The pansy-ass shrank away from him, shaking his head and looking completely lost. “W-what?” There was no way he was acting; the dude seriously had no idea what was going on.
“Fuck,” I uttered, my stomach pitching with utter fear. “He doesn’t know where she is either.”
I’d kind of been counting on him having her, so we could beat her whereabouts out of him. But her ex didn’t know where she was either. And if he didn’t have her, then who did?
I glanced around me blindly, suddenly very helpless and vulnerable.
Two days later, I’d probably gotten a total of four hours of sleep altogether. And Julianna was still gone. That was the point when I finally broke down and cried.
JULIANNA’S CHAPTER | 33
Sitting on the damp floor with my back to a crumbling wall, I tugged off one of my gloves with my teeth, then picked open a scab on the tip of my finger. I’d spent all day yesterday trying to claw my way out of this concrete tomb that seemed to be some kind of small underground storm shelter. The only thing I’d managed to accomplish, though, was to give myself two hands full of broken fingernails, ground down to tattered bloody stubs.
When fresh blood welled through the dirty flesh, I stuck my thumb into my mouth, sucking greedily so I could at least wet my tongue.
There’d been a small puddle in the corner just under the air vent in the ceiling where water had probably leaked in when it had rained. But I’d already drank that dry, knowing it’d probably make me sick but needing it anyway.
I almost wished for an insect to crawl by so I could eat it. I was literally starving to death down here. I’d screamed myself hoarse on day one, but even if I hadn’t, my throat had dried up too much to make much sound by now, anyway.
So I sat here in my ten-by-ten-foot prison, drinking blood from my own fingertips to hydrate myself and trying not to freeze to death in the process. I guess the only consolation was that I’d been taken while wearing my winter coat, where by some quirk of fate I’d had some gloves and a knit cap stuffed in my pockets. But no matter how much I bundled up, the cold crept in and settled straight against my bones.
Weak, tired, cold, starving, stiff and sore, I bent my knees up to my chest and hugged as much body heat back into myself as I could.
I didn’t know who’d taken me. One moment, I’d been trudging to my car through the crisp morning air, eager to get to campus so I could see Colton again; the next, a splitting pain seared through the back of my head as someone hit me with something. And after that, nothing. I’d woken up here, freaking the fuck out.
What’s worse, no one had come to visit once. I had no idea who had taken me, or why.
There was a door on the slanting roof above me and even a latch to open it, but someone had removed the steps that should’ve led up to that door, and no matter how much I jumped or tried to climb, crawl, or claw my way up to it, I couldn’t reach it. I’d cried so many frustrated, mad, frightened tears in the past few days, I probably could’ve drunk my dehydration away with them.
Closing my eyes as the metallic flavor trickled across my tongue, I rested my cheek on the wall and went to my happy place. It was with Colton, always Colton, with him either grinning at me from the other side of the bar at Forbidden as he commenced to flirt his way into my pants, or smiling with sated satisfaction in my bed with his bare chest still gleaming with sweat, or watching me with that knowing twinkle in his eyes from across the classroom in philosophy. It didn’t matter where we were, he was always there, watching me, wanting me, loving me.
I choked out a sob and wondered if I’d ever see him again. But those thoughts led to the worst panic. The thought of never getting out of here alive, never seeing Colton or my dad or best friends again, it all made my chest heave and body shake. So I shut those thoughts down and returned to just images of Colton’s face and the way he never failed to look at me with an impatient hunger.
I love you, I whispered inside my head, wondering if maybe he might hear it in his head if I thought it loud and hard enough. I love you, and I’m right here. Please find me.
A tear trickled down my cheek, making me grit my teeth. Dammit, no more tears. I couldn’t waste anymore moisture coming out of me. I needed to survive, prove my hearty ancestors proud, and make it through this.
I would overcome.
I just didn’t know how. And I felt so lost and alone and hopeless, another tear tracked down my cheek.
“Someone,” I croaked the word aloud, though my rasping voice barely lifted above a whisper. “Help me.”
As if answering a prayer, footsteps approached outside, making a crunching sound, like maybe boots plodding over gravel. Then metal scraped against metal. It was dark in my pit, but the air vent allowed just enough daylight in that I could see the inside of the door latch turning until it began to swing open. But the amount of brightness that flooded the cellar caused me to shrink back in my corner and hold up my hand to shade my eyes instead of scampering forward for help.
It was probably just as well I didn’t surge forward, anyway, because I soon discovered my captor—not a savior—had arrived.
“Hey,” a male voice said. “You still alive down there?”
I didn’t answer, wondering what would happen if he thought I was dead. Would he come down personally to check on me? Maybe I could overpower him and get out. He’d hit me from behind to capture me, he hadn’t tried to physically manhandle me; it was possible he wasn’t that big of a guy. Or would he shut the door, never to return, so that I really did die down here?
I was too afraid to move, yet too afraid not too. My breaths started to heave, so I slammed my hand to my mouth and bit my knuckles, hoping to keep quiet. A second later, the beam of a flashlight invaded my dark corner and hit me right in the eyes, causing me to clench them shut and cower my face into my knees.
“There she is,” he cooed approvingly. “Time to wake up now, Chocolate Tits. We got some justice to serve.”
Chocolate Tits?
I lifted my face, squinting until the flashlight moved away from my face, and I could make out the man’s silhouette. He crouched down onto his haunches, and the shadows shifted just enough to reveal the side of his face, along with a teardrop tattoo dripping down from the corner of his eye.
I gasped, my mouth falling open.
But what the hell? I thought he was in jail. The officers had said he was being arrested after he’d gotten into that fight with Colton. How had he gotten out? How had he found me? And why in God’s name had he kidnapped me?
“Remember me, do you?” he asked, resting his forearms on his knees so that his wrists dangled between them, one of his hands holding what looked like a knife.
My gaze shifted back and forth between his face where a cynical sneer contorted his features and that knife swaying lazily from his fingers.
He smirked when I didn’t answer him. “Yeah, you remember me.” Tilting his head to the side as he continued to watch me, he added, “Bet you’re wondering why I took you, huh? Probably think it’s payback for the way you and your boyfriend got me arrested. But no. That’s not it. That’s not it at all.” Then he chuckled. “Okay, maybe it is a little.”
He stood up again and spread his arms wide. “You probably can’t see it from down there, but all this land around me here is my family homestead. We owned the biggest damn orchard in the entire state. My parents, and brother, and I. It was…” His voice went breathless with awe as he gazed around him. “It was amazing.”
But as soon as the word hit his tongue, his shoulders fell.
“Until one of your fucking black brothers raped and murdered my mother when she went to Chicago for a business trip.” His entire body shook and his lips peeled back away from his teeth as he gritted them. “My father ended up killing himself because of the grief. All the workers ran off, then my brother left. Now it’s just me. Me and my nightmares. I can’t sleep for the fucking nightmares,” he screamed, pointing his knife at me as if it were all my fault.
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Chest heaving and eyes filled with an unnatural glow, he glared at me, saying, “I’ve tried drugs and alcohol and sex and violence. None of it fucking works. I still have the nightmares.”
Another tear trickled down my cheek. Maybe he should try dream catchers or rabbit’s feet. Not that I was going to suggest that, but it had to beat kidnapping.
“So you know what I finally figured out I was doing wrong?” he asked me. I didn’t answer and didn’t really think I had to. The guy seemed to be monologuing just fine without me. “I haven’t gotten my revenge yet. My justice. That’s what I’ve been doing wrong.” His arms went up as if in victory for coming up with his idea. “If I just rape and murder one of his women, all will be right in the world again. Justice will be served. And wasn’t it just handy you were the bitch who got me arrested on the very night I came up with the idea? And that I got a brief glimpse of your name and address on one of the witness reports in the file they had open when I signed my bond paperwork to get out of jail. It was as if destiny was telling me what to do, demanding what I do.”
I whimpered and my bottom lip trembled.
There was so much I wanted to say to him: Two wrongs didn’t make a right. I hadn’t been the one to kill his mother, so revenge really wouldn’t be served if he hurt me. There would be no justice in this.
Besides, making this about race was just plain stupid. Adolf Hitler had been white. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jr., the Green River Killer. All white and all brutal murderers. But I didn’t think white people were evil. Well, aside from this creep, and even then, I was smart enough to see he might’ve started off as a normal, average guy without any kind of hatred in him; his grief had fucked him over majorly.
I bet the man who’d murdered his mother had been mistreated by white people before he’d gone evil too. It was a vicious ugly cycle that needed to stop. I wanted to tell this guy he needed to let the pain and hatred go or he was going to end up somewhere he couldn’t return from, except…I think he’d just arrived there.
I almost felt bad for him. He could no longer understand logical reason or right from wrong. The man he might’ve once been was long gone. His demons had consumed him completely. But then, yeah, the fucker had just kidnapped me and said he was going to rape and kill me, so…my sympathy never quite made it to the surface.
Full of anger and fear, I didn’t waste my breath. I just tried to keep myself from having a panic attack and stared mutinously at him as he closed his knife and tucked it into his pocket before grabbing something and dropping it down into the cellar with me.
It clanged loudly, echoing around my concrete prison, making me wince and cover my ears before I realized he’d just gifted me a metal ladder.
I blinked at it, my chest growing tight with anticipation and my head spinning with the hope of freedom. When my muscles tightened, not sure if I could trust this olive branch or not, he said, “So here’s how this is going to go. You can either climb up out here and die in the sunlight, or I can crawl down there and kill you in the dark. Make your choice.”
My vision grayed and pulse quickened. Fear raced through my bloodstream. My hands and knees and probably even my hair trembled out of control.
I wanted to choose C, none of the above. But Psycho Kidnapper was already tugging his knife from his pocket again and looked like he was going to start climbing down, so I clambered for the ladder, my bloody hands gripping the rungs and knees knocking together so hard I could barely move.
I was so weak; it was a miracle I could pull myself up one step after another. My body was stiff from hovering in the fetal position for days, my blood sugar felt incredibly low and my eyes couldn’t seem to adjust to the brightness outside, though the more I climbed the more I realized it was later in the day than I had initially thought. It was probably about time I should be heading into work. I tried to remember if I’d been scheduled today or not, but my brain wouldn’t function right.
Why the hell was I even worrying about missing work while I was climbing out of a concrete pit to meet my death?
I think I was going into shock.
I looked up, my hopes sinking. My kidnapper wasn’t small, dammit. He probably stood over six feet and weighed over two hundred pounds. There was no way I was in any kind of position to enter hand-to-hand combat right now, especially with someone this big. I’d taken a total of one self-defense class in my entire life and at the moment, I couldn’t remember a single technique I’d learned. The chances of me coming out the victor were pretty much zero-point-five.
But as I gingerly pulled myself up from the hole in the ground, Colton’s voice echoed through my head.
You’re not the type to go down after one punch. You always pop right back up, swinging and snarling.
You’re a fighter
And I was.
I was a fighter, so I was going to fight.
BRANDT’S CHAPTER | 34
I wiped down the counter of the bar and glanced at the time. Twenty minutes until opening. I’m not sure why I was so obsessed with checking the time these past few days, but I did it constantly.
Obsessively.
It’d just passed the fifty-seven-hour mark since Julianna had gone missing. Twelve minutes since I’d called in to check on my brother. And about twenty-five seconds since I’d fought the urge to ditch work and drive the streets again, searching for my lost coworker.
Colton was a fucking mess. I’d never seen him this out of sorts before. He’d wept this morning, losing his shit all over Aspen, and none of us had known what to do to help him.
I didn’t like this powerless feeling. I had no idea what to do to ease my brother. None of us did.
They said he wasn’t eating or sleeping. When he wasn’t out looking for Juli, or hanging around her apartment in the hopes she’d show up, he was agitated and short-tempered. Not that I could blame him. If Sarah had disappeared into thin air, I’d freak the fuck out too. It was just so strange to see Colton like this and realize he really had gotten that close to Juli.
It had been so weird for me to think of them together. But in the last fifty-seven hours, my coworker had swiftly moved from one of my what-ifs and strictly to Colton’s one-and-only, which was bizarre in its own right. But whatever.
I was scared as hell for him. He was running himself into the ground and was going to be no good to anyone soon. I wanted to smack some sense into him and hug him all at the same time.
Pick exited from the back hall, talking on a cell phone. “Thanks for the info,” he was saying, “I owe you one.” When he hung up, he set his arms on the countertop and sighed heavily.
“Anything?” I asked hopefully.
He was doing everything he could to find Julianna too, pulling strings and digging up information behind the scenes, even hiring a private investigator. One of his bartenders had been abducted; he took that personally.
“My guy has a lead on the guy Colton got into a fistfight with.”
I frowned and shook my head, confused. “The racist drunk?”
Pick nodded and pinched a spot on the bridge of his nose. “His name’s Fulton Seymour. He’s been arrested a few times in the last couple years for some minor hate crimes, mostly drunken arguments, vandalism, petty theft. But it started about four years ago after his mom was murdered…” He looked at me meaningfully before adding, “By a black guy.”
I sighed heavily, not liking where this was headed.
“He bonded out of jail about an hour before Julianna disappeared.”
“Fuck,” I murmured, shaking my head. “Has anyone questioned him yet?”
“No one’s been able to locate him. He’s no longer living at his last known address. None of his friends know where he’s been staying and the orchard his family owned, about twenty miles outside town, was foreclosed about two years ago and is currently property of the bank.”
I ran my hands through my hair, relieved there was finally some kind of lead, and yet more frustrated and scared by what we’d l
earned. “Does Colton know any of this?”
Pick shook his head. “I don’t know what the point of telling him would be. If we can’t even find this Seymour guy, how could it help anything? I think it could only upset Colton more. Besides, who knows if he’s the one who took her or not.”
I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure if I agreed. If there’d been any kind of news about Sarah’s disappearance, I’d want to know every detail. It all just made me feel shittier.
Colton snapped at me more than he did anyone else, and he couldn’t look my way without glaring. He was pissed about the way I’d initially reacted to his relationship with Juli, and at the moment, I couldn’t blame him. But it all made me antsy and distressed. I wanted to do something for him—like find his Julianna—so he’d finally forgive me.
“I keep expecting her to walk through the doors for her shift,” Pick murmured, watching the waitresses set up tables for opening.
I nodded sadly. She’d been scheduled to work tonight, but I was filling in for her. For some reason, I thought it’d earn me a couple brownie points with Colton, but I don’t think he’d even noticed. I opened my mouth to ask what the chances were that she was still alive when the nightclub’s landline phone rang. We weren’t open yet and normally I’d let it ring through to voice mail, but I’d been answering every call coming in from every phone around me these last few days.
“Forbidden Nightclub. This is Brandt.”
At first, there was nothing, just some static, and then I thought I heard a faint sound.
“Hello?” I asked, my heart rate jerking with hope. Pick straightened, alerted to my reaction. His gaze pinned me with question. “Hello?” I said again.
The scratchy noise came again, but this time I swear it said my name.
It didn’t sound like her at all, but I still had to ask. “Julianna?”
Pick leaped over the counter to stand anxiously next to me.