Savior (23 page)

My hair was grabbed again, but closer to my scalp, pulling me back onto my feet.

At this point, I was done. My face was throbbing; my stomach was aching; my forearms and palms were burning and bleeding and I was just... done. He pulled and I went with him.

"I ought to slit your fucking throat for that you stupid cow," he roared as he pulled me across a lot. It was then I realized where he was taking me. Before me, a long, wide, windowless metal structure loomed at me, a perfect kind of irony. I wanted to know what was inside. I guess I would be figuring that out after all. "Maybe once the boss finds out what you got to say, I'll get the privilege of killing your ass. But not before making you wish you were dead first," he said, giving me a once over as we stopped outside the warehouse door.

I felt my stomach clench hard, knowing what he meant, knowing that he would take a sick amount of pleasure in beating and raping me before putting me out of my misery.

I swallowed hard, proud that my eyes were dry, knowing that while I was absolutely weaker than he was, that at least I wasn't looking that way.

"Is your chosen form of torture talking 'cause, let me tell you, I'd certainly take death over this."

D's fist banged on the metal door three times, the sound loud enough for me to shrink away from it. "You're going to regret this," he promised as the door pulled open, revealing the other guy from that night nine days ago. Trick. Paine had called him Trick and he was the one with more of a brain. I wondered if that worked for, or against, my favor.

"The fuck'd you do to her face?" he asked, looking down. "And her arms?"

"Bitch hit me with a fucking padlock. The fuck was I supposed to do, let her get away with it?"

Trick sighed heavily, like he'd hit his limit at having to put up with D's shenanigans. "I'll call the boss," Trick said, moving out of the way of the doorway so we could, presumably, enter. I was given very little choice because I was shoved forward with two hands to my back, making me trip over my own feet. I managed to stay upright somehow and Trick's hand reached out to steady me. "Ease up," he said over my shoulder toward D.

The smell hit me first. It wasn't something I could place, but it was chemical, unnatural. It made my nose burn to breathe it in. The air inside the warehouse was hot, stiflingly so. I felt sweat already start to bead up on my scalp as I heard the door slam behind me. My eyes quickly found the sources of the heat and humidity, locating long, low work tables in four rows down the center of the room. People stood almost shoulder-to-shoulder. Some were doing some sort of grinding, others stirring, but also some... cooking things. As in over fires. Small ones. With beakers over them. Like in science class.

No one even bothered to look our way despite the initial commotion. I guessed they were either too focused, too scared, or too used to such things to bother. Or maybe a combination of all three.

"Stick her over there," D said, waving a dismissive hand toward a small closed off space in the corner, like an office, except the walls didn't go all the way to the impossibly high ceiling.

"Come on," Trick said, his voice going low. "Better not to piss him off. The boss won't do the talking with fists and boots. You're better off laying low until the check in."

"Check in?" I found myself asking, immediately cursing myself for being nosy and cringing at the pain even the slightest bit of talking did to my, I imagined, hideously bruised jaw.

"Check in," he agreed, not dumb enough to elaborate as he opened the office door and ushered me inside. "You got about... two hours," he said, looking over the room quickly before moving back toward the door. "Sit tight." With that, he closed and locked the door.

For a long second, the panic swelled up to epic proportions. I felt like I was choking on it. It made my skin feel like it was crawling, like bugs were going to burst from the hair follicles covering my body. It made my mind race and my breath hitch.

There was some kind of slamming outside the door that made me jump and somehow managed to fight back the swirling thoughts so I could think clearly.

Panic wasn't going to help me.

I needed to think.

I needed to...

"Idiot," I hissed at myself, reaching into my back pocket and grabbing my cell. I was so nervous that my hands fumbled and screwed up my password twice before I took a deep breath and tried again. My screen unlocked and flashed bright and beautiful, like a lighthouse beacon to a lost ship. That was until I looked at my service bar and saw a big, ugly X over it.

My brows drew together, confused. I'd never seen an X over my service. I had service every-freaking-where. I was once in a field full of wind fans in the middle of bumbfuck Montana and had all my bars. It was never simply... gone. Not willing to accept the X, I clicked off of the now-blank Facebook page, and hit my number pad, typing in 9-1-1, hitting send, and bringing the phone up to my ear. I waited. I pulled the phone down when I heard no ringing, saw that it was doing the dot-dot-dot thing, trying to connect, brought it back up to my ear and waited some more. I hung up. I dialed again. I waited again.

But it was no use. There was nothing.

Maybe the Third Street guys had one of those signal-blocking things.

On a sigh, I slipped it back into my pocket and crept across the room, taking it in fully for the first time.

No windows, obviously, and just the one door. There was nothing on the bare Sheetrock walls. In the center of the room was a cheap Ikea-looking black desk and ergonomic desk chair. On the surface was a blank memo pad and two pens. I grabbed the pens and stuck them in my pockets, knowing it wasn't much, but it was something. As much as my stomach turned over at the idea of stabbing something like that into someone's eye, well, if it would save me from rape and death... I was willing to steel my stomach and do what needed to be done.

I took deep, slow breaths as I moved methodically over every inch of the small space, looking for any point of escape (there were none) or anything I could use to defend myself (aside from the pens, all I found was a heavy rock that I guessed someone used to prop the door open).

It wasn't much.

It certainly wasn't a metal, bone crushing padlock.

But it was something.

It was all that I had.

With nothing else to do, I sat down on the office chair, tried my best to ignore the pain that was overtaking my entire body, and tried to ready myself for anything.

Sixteen

Paine

I'd like to say I knew something was wrong, that I had a gut feeling, that I had some kind of fucking sixth sense that told me my girl wasn't okay. Sure, I'd love to claim that. But it wasn't true. I wasn't some superhero and I wasn't psychic.

So at eight when Elsie still hadn't showed up, I expected she had stayed a little longer at the gym, doing a guilt workout to work off the whole container of Chinese food she had devoured in one sitting. When eight-thirty rolled around and I was sitting in her kitchen next to the dinner spread of a giant salad, baked rosemary chicken, and side of green beans I had made, mindful of the fact that we both liked to keep our bodies in shape and to do that, you had to feed them right at least sixty-percent of the time, and she still hadn't showed up, I started to worry.

When another twenty minutes ticked and she still hadn't pulled up, I grabbed my keys and I headed over to Willow to check the gym. At first, I spotted her blue Porsche and felt my stomach muscles unclench, my hands relax their death grip on the steering wheel. She was just staying extra late at the gym. Hell, maybe she ran into a girlfriend and got to gabbing. But as I did a quick K-turn, ready to go and wait at her place so I didn't show up and look like some possessive prick, I spotted something that made me put the brake to the floor while pushing my car into park and running out of it. There were keys on the sidewalk.

This is where the gut feeling finally did kick in.

Sure, they could have been anyone's keys.

There were dozens of cars in the lot, any one of the owners could have carelessly dropped their keys on their way into the gym, shuffling to get their shit into their gym bags or whatever.

But that wasn't the feeling I was getting.

The feeling I was getting was that they were Elsie's and that something was wrong.

When I got to them, snatched them up, and saw the dozen or so keys she kept on a chain along with the Porsche key fob and the red Stanford "S" Roman had given her as a key chain, the stomach clenching came back, intensifying to the point of a sharp pain.

I turned and ran toward the gym, barely in the door before I started barking at the girl at the front desk. "I need your camera feed for the parking lot. Now," I growled when all she did was look at me with drawn-together brows. "Fucking now, babe. I don't have time to..."

"Paine, what the fuck?" Shane Mallick's voice called, walking up, shirt wet with sweat like he had overheard the yelling while doing a workout.

"I think Elsie was taken from your parking lot. I need your camera feed. Now."

"Taken?" he repeated, needing clarification.

"Third Street," I said through clenched teeth and his face fell as he turned toward the computers behind the desk, shouldering the girl gently out of the way and clicking through a few screens before finding the feed. I moved behind the desk uninvited and stood to his side, watching as he used a little ball to rewind the footage. People came and went. A couple made out against their car. A guy picked a wedgie. A girl wobbled on her heels, looking around frantically to make sure no one saw her.

Then there it was.

I wasn't sure it was her at first, just a blur of motion as a person disappeared inside a trunk, but as Shane slowed the feed and it kept moving backward, Elsie's limp body came back out of the trunk, came to life, then she wasn't being held in a successful rear naked choke, she was being pulled across the lot, flailing, gagged.

By. Fucking. D.

"Lost her," Shane said when they went out of camera range. "Hold up," he said, switching to a different camera and rewinding. Then there they were again. She hadn't been paying attention and she ran right into him.

Fuck.

"Shit," Shane cursed, standing, reaching for a phone.

"Cops?"

"They can put out a call to look for her. But they won't find her," I said, clenching my hands up. "Call Sawyer."

"Sawyer Anderson?"

"Yeah. He was working a case for her. Call him, tell him what happened. Get him on it," I said as I moved out from behind the desk and went toward the door.

"Where you going?" Shane called.

"Family fucking reunion," I growled, swinging open the door and running across the lot toward my still-open and still-running car. I threw myself inside and put it into drive, simultaneously peeling out of the lot and reaching into the glove for my gun.

Seemed like the only time I ever saw my brother anymore was when I had a gun on him.

Enzo generally occupied the old apartment I used to when I ran things. But he also had an apartment on the very outskirts of the slums, still technically on the streets he ran, but safer and more expensive. It was like a part of Enzo was constantly at conflict between his old life before and the one he chose to live in after, like he couldn't give up the money and power of running the streets, but also didn't really want to be associated with that 'low life' behavior his mother raised him to detest.

As I parked on the street, slipping the gun into my waistband and pulling down my shirt to cover it, I wondered if that was something he struggled with- what Annie would think of the man he'd become.

Knowing Enzo, it fucking haunted him.

I pushed those thoughts and the tug of connection away as I moved in the front doors of the red brick building that had a super that actually cared enough to keep things relatively up-kept though there was no automatic lock on the front door. I went inside and took the elevator up to the top floor and moved toward the far end of the hall near the exit staircase.

Enzo wasn't the door locking kind of guy so I reached for the knob while taking my gun back out.

The inside of his place was neat, orderly, almost obsessively so. Maybe like a part of him rebelled against the filthiness of his lifestyle and overcompensated with chronic housekeeping. All his furniture was sleek and modern, a style that made my lip curl. I liked a home to look like a home, like a place you could sink into and feel comfortable. I figured it was just another way to make his place look all the more orderly.

The living and kitchen space was empty and I moved down the hall toward the master bedroom. The bed was made, tucked down in full-on military fashion. Just when I was turning in the direction of the bathroom door, it opened.

Enzo froze, back illuminated by the harsh fluorescent light in the small tile room. But as he took a step out and his face wasn't in shadow, I felt my raised gun fall a few inches.

This was because Enzo, just as big and built and unbreakable-looking as me, had been worked over. Meaning his face was busted: lip swollen and broken open, one eye swollen almost shut, the other bruised with small steri-strips holding a large gash closed. And if the way he was leaning toward his side and bulkiness under his shirt was any indication, he'd bruised or busted a rib or two as well.

"The fuck?" I heard myself ask, not sure I'd ever seen anyone get the drop on him, let alone keep him down long enough to do that kind of damage. It looked like he'd been jumped. It looked like...

"Yeah," Enzo said, nodding slightly like he knew what I had been thinking.

"You got a beat-out?" I asked, brows drawing together. First, because as long as I had been affiliated with the gang, the only way out was death or disappearance. Second, because shot-callers simply didn't
get
beat-out. That wasn't how it worked.