Page 58 of Vanishing Point
She would never cower to this man again.
“Stupid?” she asked lightly, and even though her hands shook, her voice was clear and strong. “I’m banking on it.”
The blow was swift, vicious. Hard in her stomach, under her rib cage. Right where it would do a considerable amount of damage. The pain shouldn’t be shocking. She’d spent so many years suffering under this man’s blows.
And still, she hadn’t braced herself in quite the right way. The force of the blow had the chair she was sitting in toppling backward and splintering into pieces. She fell to the ground and pain shot through her shoulder blade as chair hit floor, and shoulder hit the edge of the chair back. Then the back of her skull erupted in pain as the force of impact made her head snap back onto the floor.
Then he was standing over her, a foot on either side of her hip. He kicked a part of the chair out of the way, and she couldn’t stop herself from flinching. He sneered down at her. He was wavering a little bit—the blow to her head hard enough to make her vision feel off.
“I wish I could let them find your body, Vi. Because every inch of it will be bruised and bloodied once I’m done. It’s a shame you’re just going to disappear forever.”
She didn’t say anything else. She might have if so much pain wasn’t throbbing through her body. The knock to her head made her dizzy and nauseous. She couldn’t really concentrate on him standing over her.
She should have. She should have remembered.
He grabbed her by the hair, laughed when she howled in pain as he jerked her by the hair out of the chair and off the floor and onto her knees.
“That’s better,” he said.
He released her hair and she fell forward, managing to catch herself by her palms even with her wrists zip-tied.
She struggled to inhale, holding herself up on all fours. Struggled to calm herself. Struggled to blink back the tears that wanted to spill over.
He wanted her screams and her tears and her pain. He wanted her to beg him to stop. He wanted to know he had all the control, and she was nothing.
She had to find some way to not give it to him. She sucked in a breath, squeezed her eyes shut. Two tears fell onto the ground beneath her. If they fell, maybe he wouldn’t see them when he looked at her face again.
She stared at the two drops of moisture, willing them to be all. And that was when she really looked at the floor, the splintered chair, and the little glimpse of something shiny.
A piece of metal lying in between a gap in the floorboards. A dime. She almost sobbed right then and there. She’d stopped believing in signs from the universe, from people she’d lost a long, long time ago.
But seeing a dime had saved Thomas. Or at least, he claimed it had. He’d told her that story about not getting shot in the head, and in this moment… She wanted to believe. Believeeverything.
It was her own sign. She would make it through this. Someone was watching after her.
And when she looked just a few inches beyond the dime stuck in the floorboard gap, her breath caught.
There was a nail. It wasn’t very big and kind of rusty. The chances of it actually cutting through the zip ties were slim to none, and it was too short to be much of a weapon.
But it was sharp, and it was something.
Chapter Seventeen
Thomas drove to Fairmont at illegal speeds, sirens screeching. But once he reached the city limits, he slowed and turned off the sirens. He didn’t want to scare off anyone who might work at the convenience store, and he had a few questions for Rosalie he didn’t want to have to scream over the sirens to ask.
“I don’t need the illegal details, but how did you manage to track down an alias? We’ve been trying to get information out of his friends and family and workplace since we got those photos.”
“And what did every single person you guys tried to talk to have in common? They’re allmen. Dad, brothers, SWAT team. Dude doesn’t have one woman in his inner circle, and I figured there’s a damn good reason for it. So I searched the precinct’s employee list for a woman. I called an administrative assistant, a road officer and a woman in their crime scene squad—the only three women in their entire precinct, which ishugeby the way. Red-flag city.”
It was ingenious. The men had closed ranks around one of their own, but when there was one female victim, why wouldn’t there be others?
“The road officer was no help. Guess she drank the Kool-Aid,” Rosalie continued as he pulled into the convenience store parking lot. “And the crime scene lady didn’t get back to me, but the administrative assistant had alotto say.”
“When we find Vi, we’ll send her flowers.”
“Damn right,” Rosalie said firmly, probably needing to hear thatwhenas much as Thomas needed to say it. “The big breakthrough was she mentioned that one time Eric had submitted receipts for reimbursement after some SWAT trip, and she’d had to give one of them back and refuse repayment because the name on the receipt hadn’t been his. He’d tried to claim it was an undercover name, but since the department hadn’t approved an undercover name credit card, they refused to pay him back. He raised a big stink about it. Big enough that she remembered the other name.”
Thomas pulled into a parking spot next to the store.
