“Kash, Kash, Kash, calm down. Come on, man. Calm down. I know.”
Mason gripped my shoulders and I tried to focus on him. The other two officers were now struggling to keep me down as I thrashed against them. Where I was going to go when I got away from them, I didn’t know, I just needed to go. They had my girl. I needed to find out who they were, and I needed to get her back.
“I know this is hard. But we’ll find her. I swear.” Mason looked just as panicked as I felt, and it was then I noticed the wetness in his eyes he was trying to keep back.
When I finally stopped struggling, the officers let me go at Mason’s request, but he kept me seated on the bed. “I need to get her back, Mason. I have to.”
“We will.”
“I’ll do anything.”
A determined look settled over his face and he whispered low enough that only I could hear him. “Anything to bring the fuckers down, right?”
I slammed my fist against his and swore, “Always.”
I WALKED INTO MASON’S APARTMENT that evening with a bag slung over one shoulder and Trip in my arms. Our bedroom was still being considered a crime scene, and I was asked to stay out of it for the night as they processed more and continued to take fingerprints. Not that I thought I would be able to stay there even after they were done anyway, without Rachel . . . I didn’t know how I would handle being there.
After dropping the bag in the room I’d occupied for years when Mason and I’d shared an apartment, I fell heavily onto the bed and kept Trip secured tightly to my chest as I stared at nothing.
A fear unlike anything I’d ever known had coursed through my body the moment I’d realized Rachel was at a murderer’s home last fall, and that I’d let her walk away with him. When the call between us had been dropped after I’d heard her scream, I hadn’t even let myself believe I wouldn’t find her and bring her back alive.
But the fear I’d experienced that early morning could never be compared to the fear that had been crippling me all day. At least when she was with Blake, I’d had an underlying knowledge of what Blake was capable of. Now, though, I didn’t know who had her, what they were doing to her, and what they could do. I just knew what they’d threatened to do.
For close to ten hours, a handful of detectives had questioned every member of Juarez’s gang, the two men hired to kill Mason and me last year, and family members as well. No one was talking, and the only living extended family of Juarez and his boys that we could track down had either turned their backs on the members of the gang, or were afraid of them. I hadn’t been allowed in for any of the interviews, since I was too close to the case—again—so I’d spent hours seeing if anyone on the street had heard anything, and looking for Rachel’s cell phone, which we’d later found ten miles away from the house in a trash can at a gas station. A gas station whose indoor and outdoor cameras just happened to be down.
There’d been nothing to go off of from the anonymous call placed regarding their demands and threats for Rachel’s safety, and although they said they’d call back every two days, I’d hoped like hell they would’ve called back again. But there was nothing. We had leads that weren’t talking, and didn’t have a reason to talk, and nothing else.
And my girl was gone.
Pain seared my chest and I prayed to God that he would keep her safe. He could do whatever he wanted with me . . . as long as she came back alive.
There was a shuffling near the other side of the room, and I looked over to see Mason standing in the doorway.
“How are you holding up?”
I sucked hard on my lip ring when my chin started shaking, and looked back to the wall. How the hell does he think I’m holding up? Rachel’s gone and probably being tortured, and I can’t do anything!
“We’ll find her, Kash.”
Unable to speak yet without breaking down, I nodded my head hard, once. We have to find her, and we have to do it tomorrow. I didn’t care if they’d given her a month to live or not. They also said there would be consequences if there wasn’t progress in two days, and I wasn’t willing to let her find out what those consequences were. Seeing how the possibility of giving the takers what they wanted was slim, finding her was the only other option.
“I love her too, I’ll do anything to get her back.”
“Do you mean that?” I choked out when he turned to leave.
He turned back and gave me an odd look. “Of course I do.”
“They aren’t going to release Juarez.”
“I know,” he said with a sigh.
“Chief told me tonight before I left that I was off this case.”
“Know that too. What are you getting at, Kash?”
I swallowed past the tightness in my throat and shook my head quickly. “We had to do a lot of things in the years that we were in undercover narcotics that I wish I could erase from my memory. But you and I agreed before we ever started, we would do anything to take the fuckers down.”
“Kash . . .”
“And I’ll do anything—anything, Mase—to bring these fuckers down too.”
He stared at me for a few tense moments before responding. “I know what we agreed on, and we’ll do what we always do. But don’t do something stupid. There are a lot of people looking for her. We’ll find her.”
Fear was quickly turning to rage and determination. “Yeah, we will.”
6
Rachel
WHEN I WOKE AGAIN, there was no dizziness, no need to empty the contents—or lack thereof—of my stomach, no headache, and no sense of how much time had passed. But there was fear, and very vivid memories of being taken.
Kash. My chest ached and tears burned my eyes. He has to know by now that I’m gone. What is he thinking? What is he doing to find me? And I had no doubt that he was trying to find me. I just didn’t know if he would.
Finally opening my eyes to the dark room when a sob tore free from my throat, I covered my face with my hands and curled into a ball on my side before I heard a shuffling noise, and my entire body stilled.
There was someone else in the room with me.
Was it him? The man who had dragged me out of the closet and kept me from escaping the last time I’d woken on this mattress?
I brought my hands down from my face and waited the few torturous seconds while my eyes adjusted to the dark. Even having had my eyes closed for so long, it was still nearly impossible to see anything past my mattress, it was that pitch-black in the room. A large shape came into focus before I was able to make out legs stretched out along the floor and crossed at the ankles, large arms crossed over an equally large chest, and the whites of a set of eyes fixed directly on me.
“Are you awake now?” his low voice rumbled through the room, and for some reason I shrank away from it. “Do you feel up to eating?” When I continued to stay silent, he rose from the floor with a grunt and I watched his shadowed body stretch before turning toward the wall he’d been up against. “Don’t go back to sleep. I’ll be right back.”
A bright light filled the room for the short time it took him to slip out the door, and I immediately bolted off the mattress and headed in the direction of the door. The room went pitch-black again and I felt along the wall for a handle. Beeps sounded—like electronic buttons were being pressed—before a series of short, staccato beeps, and then the sound of his heavy footfalls as he walked away from the door.