The Stolen Girl (2 page)

But worst of all was what rested on top of the unmade and disheveled bed. Elizabeth’s laptop was there, a silver MacBook Pro that she’d been ecstatic to receive for her sixteenth birthday, still open and knocked askew. But next to it, on top of the tangled sheets, was her iPhone. As the light glinted off of it, Sterling felt his heart sink down into the pit of his stomach. Elizabeth never went anywhere without her phone; the little device was basically an extension of her hand at all times. And if it was here and she was not, he had to assume the worst.

The thought that his daughter might have left of her own volition never crossed Sterling’s mind. His daughter had been born with a rare level of maturity; she had always been the calm, considerate one, asking quiet and serious questions instead of screaming and bawling. Sterling and his wife had been worried that she would slip into a rebellious phase, would go find some hippy washout from society and would end up plastered in photos across the internet. But Beth had always been mature, responsible, the perfect daughter. And that made her absence hit the man all the more strongly.

Filled with a burst of scared adrenaline, the senator ran down the stairs, taking them two at a time and not even thinking of the possibility of injuring himself. “Barry!” he roared at the top of his lungs. He flung open the front door and yelled again. “Barry, I need for you to come here right now!”

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I
blinked a couple times, struggling to open my eyes. My entire head felt woozy, and I could feel a killer headache beginning to form behind my temples. Something at the back of my head really hurt, and my arms were curiously sore. Where was I?

I finally opened my eyes, and gazed around in confusion. I was sitting on a carpeted floor, my back up against something hard. My hands seemed to be stuck on something behind me, painfully pulling my shoulders back. I tried to move my legs, but they also seemed similarly stuck, my knees folded beneath me and my feet back behind me. Something was pinning me in place!

Deep in my chest, I could feel a rising wave of panic. Using every ounce of my mental focus, I forced it down, forced myself to remain calm. Instead, I tried to look around at the furniture, to figure out where I was, and maybe what could have happened.

It didn’t take long to at least work out a general idea of where I was - I was in a hotel room. A lower-end one, if I had to be more specific. Thanks to being dragged around the state with my father as he made campaign stump speeches every few years, I had spent a fair amount of my childhood running around the halls of hotels. Of course, those were usually much nicer than this one; clearly, whoever had plopped me down in this place didn’t have a senator’s salary.

Despite the lower quality, however, the large beds with floral covers that easily hid stains, the dark carpet that did the same, and the vague watercolors on the walls, specifically chosen to not offend, clearly belonged to a hotel chain. There didn’t appear to be anyone else in the room, and the curtains were drawn on the window. I could see slivers of sunlight slipping through the bottom of the thick light-proof curtains, but there didn’t appear to be a clock in the room - not one within my field of view, at least.

I tried to think back, to remember how I might have ended up here. As far as I could recall, the last place I had been was up in my bedroom, waiting for my dad to get home. Now that my mom had passed away, he had started spending longer and longer hours at the office. The media had seen this as a sign of a man focused on his career, on doing good for the nation and for his constituents, a natural party leader, but I knew the truth. Dad simply didn’t want to come home, didn’t want to have to face the empty house that was still somehow filled to the rafters with memories of the family he had lost.

I had been sitting on the bed in my room, browsing Facebook on my computer, when I had heard a scraping noise from outside my window, I remembered. I had pulled out my headphone, pried myself away from the screen of my laptop and turned-

-just in time to see a black-gloved fist come arcing through the window, shattering the glass with a loud crash. I had screamed, but it was useless; no one else was home.

All along the second floor of our house, a section of the roof was relatively flat; that must have been how the intruder had gained access to my bedroom window. My eyes flitted around the room, frantically searching for some tool, some weapon that I could swing. I briefly considered closing my MacBook and using that. It was cased in metal, after all. But then, my eyes fell on the aluminum softball bat resting in my closet, and I changed my mind. As the man outside my window cursed and fumbled with the latch, I rolled off my bed and lunged for the long metal pole.

My hands closed around the rubber-tape grip. I spun around, bringing the tool up to my shoulder, and found myself confronting a massive bear of a man. He was dressed in black leather and denim, ragged jeans stained with dark, dried liquids and a biker’s jacket. I could see drops of blood dripping from his hand where he had cut it on the glass, but he wore a grin on his face. I guessed that he was in his late thirties. Muscles bulged inside the sleeves of his jacket, and I could see the tip of a tattoo on one wrist, on the exposed skin between the sleeve of his jacket and the cuff of his glove. A bandana was wrapped around the top of his head, pulling back a shock of short-cut blonde hair.

“Hello, kitty,” the man spoke, his deep voice filled with barely restrained fury. “Why don’t you come here?”

I didn’t respond, but as the man stepped forward, advancing across the room towards me, I raised the wavering bat. “Don’t make me use this,” I threatened, hoping my words sounded more intimidating than they felt.

The sight of the bat made the man pause for a moment, but then he strode forward again, filled with renewed energy. With a scream, I swung out with the bat as he came closer. But reaching up with one hand, the big man caught the bat in mid-swing, his fingers tightening as he yanked it out of my grasp.

I screamed again, but the man’s big hands closed around me, and one glove came up to clamp my mouth shut. “Quiet, you little whore,” he snarled down into my eye. “Now, if you don’t want me to break your damn neck, you’re gonna come quietly!”

Tears were already starting to well up in my eyes, but I stopped screaming, biting back those shrieks of helplessness. I nodded, instead, and the man released his grip on my mouth. His other hand held onto my arm, however, gloved fingers still managing to dig in painfully to my bare skin.

The man forced me towards the door of my bedroom, roughly shoving me down the stairs in front of him. “Outside,” he commanded, pointing at the door.

I stepped forward, unlocking the deadbolt on the door and pulling it open. The idea flashed in my head of running; our house was surrounded by woods, woods in which I had run and hid and played ever since I was a little child. I could probably get away from this man in the forest, could hide long enough for him to leave, and could double back and get my phone and call for help.

But as I opened the door, the man standing behind me, I never got the chance to put my plan into action. For a brief second, a splitting pain had come from the back of my head, and the world had vanished into whiteness. And when I had next opened my eyes, I was here, in this hotel room.

My recollection was interrupted by the scraping sound of a key in a lock, and I saw the bolt being drawn back on the front door of the hotel room. I quickly shuffled back down onto the floor, tilting my head forward so that my strawberry blonde hair fell in front of my eyes and shrouded my face. Through this shield, I peeked out through hooded lids, trying to catch some details about my kidnappers.

Two men entered the room, both wearing heavy black leather boots. Through my long bangs, I looked upward at the pair. Both men were at least six feet tall; both were also dressed in jeans. One of the men wore black leather over his chest - I guessed that it was the one who had broken into my house, who had kidnapped me. The other man looked to just be wearing a loose white tee shirt. I couldn’t make out any other details through my hair, however, and instead focused on trying to hold still.

“Fuck off, Roads!” The words came from the man in the black leather, and I immediately recognized the voice from my abduction. “I’m the president of this club, and my word is final! You’ve been causing trouble for a while now, talking behind my back. Either you’re with us, or you’re against us! What’s it gonna be?”

“I’m not against you!” This was the other man, the one in the white shirt. Roads, my abductor had called him. “I just think that maybe we should reconsider this plan, Slammer. We’ve pulled some shit, and I’m cool with that, but kidnapping? And the daughter of a political figure, on top of that? This could land all of us in a lot of hot water. We’re in over our heads here.”

This second man also spoke in a deep baritone, but his voice sounded more caring, less filled with rage and hatred. His conciliatory tone didn’t seem to have its desired effect on Slammer, my abductor in the black jacket, however. “Who’s president of the Outlaws, huh?” he pressed, and I saw him slam a finger into the middle of the white shirt.

“You are.” The words sounded forced, but they came nonetheless.

“That’s right.” Slammer sounded satisfied. “And you better get that through your fuckin’ skull, Roads. Now, let’s see if our little kitty here is awake.”

The man in black, Slammer, squatted down next to me. I felt his hand slide through my hair on the back of my neck, and he hauled my head back. My eyes snapped open from the sudden pain, and I found myself staring directly into a face that gazed back with the flattest, scariest expression I had ever seen in my life. There was no caring, no mercy in this gaze. I felt as though, in Slammer’s eyes, I was no more than a tool.

“Looks like someone’s been listening in,” Slammer said, spreading his lips in a grin without a single trace of humor. “Like what you’re hearing, kitty?”

I summoned up my courage and pulled air into my lungs to reply. “Let me go,” I said, keeping my voice soft and open. “Please, just let me go, and I won’t even tell anyone what happened.”

Slammer’s grin widened. “You’re not getting away from me, kitty,” he hissed. “Oh, no. You’re our meal ticket to the big time. Little golden goose, you are.” I saw the man’s eyes drop from my face, running over my exposed body. I was still dressed in the pajamas I had been wearing when he had kidnapped me - a pair of fleece draw-string pants, and a spaghetti strap tank top with only a thin built-in underwire bra. The low neckline didn’t do much to cover up my chest, and I could feel Slammer’s eyes leering down at me.

I could see the gears inside the man’s head turning as he stared down at me. His gaze looked hungry, like a wolf sizing up its next meal. But as his hand slid down over my neck, his hot fingers tracing lines across my exposed shoulder and upper chest, the other man in the room stepped forward.

“Slammer, we need to move,” the other man, Roads, spoke up. “We can’t stay here too long. I’m sure people noticed us coming in, and we’ll need to stay ahead of the cops.”

The words were spoken in a lower, subservient tone, but for an instant I still saw a fiery rage burning in the pupils of Slammer’s eyes. The flames were doused in an instant, however, and he straightened up, letting go of me. “Right,” he agreed, a touch of disappointment in his voice. “Grab her. I’ll get the men ready to go.”

His heavy boots leaving imprints in the well-trafficked carpet, Slammer strode out of the room. The door slammed behind him, leaving me alone with Roads, the other biker.

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I
glared up at this new man, daring him to make some sort of move while I was vulnerable. Slammer scared me; he seemed to have no soul, nothing holding him back from embracing his deepest, darkest urges. But this other man seemed more hesitant, more aware of what he was doing. He moved forward and squatted down in front of me, just like Slammer had done - but instead of leering at me, his big brown eyes looked full of worry.