Page 1 of Hot for Hostage

happy tails haven

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Sadie

Sadie’s Guide to Hostage-Taking, Tip #1: Forget everything you think you know about hostage situations.

Happy Tails Haven had been brutally vandalized.

Again.

I frowned at the mess of graffiti marring the front of the dog shelter. Sunlight glinted off scattered shards of glass, and my eyes narrowed on the broken window. I’d been volunteering at the shelter for three years, and the sight of it defaced like this made me sick to my stomach.

“I won’t stand for this,” I declared, fists clenched at my sides. “That’s the third time those little thugs have hit us this week!”

“Sadie—”

“No, I mean it this time,” I told Gladys, dodging my fellow volunteer’s outstretched hand. I was so frustrated I could cry. Graffiti was one thing. Destruction was another—the glass could hurt the dogs! “Happy Tails Haven is a sanctuary for abandoned and mistreated dogs. They don’t need this sort of abuse from teenagers who should know better.”

Gladys’s wrinkled forehead creased further as she followed my gaze to the obscene graffiti. She didn’t look particularly bothered, which made no sense.

“Does it really bother the dogs, though?” Ryan, another volunteer, asked from my other side. “I’m not sure they even notice.”

Why were neither of them upset? This was anoutrage.

“Oh, they notice,” I promised. Dogs were very sensitive to negative vibes like this. “We have to do something.”

Gladys snorted. “What can we do? We called the police weeks ago, and their extra patrols haven’t caught any suspects.”

I frowned and planted my hands on my hips. “Why don’t we camp out here with the dogs until we can catch those troublemakers in the act?”

She squinted at me. “And then what? We take them on ourselves?”

I looked down at my noodle-thin arms and pink sundress. Nothing about me was very intimidating, and dying my hair pink hadn’t done anything to build my street cred. The teenagers messing with our shelter were all bigger than me, and Gladys was made of elderly sticks and bones. She was the oldest volunteer at the shelter by at least two decades, and neither of us could open a jar of spaghetti sauce without asking for help.

Ryan wasn’t much better. While he could lift two of the extra-large bags of dog food without breaking a sweat—something all the workers at the shelter admired him for—his appearance could be a little deceiving.

I eyed our muscular friend before smiling hopefully. “Any chance you’ve stopped practicing that whole pacifism thing?”

Calm blue eyes blinked back at me. “Violence isn’t the answer. Not now, not ever.”

My shoulders slumped with my sigh. “I figured. No, I’m not saying we take them on. But there’s got to besomethingwe can do. Maybe if we just tried talking to them?”

My other idea was to find a way to signal for Batman, but they’d probably just make fun of me.

We lived in Westport, not Gotham.

Gladys pulled her grey cardigan tightly around herself, despite the summer weather. “If we confront them, we’ll probably get shot.”

“Shot?” My jaw dropped. “But we saw them in the security footage. They’re barely even teenagers. You think they have guns?”

“I saw a few of them packing,” Ryan said. “There’s nothing we can do. These kids are stupid and think they’re invincible. The only people punks like them respect are the Reeds.”

I bit my lip. The name didn’t ring any bells. “Who are the Reeds?”

Two blank gazes stared back at me before Gladys shook her head. “I know you’re from the ’burbs, Sadie, but you’ve lived in the city a few years now for school. You’ve seriously never heard of that old psycho Sebastian Reed? He has more Westport property than a game of Monopoly, and he’s head of the local mafia.”

It took me a second to make sure I’d heard correctly.

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