Page 40 of Single Mom for the Firemen

“What is it?”

“Get dressed,” he shoots back at me. “Meet us in the office. Vanessa and Callie have been kidnapped.”

My heart stops. He goes to turn around and make his way down the stairs, but before he can go anywhere, I grab his arm.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I demand. “You can’t just turn up here and drop that on me and expect me to?—”

“I don’t have time to explain now,” he replies, his voice taut. “Just come down. And make it quick.”

I know there’s no point arguing with him. When he has it in his mind that things are going to go a certain way, the best I can do is just try to keep up. I throw on some real clothes and take the stairs two at a time, to find Mason and Jake waiting for me in the office. Mason is pacing, and he nods to the coffee sitting on the edge of the desk.

“You’ll need it,” he tells me grimly.

I rub a hand over my face. “What time is it…?”

“Six,” Jake replies. “I was getting ready to head out on patrol, but I thought I’d come down here and check on the cameras we set up first. Make sure they were working, you know? And when I scrubbed through the footage…”

“It’s easier to show him,” Mason cuts in, and he steps over to one of the monitors, which is paused on an image of Vanessa’s front yard. I can see the path that leads down to their place weaving out of the forest, and as Mason taps it on, I watch as Vanessa and Callie come into view.

They look…happy. Peaceful. Wearing the clothes they were last night, when we saw them last. If I’d known something was going to happen to them, I would never have let them go alone…

I do my best to focus on what’s happening on the screen in front of us. I can’t get distracted by my emotions. I need to keep my head, no matter how tempting it is to lose it. I fix my gaze on the screen and watch in horror as the events of the night unfold in front of me.

I notice, almost at once, that there’s a man hiding in the shadows of the tree line—neither of them notice him, but my gaze is highly attuned to catch anything that seems out of place. My eyes flick back and forth between the man and the girls, and then Vanessa seems to spot him. She turns to confront him, and he emerges from the woods. My heart thuds hard in my chest when I see her move to step in front of Callie, doing everything she can to protect her from what is going to happen.

But the man is quick and brutal—he slams a bag over Vanessa’s head and pins her arms behind her back, slipping plastic cuffs over her wrists to pin her in place, and roughly grabs Callie by the arm to drag her along with him. The sight of him laying hands on that little girl, it’s enough to send a blaze of anger through my system. I want to tear that motherfucker apart for so much as thinking he can go after either of them like that…

And then he leads them off into the forest, and they’re gone.

“Holy fuck,” I mutter. “Who—what?—”

“Drink your coffee,” Jake replies. “I’m going to fill you in on what we know, and then we get out there and find her.”

“You really think we have time to wait?” I exclaim, stabbing my finger toward the screen. “After what we just saw?”

“If we go running in there all guns blazing with no plan, we’re going to get ourselves killed. Or worse, them,” Mason replies, gripping my shoulder. “We need to be careful. It’s not just about us. It’s about Callie and Vanessa.”

I close my eyes for a moment. I know he’s right, but it’s the last thing I want to hear right now. All I care about is running off into these woods and finding them before something happens. If they get hurt, or worse, I…

“She told me about why they came here in the first place,” Jake announces, cutting off my line of thought.

I turn my attention to him. I have to stay focused. Even as the emotion threatens to get the better of me, I have to keep my cool, or I could lose them both.

Lose them both.

The thought hits me like a ton of bricks as Jake fills me in on everything he knows—the story that Vanessa wrote, coming out here to lie low and get away from the cartel, all of it. I can’t make sense of it, not a single part. It has to be some kind of nightmare.

Why wouldn’t she have told us all of this? Maybe she was in denial. Maybe she thought, if she could just pretend it wasn’t happening, she would get away without getting hurt.

But now, she and her daughter are in danger. And it’s up to us to get them out.

“So what’s the next move?” I demand as soon as he finishes up. The coffee is going cold in the cup—I can’t even think about drinking it right now.

“We need to find out where they were taken. Best way to do that is to figure out who the person who took them was. He’ll have a base he works out of, and chances are that’s where they’re at right now,” Mason replies, slipping into work mode just like that.

“You pulled some screenshots from the video?” I ask, and Jake nods.

“I’ve already sent them off to some of the cops we were working with last year on that land dispute,” he replies.

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