It had been excruciating to drive around from one false hope to the next with the man, to wait with bated breath for the next useless lead his contacts provided. It wasn’t the man that made it agonizing really. He was a cold fuck, but he did little to grate on my nerves.
It was the waiting. Waiting for him to make contact. Waiting for him to acquire leads, and for him to negotiate exchanges of information. And the uneasy feeling that had me constantly resisting the urge to reach for my gun.
Abandoning any hope of maintaining an element of surprise, I’d begun reaching out to my own contacts by the end of the third day.
At first, it had seemed important to leave Marcos’ network thinking I was dead, that whoever had taken her had killed me in the process to keep them from bothering to bury her deep. But the strategy hadn’t done a damn bit of good, so while Donovan had been meeting with yet another useless contact, I’d put in some calls of my own.
My phone had vibrated against my chest not five full minutes ago and while my fingers itched to pull it out, I waited. Call it a distrustful nature, but there was no reason Donovan needed to know what I was up to unless it proved fruitful.
Donovan nodded and slid out of the passenger seat. I waited while he ascended the front steps, and the moment he disappeared into the house, I pulled out my phone.
“No news on a missing product,” the short text read. The same as a half dozen others had read in the days before. Fuck!
I was just slipping the phone back into my pocket when it vibrated against my fingers, signaling another message. The number was an unknown, but the message got my attention.
“I’ve been watching your missing product since it arrived, and it’s about to be cleared for transport,” it read.
“Where?” I texted back while my heart pounded.
“Right here.”
Right here? Where the fuck was right here?
“Watch out behind you,” the next text appeared on the phone’s screen.
I dropped the phone in my lap and glanced in the rearview mirror. A guard had appeared there, ten yards back, just standing there.
But how…
Oh, fuck! Right here meant here. This house. She was here. Unless the mystery message-sender was fucking with me, Scar was alive. And she was within my reach.
But how the hell was I going to get to her and get her out? A guard behind me. Two more at the post we’d passed on our way in. I could see another at the far, left corner of the house, and no doubt there was at least a handful more I couldn’t see.
There was something else though. The estate’s owner only purchased slaves, but he didn’t train them…and yet Scar was about to be transported. Something didn’t add up. Had Donovan’s contact perhaps led them right into a trap? Or was the mystery man texting me full of shit?
“Proof?” I typed with my phone on my thigh.
“None,” he texted back.
Just fucking great.
The guard in the rear view mirror started back the way he’d come, disappearing around a bend in the driveway.
“Right side of the house. Go now.”
Fuck. I was probably about to walk right into a trap, but I was sliding out of the car anyways. What choice did I have? She could be here. No fucking way could I walk away from that. So, I walked casually toward the right side of the house, not spotting a single guard on the way.
The phone vibrated with another text just as I’d rounded the corner. “Second door.”
I walked to it and just as I grabbed the handle, the door made a quiet click and it opened when I pulled.
Inside, the phone vibrated again. “Don’t move,” the text read.
Yup, I’d just walked right into a trap. And it seemed my suspicion was confirmed when I heard the murmur of voices coming closer.
Closer. And then quieter.
They passed right by the door that separated the four-foot foyer where I stood from the rest of the house. There were two other doors, one to my left and the other to my right. A quiet click of the door on my right told me which door the mystery man wanted me to take.
I opened it. The door led to a staircase. Fifteen stairs down to a gloomy stone landing below. There was a door there as well. It looked just like the one I’d opened. If I climbed down the steps and the door at the top locked behind me, I’d be trapped like a sitting duck if the one at the bottom didn’t unlock for me. Or, I could open the door down there to find a sea of guns pointed at me.
Or…I could open the door and find Scar on the other side.