Page 36 of Vicious Vows

How could I be so stupid?

Once I’ve downed the pills and chased them with a large glass of water, I head back to the office. I can at least check the cameras to see when she left. I sit down in front of Dale’s computer and log in the way he taught me, but there are no notifications from the camera at all. I glance up at Vic and scowl.

“When did you bring that chair to the front door and sit down and fall asleep?” I glare at him angrily, and he squirms.

“Uh, sorry, sir. I got kinda tired and I?—”

“What time!” My interruption sobers him. I don’t give a single fuck when he fell asleep. I need to know when he moved up the hallway.

“Around one, sir. I took the chair from the living room and put it there and sat down. I fell asleep shortly after.” Vic pockets his phone and stands with shoulders squared, ready to answer for his stupidity, but I’m not interested in reprimanding him right now.

“And what time did Micah come into the office?” Rage boils my blood. She set the cameras to a loop again, the way she did the last time she tried to sneak out and we caught her. There is no footage from one a.m. when Vic said he moved the chair.

“Uh, before nine p.m., sir. She didn’t say a word to me. She just walked in and sat down at her computer.” Vic looks terrified, and he should be. He let her climb right out the window and head off down the street alone in the middle of the night with my enemies hunting for her.

“Do you realize what you’ve done?” My shoulders tense, and I am about to rip his head off when Dale bursts in, drenched from the rain and carrying his computer bag.

“I brought backup,” he says, nodding over his shoulder. An older man in his fifties follows behind, removing his dripping hat. I don't even care who comes to help as long as we find her before the Russians do.

“She put a set of coordinates out for us, a twelve-block radius we need to start with. We can narrow down the search by eliminating anything that closed earlier this evening and anything that is a very public place. Get on this, guys. We have to find her now.”

I watch them start setting up shop, and all I can do is pace. I’m helpless to do anything else. Unless I have a direction to go, Ican’t even get in my car and go. And a new emotion is rising, one I’ve never felt… or haven’t felt since I was a child.

Genuine terror. They’re going to kill her, and not in a nice way, either. They’ll make an example of her, killing her very publicly, and probably torture her first. And this is all my fault.

Why the fuck couldn’t she just listen to me?

27

MICAH

Iglance at the clock again, noting it’s now after three a.m. Four hours of hacking, set up in this damn Ramen shop in midtown, and I’ve still gotten nowhere. My eyes are tired. I’ve drunk two energy drinks and just cracked the third open, and all I can do is keep trying. Every attempt I make at breaking down their firewall is thwarted by their own hacker, probably keeping me from seeing what Will is doing. I know he’s close. It’s like I can feel his presence with me, like he’s there in the keys, on the screen, coaxing me forward.

“Come on, come on!” I scold myself as the petite cashier with dark hair passes by my table again. She eyes me suspiciously, the way she has all ten times she’s passed the table tonight. I’m a paying customer, but I get the feeling that if I don’t order something more soon, she’ll ask me to leave. No one else is here. She probably wants to nap or something.

I force a smile at her, and she scowls and walks off. Then I refocus on the task of hacking the Russian network again. I’m right between two of the buildings that are likely my target. The small Ramen shop sits between them, in the ground floor of amid-rise apartment building. It’s dirty and it smells like old fish, but it’s the only place with a light still on this time of night and free Wi-Fi.

Will would call the place a dive and refuse to eat here, but I’m playing hero, not ordering a gourmet meal. And he will thank me when I figure out which building he’s in and rescue him. At least, I hope he will. Which is why I keep pushing myself even though I desperately need sleep. My shoulders are slumped. I hunch over my screen, and then I hear the bell above the door chime.

I try to keep my eyes on the computer screen, but movement out of the corner of my eye startles me. Without drawing attention to myself, I glance up at the activity to see a large man with dark hair, dressed in all black, stalking toward me. My throat seizes as I try to stifle a whimper, and I shut the laptop, effectively locking it. He is staring right at me, and I only have seconds to react.

My heart races as I slip my laptop off the table and into the backpack I stole from Luke’s house. I am on my feet racing toward the door as I struggle into the straps of the backpack and try to keep as many of the small round tables between myself and that man as possible. His eyes track me, and he smirks, revealing his tobacco-stained teeth in a crooked grin.

They’ve found me. I wasn’t careful enough in my hacking, and without the backup of a partner to cover my tracks and the speed of the supercomputer at Luke’s place, I knew I was just too vulnerable. But I couldn’t stop, and now I can’t do anything but run. My feet clomp on the tile floor of the Ramen shop all the way to the door, which I reach before him. I thrust it open and dart into the night, then turn to run up the sidewalk, but there are more of them. A lot of them.

At least ten grown men surround me, all of them with menacing expressions, a few of them with weapons in hand. “Shit,” I hiss, and turn to retreat, but the man is there, just out of the restaurant, and a few more men have joined him, closing me in from the backside.

“What do you want!” I shout, but the way my voice cracks and shakes gives away my fear.

“You’re coming with us, Ms. DeSantis.” One of them speaks, and it makes my blood run cold. The hair on my arms stands on end, and I whine as my eyes dart around, looking for a way through them or away from them, but before my feet can move, one of them grabs my backpack and rips it off my shoulders.

“Hey, ouch!” I snap, spinning around to grab the thing back, but there are too many of them, all of them too large to even take on one-on-one. Terror grips me, and I realize instantly that Luke was right. This is too dangerous. I should have listened. I need to get out of here, and the only way out is through, so I charge forward, barreling into the herd of men, only to be grabbed and hoisted onto someone’s shoulder where I kick and scream and pound my fists.

Luke’s words of warning ring out all too true now. They’ll kill me. They’re probably taking me somewhere to do just that right now. “Let me go!” I scream, kicking so hard I catch one of them in the jaw, and he stumbles backward. Another one smacks me hard across the face, and I taste blood in my mouth.

“Shut up, you little bitch,” he says, but I don’t stop screaming and pounding my hands into the back of the man who has me over his shoulder. Someone somewhere might see what they’re doing and call the cops. Maybe the cashier at the Ramen shop, but I don’t hear sirens even as they walk up the street.

The mob enters a building, and now I know no one from the street will hear me anymore. I devolve into sobs that rack my body and claw at the man’s skin until his back is bleeding, but he doesn’t let me go. He keeps walking through a maze of hallways and rooms until he drops me on the floor in a heap. My head slams back into something hard, and I see stars for a moment, and then I see the thing I’ve been missing for months. Will.

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