Page 120 of Indigo Sky

“Nothin’. Just drive faster.”

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I caught up to Donny but kept what I assumed was a safe distance. It was easy enough to blend in on the highway he’d turned onto, but after ten minutes, he turned off toward the suburbs.

“Where the hell is he going?” Nate asked, holding my phone in his hand.

At some point, the battery had died, losing the connection with the 911 operator. I tried not to think about it now or the fact that Nate’s phone was also dead and useless—the bastard could never keep that thing charged. If I let myself think about it, the terror of knowing there was no help coming would consume me and get in the way of what I needed to do.

And that was save Kathleen McLaughlin, Indigo Sky …Kate.

“I don’t know,” I answered Nate as Donny rolled up to a Stop sign in the near distance.

Wherever he was headed, he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. Not wanting to grab any unwanted attention, I figured.

But then I started to recognize my surroundings. The houses looked familiar, then the buildings. And soon, Donny was pulling up to the gated community Kate called home.

“Fuck,” I muttered, stopping the car far enough away to keep his suspicions lowered.

“What?” Nate asked, watching as Donny stalled for a moment.

“Her dad—"

Donny opened the car door. In his hand was a gun, not unlike the one in Nate’s. He popped the trunk and hurried to round the car. I tensed behind the wheel, my heart pounding louder than a time bomb as Kate’s long legs kicked out and a scream ripped through her throat.

Fight, sweetheart. Fucking scream, I sent out to her, doubtful she’d hear me.

Donny remained calm and reinserted the gag that she had worked out of her mouth. He pulled her close and said something to her—too low for us to hear with the windows open—and he wrenched her away from the trunk. She spat in his face, and he whipped her across the cheek with the gun, then dragged her by the hair to the keypad.

I jolted behind the wheel, ready to run.

Nate’s grip was on my arm. “Easy,” he said as my jaw locked and my teeth ground and my hands held so tightly to the wheel that my knuckles cracked.

“I’m going to kill him,” I said through my clenched teeth, hardly able to believe I was still sitting in that car.

“That’s fine,” Nate said. “But you can’t kill him right now. He’s got a gun pointed at her. If you run up there right this second, that’ll be it,” he warned.

He was right.Fuck, I knew he was, but desperation warred with logic as I watched Donny force Kate to punch in the code to raise the gate to her father’s home.

He shoved her into the open driver’s side and made her climb over to the passenger seat as he got in, and then they drove in, the gate dropping behind them.

Not only was Kate unsafe, but Howard and Angela would be too.

My brain kicked into overdrive, putting the pieces together as I gnawed on my bottom lip.

Nate asked me what I wanted to do.

“Hold on,” I said, putting up a staying hand.

I looked at the fence surrounding the community. It wasn’t very high, maybe six feet. Stone. I could climb it and drop to the other side. A sign warned that trespassing would trigger the alarm, calling the police. But that was exactly what we wanted.

Every one of these units had a back door leading to a small yard of land. There were no fences separating the little plots of land from each other. It was all open, one unit blending into the next. I could run across the back, maybe go undetected, and get into Kate’s house through the back door.

It seemed like a plan, more of one than I’d had moments ago, and I turned to Nate and told him what I was going to do.

“And what do you want me to do?” he asked.

“Go home.”

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