swollen lip, she felt the ridges of a tender cut. Her head felt like it weighed fifty pounds when she tilted it to the side.

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“Why?” she managed to choke out, images of her father lying dead in his own blood giving her a spurt of courage.

The man propped her head upright with his fist under her chin. “Where is your father, Miss Shaw?”

“He’s…” Blinking rapidly, she played the scene of her father’s murder in her head. He was dead. This man had killed him. Right? God, this was a nightmare.

His hand dropped away from her face, and her head flopped forward. Only to fly back as she was hit again. “Stop!” she yelled, choking on the blood in her mouth. Adrenaline and fear were starting to scare her “sober.” With the continual barrage of blows, she was having a hard time bridging terror and truth.

Sagging against her bonds, she dragged up reserves she didn’t know she had to stay conscious.

It would be easier to give in to the darkness beyond the pain, but she couldn’t. She was her baby’s only hope. “Who
are
you?”

“Fazuk Al-Adel. I am a client of your father’s.” He shot a sneaking glance at the bulky shadow of a man standing beside her chair. “If you would be kind enough to inform us where he is, Miss Shaw, we will be finished with you.”

That didn’t sound promising. “Finished” as in they would stop beating the shit out of her and send her on her merry way? Or “finished” as in they would just shoot her and be done with it? She could only see out of one eye, and when she turned her head to look at Al-Adel, she almost threw up. This was so unreal. “You—you s-shot him.”

Al-Adel’s expression hardened to stone. “Your father was shot? Are you telling me he is
dead
?”

The room was starting to come into focus, although Heather still felt as though she was seeing everything underwater. She continued blinking her good eye, trying to see the two men more clearly. Her abused tongue was a hindrance as she argued, “Of coursh he’sh dead. You killed him.”

“It was not I,” Al-Adel assured her with some heat.

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She repeated the words in her mind. Rearranged them until they made some sort of sense. “Yesh, it was.” She nodded, or tried to. “I saw you do it.”

Heather closed her eyes, spent. She dimly remembered a sting in her arm at the airport, which meant that the cleaning lady must have drugged her. Swallowing, she thought of her baby. Poor Bean. Poor Caleb. He’d tried to send her and Bean away, to keep them safe, and they’d ended up right in the enemy’s arms.

Al-Adel’s eyes darkened to angry slits. “You make no sense!” he growled, then turned to one of the other men. “She is useless to me like this. I specifically said I wanted her awake and aware of what was happening. Bring her around.”

Groaning, Heather really wished that Caleb would swoop in and do some of that wizard shit right about now. Something that would save her and Bean from this hell.

Time freezing, teleporting, anything to get her and their baby away from these terrifying men. God, what good was being in love with a wizard if he couldn’t get her out of this kind of situation? Her heart ached at the realization that despite everything they’d gone through, she really did love him. There was something ironic about Caleb being a Master Manipulator of Time, and yet for his family, time was running out.

“Wake up,” the cold, flat voice instructed.

Not wanting another blow to her throbbing face, Heather attempted to lift her chin from where it was resting on her chest. Slowly, she opened her eyes and gave him a deliberately vacant look. She glanced around, trying to take a quick inventory of her surroundings while maintaining a look of drugged stupefaction.

The room was vast, and the only light came from a giant fish tank against the far wall. She counted six or seven shadowy figures she assumed to be men, plus Al-Adel.

Her terror intensified. So did her resolve.

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Returning her attention to the effortless movement of the brightly colored saltwater fish in the tank straight ahead, she prayed for a plan. Quick. If Al-Whatever thought she was drugged stupid, that could buy her some time. Hopefully.

Almost hypnotized by the back-and-forth, back-and-forth swimming fish, Heather let herself sway side to side, as if she’d had a few too many glasses of champagne. The way her stomach was knotted with nausea, it wasn’t that much of a reach.

The man’s cold voice held an angry edge. “How much phenobarbital did the women give her?”

“Sophia told me a double dose. Four hundred milligrams.”

Phenobarbital?Her thoughts skipped and jumped again, coming back to the baby’s safety. What would that do? She bit back a sob, wondering if it would even matter. If Caleb didn’t come soon, she and Bean would both be dead. She tugged against her restraints. It didn’t matter how desperately she wanted to leap out of the chair and run like hell, she couldn’t break the tight ropes cutting into her wrists and ankles.

She received a whack on the back of the head for her efforts.

“She’s coming out of it,” Heather heard one man say.

“Not fast enough,” Al-Adel snapped.

“Time was of the essence,” the other man said defensively. “She had two bodyguards right outside the door. She had to be wheeled out in the cleaning cart. Any noise—”

“Yes. Yes,” Al-Adel snapped. Heather cringed as he put his hand under her jaw and lifted her face.

Heather licked her cracked, bloodied lips. “My husband will come for me. You won’t get away with
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this.”
I love you, sweetheart. Remember that. Promise me if anything happens—Promise me.
If he was a wizard, maybe he could hear her thoughts. She began to scream in her head. “Something is happening!
Rewind me, or whatever it is you do!
”

“Where
is
this husband of yours?” When she didn’t answer he flicked her cheek with something icily sharp. “Does he work for your father?”

“No, and stop poking at me, damn it!” Would it help her if he thought she was crazy? The truth might just get her there. “Caleb is magic. He has powers, but even he couldn’t bring my father back to life.”

Al-Adel cursed and stepped away. “She’s too out of it to make any sense. No. No more drugs for now. Last chance, Miss Shaw, before I just end the game. Where is your father?”

She blinked, so scared she couldn’t even cry. “Dead.”

His lips were one straight angry line across his hard face. “And where is my money?”

“Your money? Oh, right.” Suddenly everything in her
life
seemed to be about this damn money. It was why Caleb had used her. Why her mother was dead and why Al-Adel had killed her father. Heather made her tone especially flippant. To hell with the money, where was Caleb?

“Daddy didn’t steal the money. From what I hear it was lots and lots of money. Not all yours, though.

Is it?” She pictured forty-eight billion dollars in ten-dollar bills. That much money would fill a room. Fill a suitcase. Fill—her whole damn world.

“Who
has
it?” she asked, intentionally slurring her words. It was an excellent question. Too bad she didn’t have the answer. She was loopy, trying to get sensible, and
pretending
to be loopy. Loopier?

She choked as he squeezed her throat between his fingers in a grip so painful she couldn’t hear or see for several seconds. “—
you
know who moved the money?”

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If she gave him something, maybe she could stay alive another day, giving Caleb a better chance to find her and Bean. “My birthday present. I
think,
” she said with the precision of a drunk. “I
think
that it’s a clue.
I
think my
mother
stole the money. Can you
believe
it? My
mother
? Who would have thunk it? Would
you
? Did ever you
meet
my mother? Grace Kelly. That’s who she was. Grace…” Heather listened to her slurred babble and tried to rein herself in.

God. Was she overdoing it? Scary, how easy it was to imagine that this was all happening to someone else. But she wasn’t the rich, spoiled heiress anymore. She was Bean’s mother, and with Caleb missing in action, she was her baby’s only shot.

Focus. Concentrate on what you’re saying, and focus, she warned herself sternly. Concentrate. This is really, really bad. And not likely to get better. She shivered, digging deep for the strength to do what she had to do.

Al-Adel flicked open a knife, the blade glinting dangerously close to her face.

Heather nearly fainted as she pictured the blade slicing smoothly across her throat. Gritting her teeth, she lifted her chin a notch, silently daring him to make her death quick. Steeling herself, she waited for him to make his next move.

Al-Adel cut the restraints from her arms and legs, then grabbed the front of her dress in a hard fist. The fabric ripped as he yanked her to her feet. “Hey!” she muttered, staggering.

An ice-cold hand gripped her upper arm, jerking her upright as her knees buckled and her head flopped. “Can you walk?”

She didn’t bother trying. The pins and needles racing through her arms and legs as the circulation returned was nothing compared to the sharp cramp in her stomach. Hang on, baby, hang on.

One hand had her arm, and with the fingers of the other hand he grabbed her hair to hold her head up.

Think drunk, think happier times, think…“I’ve been doing it for year—”

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“How old are you, Miss Shaw?” He started walking, holding her so tightly her shoulder was hunched up to her ear, and her neck strained against the yank of her hair. “Thirty?”

He’d never know how bad it hurt her to talk, to push the smart-ass words past torn and bleeding lips.

“It’s not polite to ask a woman her age. Even for a terrorisht.”

“When is your birthday?”

She frowned, trying to figure out what he really wanted. “March twenty-ninth…”

The room they were in was some sort of medical office, with certificates on the wall nearby, and models of human organs and a vertebra mounted on black bases and lined up along a credenza. Even without bright lighting she could tell that the office was plush, with gray fabric-covered walls, and thick charcoal carpet underfoot. Tasteful paintings and plaques were illuminated by the surreal ebb and flow of the fish tank’s lights rippling across the walls.

“And what did your mother give you for your last birthday, Heather? Tell me what she gave you.”