And she would protect Georgia. Silly, bratty Georgia.
Gretchen scrambled back up the ladder and the world went dark again.
“Sweetie, are you okay?” She groped in the darkness, looking for Georgia.
Georgia hissed. “Hurts like hell. I don’t like being shot, Nat.”
“Is the bullet still in your arm?” The last thing she needed was a Georgia who might be easier to kill than to move. She couldn’t stomach the thought of Chase and Ben’s sister being murdered because Tate thought it was easier than taking her along.
“I don’t think so.” Georgia’s breath hitched. “I think I’m bleeding from both sides. It didn’t hit the bone. I’m glad I’m a little chunky, I guess. God, it hurts, but I can still move it. When they come for us, I’ll get my ass up. I won’t give them a reason to shoot me again. I can be charming from time to time.”
Thank god. “I’m so sorry I got you into this.”
There was a long silence. “I didn’t want to give up the phone because it belonged to him. I’m so stupid, Nat.”
Nat found her hair. She couldn’t see the blonde, but she felt the silk of her tresses, and pulled her close. They were sisters now. “You’re not stupid. You just fell for a boy.”
She heard Georgia sniffle. “He doesn’t like me. I don’t think he’ll come for me, but my brothers will. I annoy the hell out of them, but they’ll come for me because you’re here and they love you.”
She held Georgia close. “Logan will come. I promise. And your brothers would come even if I wasn’t here. You’re their sister. They wouldn’t leave you behind. And I won’t either. We’re going to survive.”
The room went quiet. Nat began a silent prayer. To survive.
The light flooded in again and Nat blinked up. Booted feet made their way down the rungs of the ladder, but she could see the ropes that hung beside it. Tate had always been good with a rope. It was how he’d gotten her sleeping form down the rabbit hole.
“Hello, Natalie. We meet at last.”
Nat held Georgia’s good hand and faced her nightmare.
* * * *
Chase helped the young woman out of the cage she’d been held in. Her hands were shaking, but no more than the sheriff’s voice quaked.
“You were right. About the girls. Damn, that’s Michelle Nelson.” The sheriff took a long breath, taking off his hat as the paramedics swooped in on the young, thin girl.
Jack Barnes looked down at her as she was placed on the gurney. “Hey. Your uncle has been looking everywhere for you. You’re going to be all right now, Michelle.”
“Did you find Hannah?” The other girl was all Michelle had been able to talk about. Being placed in slavery together formed strong bonds it seemed. Like the ones between Natalie and Kitten. Like the one Gretchen had utterly broken.
“She’s already on her way to the hospital. You’re going, too. Do you think you can talk to the sheriff then?” Barnes seemed to be using his gentlest voice, but he obviously wanted her to talk.
So did Chase, because despite the fact that they had found the two missing girls, they still had no Natalie. Just a third fucking cage. Empty. Waiting. The motherfucker had engraved her name on the cage like it was a gift. Natalie.
He wanted to feel that man’s throat when he crushed it.
“I can talk. I can describe him and all the men who hurt me. Starting with that jerk Cooder Jones. He’s the one who drugged me.” Michelle Nelson wasn’t broken. Oh, she would need years of therapy, but she was still defiant. Like his Natalie.
Chase tried to sound as gentle as Jack. “Are you talking about Bill Jones? The man who runs Wispers?”
The gurney came up, snapping into place. “Yes. I was looking for a job. He brought me an iced tea and the next thing I knew, I was in that cage and the blond man was…he was horrible. He kept calling me by another name.”
“Natalie.” Ben didn’t make it a question. His jaw tightened as he looked at Chase.
Hollow eyes stared back up. “Yeah. That was the name. He beat me until I answered to it.” She teared up as she looked back at Barnes. “My uncle really looked for me?”
Jack nodded. “I already called him. He’s going to be waiting for you. And I’ll take care of the rest of it.”
The sheriff frowned as both victims were taken to the hospital. “Now, Jack, you can’t just run around like a damn vigilante. I got one of my deputies watching that Tate fellow. I’m going to head on over to Wispers and see if I can have a talk with Cooder. He’s an asshole. I might need to call in the state troopers. He won’t be interested in talking to me, but maybe I can scare him a little.”
“I’m going with you.” Chase didn’t have a choice. This was the last of the places he’d found.
He’d been wrong. He was never wrong. Until the one moment it mattered most.
Now he was utterly incompetent. Useless. Natalie was counting on him. His sister was counting on him, and he had nothing.
“Calm down,” Ben said. “You were on the right track. You found the missing girls. You’ll find our girl, too.”
Before Tate raped her? Before he inevitably killed Georgia? Because his baby sister wouldn’t last long. Natalie would try to save her, but she would fail and that would kill her soul in a way Hawk hadn’t been able to.
“Georgia won’t break. I know that sounds dumb,” Ben said, his face a stark mask.
“No. She’s smarter than she lets on, and she’s stubborn as the day is long. She won’t bend. She’ll push them until they kill her. She might seem flighty and superficial, but she’s a Dawson down deep.” His brothers would kill him. How could he tell Win and Mark and Drew that he’d gotten their baby sister brutally killed?
“I’m going to that damn club.” Logan Green had a shotgun in his hand. “Someone is going to tell me where she is.”
Chase got the feeling Logan wasn’t talking about Natalie. He’d been tense, on edge, for the last several hours as they’d searched.
The sheriff returned from his squad car. “Now, fellows, I have some bad news and I have some good news. That Tate person is gone. My deputy lost track of him.”
Motherfucker. He should never have listened to any of these men. He’d called the feds in, but they were taking their time. Time was the one thing he didn’t have. And now Tate was in the wind. Leaning on the guys at the strip club seemed like their only option.
“What is the good news?” Ben asked between clenched teeth.
The sheriff rubbed a hand across his face. “Does anyone here know a man called Nathan Wright?”
Who the fuck was Nathan Wright?
Logan turned, his whole body shifting to someone more confident. “Nate Wright is the sheriff of Bliss.”
“Well, he also seems to think he knows where your women are. Says someone named Marie Warner told him she talked to a young girl who was in a cage on someone named Logan’s phone.”
Logan gasped, his breath heaving. “My mom. She tracks my phone. Holy shit. I always wondered if she did that. Thank god. Where? How? Georgia. Damn it. That girl treated me like a dumb dog. She pretended to toss my phone and then kept it. Fuck. Tell me she’s alive.”
“According to this Nate fellow, there were two women talking and your momma was damn mad that you were allowed in a strip club. It seems she takes exception to them. And Nate said if I didn’t want a woman with a shotgun on the doorsteps of Wispers in about twelve hours, I should handle it myself.” The sheriff frowned. “Which is what I should do, but hell. I’m not equipped for this. Barnes? Can you come out with me? The feds won’t be here for another hour or so. Those women might be dead by then. I might be lazy, but what I’ve seen here today just ain’t right.”
Barnes stopped, Fleetwood at his side. Abby was back at the house watching the kids and Kitten, who couldn’t stop crying and vowed to be used as bait for Tate if she had to. “Where the hell is he keeping them? That apartment over the club is tiny. And I checked the place out myself when the girls first
went missing.”
Sam shrugged, looking frustrated. “I managed to sneak into the back at one point. The dressing rooms are tiny. I mean those girls are shoved in together and the office is basically a closet. Besides the office, there’s a janitorial closet and a men’s bathroom with exactly one stall. I just don’t see where they would keep her unless they shut down for the day or the strippers are all in on it. I guess they could be in that apartment.”
The sheriff shook his head. “No. I sent the deputy I’m not going to fire out there an hour ago. It’s open, and Cooder didn’t have a problem letting him look around. There was nothing out of the ordinary.”
Chase let the sheriff’s words drift off as his mind hit on a few things. He pictured the club. The big sign in front was completely out of place. Huge bright neon letters that would light up the night sat atop the crap-ass prefab building. The owners hadn’t spent a dime on making the place nice, but that sign had to have cost a bundle. The letters were at least seven feet tall. Easy enough for a man to hide behind.
But no one would leave them on the roof. And the deputy would have been behind the letters so he would have seen them. It didn’t make sense.
And neither, he realized, did the building.
He estimated. Four thousand square feet. Nothing less. Maybe a tiny bit more. The main portion of the club was roughly half. Two thousand. If the other rooms were tiny, where did all that space go?
“What’s behind the bar?” Chase asked. He could see it plainly now. He’d been too busy trying to find out names and dates that he hadn’t paid attention to the place itself.
Sam frowned. “Uhm, the bar is against the back wall.”
A little thrill lit Chase. It was that instinct that told him something was wrong, but he was on the right track. “No. That bar is at least ten feet inside the club. And there’s no back room there. That’s in the kitchen which is on the other side of the club.” He’d noted the double doors Twilene had come in and out of.
Such a little thing. The walls were painted a navy blue, offsetting the obvious problems in the building—like the room which had no doors. The room no one used and everyone ignored. “I know where they are. And I have a plan to get them out alive. Sheriff, we need to use your radio. We’re going to use a little subterfuge, a little brain power, and a whole lotta bullets.”
Chapter Twenty
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” the sheriff asked.
Chase slammed out of the sheriff’s car and looked around the parking lot. Everything looked fine. Just a regular day with regular men who liked to watch the day shift at a strip club. Nothing out of the ordinary about that.
Looks could be deceiving.
Chase looked like he was alone with the sheriff and Logan Green. Yeah, that was a little deception.
In the distance, he saw the glint of a rifle scope. Benjamin. It was a signal that he was there, but Chase didn’t really need it. Ben would always be there.
He’d strategically placed Ben, Barnes, and Fleetwood around the club at a distance. Each man had a rifle and knew how to use it. Any way Tate Evans tried to slip away, someone would be waiting for him. He was in that club. There was no doubt about it. He wouldn’t let his prize go. He’d waited too long.
“Why did you have me talk to my deputy over the radio like that?” The sheriff followed him, his booted feet kicking up dirt. He walked slow. He thought slow.
Logan didn’t however. Not when it came to police work. “They’re monitoring the police radio. Anything we said would have gotten back to them.”
So they would know that the sheriff thought Chase was an idiot and his brother and the Barnes-Fleetwood men were headed to the hospital to wait on the feds to question the Nelson girl.
As far as they would know, it was just the three of them and they didn’t have a warrant. Just two crazy men and a worn-out sheriff who thought he’d been put on wild-goose chase.
It would be the perfect time for Tate to move the women because he would think he knew where everyone was. Even as he thought the words, the deputy—the one who was trying to rejustify his job—was playing the game nicely.
“Sheriff, this is Mike. Are you sure you can’t get down here? Barnes is giving the staff hell, and I just got word that the feds will be at least another hour.”
Perfect. Give them a timetable. Once the feds got here, it would be far harder to move the women. Chase wanted to give them a reason to move and move now.
He gave the sheriff an encouraging nod. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. I have to deal with this. These two won’t believe the women aren’t here until they see for themselves. You handle it until I get there. Ron is on his way to the station to meet the feds and take them out to the hospital. Are those girls talking yet?”
The sheriff was doing a damn fine job. It was the only thing he’d done right for days.
“Not yet.”
“All right, let me know when that changes.” The sheriff let the radio squawk off and shoved it into his back pocket. “I hope you’re right about this. Otherwise, we could all be dead.”
Chase had to take that chance. He pushed through the double doors and almost ran into the bouncer, a rat-faced man who looked like he used too much of the product they pushed, and Chase wasn’t thinking about the women. The man grimaced, his teeth plainly rotting.
Meth head. He wasn’t the usual bouncer. Over the course of coming to the club, the bouncers he’d seen had been burly, big guys. Where the hell were they today?
“I want to know where Natalie Buchanan is.” Chase didn’t have to fake his role. He was the pissed-off future husband. He pushed past the meth head and into the club.
Bill “Cooder” Jones was in fine form. He walked out from behind the bar, his brows raised. “What the hell is going on? Sheriff? Is there a problem?”
Chase stared at the wall. He was right. He had to be. There was zero reason for the wall in front of him to be there.
“You’re damn right we have a problem. I want to know where my woman is. I know she’s here.” Logan got in the man’s face, giving Chase precious moments to think.
Natalie was behind that wall. He walked up to it, placed a hand right there. She couldn’t see him. Couldn’t hear him, but he knew she was there.
“Now I already let the deputy take a look around here, Sheriff. And without a search warrant, might I add. He didn’t find anything. I let him go everywhere.” Cooder’s shoulders straightened. “I’m trying to run a business here. I don’t have to take this. I’ve already called in a lawyer.”
The sheriff sighed. “And these fellows have called in the feds. We’ve had too many girls go missing. If there’s something you have to say, you better start talking.”
“I already answered the deputy’s questions. I don’t know this Tate person or Don or whatever his name is. Gretchen has worked here for a couple of months but I fired her because she’s a crazy bitch. Now I deal with a lot of crazy bitches, but she tried to take a knife to a girl the other night. Seemed to think she was some woman named Natalie.”
Chase chuckled, but he wasn’t amused in the slightest. “Is that how you’re going to play it?”
“You should watch your mouth, son.”
Cooder looked pissed, but the club owner wasn’t getting rid of them. He hadn’t called his bouncers or tried to push them out or even threatened them if they didn’t leave. Shouldn’t he be attempting to toss them all out? God, he hoped Ben’s eyes were as good they used to be. “I’m not your son. So you’re planning on pinning Natalie’s disappearance on Gretchen. Why would Gretchen hurt Georgia? She’s my sister, by the way. You took my fiancée and my sister. I’m going to utterly destroy you, you know. I’ll make your life from this moment on a living hell. I’ll ruin you financially. I’ll make sure you never work again. If you have a wife or children you love, I’ll burn down their lives, too. You have one chance. Tell me where they are and then you can do the gentlemanly thing and end your own life with som
e semblance of honor or I’ll raze your house and no one will remember you ever existed.”
The sheriff’s jaw dropped. “Damn, Dawson.”
Logan stood beside him. “What he said, except I’ll kick your ass first.”
“The ass kicking was implied, Logan,” Chase shot back.
Cooder’s eyes had gone wide. “You can’t do that. I have money.”
“And I have five hundred million in a trust fund. Has your drug dealing gotten you to the millions yet?”
Cooder sputtered. “I don’t do that. Damn you. How can you let him come in here? I already let the deputy check. I already did it.”
He was on the ropes, panicking. It was perfect.
“Did the deputy check the room where you cut the dope?”
“How do you know about that?” Cooder whispered the words.
But it was enough for the sheriff. He drew his gun. “Down on your knees. Right now. Goddamn it. This is why I left the damn city. Green, Dawson, consider yourselves deputized. I think this whole thing is about to come down on our heads.”
It was the go-ahead to draw weapons, but chaos was already raining down on them. The minute the sheriff had drawn, one of the strippers had screamed and hit the floor. The men sitting at tables rushed to try to get out, likely fearing a raid, and even the meth head scrambled to get away.
“He promised me I would make money. I didn’t know about the girls. Damn it. I didn’t know. They’re in the dark room. The only way to get in and out is hidden on the roof. Push back the air-conditioner unit on the right. It’s a fake. It’ll get you down there. Please don’t kill me like they killed Stan. He was going to talk. Tate said he would take care of it. I didn’t know it would end like this.”
Chase heard the sheriff cursing, but he and Logan ran for the door, one thing on their minds—getting in that room before something else went wrong.
* * * *
“The guys were right, Master.” Gretchen climbed back down the ladder. The minute she looked to Tate, her words and body language softened. Nat felt her stomach churn. “I hid behind the sign and watched them. There are only the three.”