Page 86 of Hunted Hearts
Because they’d takenher.
Juliette.
The woman who played like he was the only person in the audience not even an hour before…who looked at him like he wasn’t broken from the things that kept him awake at night.
He loved her.
And if they thought they could take her from him…
They had no idea what they’d just started.
* * * * *
The doors locked with a quietclick.
Juliette sat stiffly in the back of the sleek black limo, her hands pressed flat against her thighs to keep them from shaking. Her violin case lay on the seat beside her like the ghost of themistake she’d just made. The phone that had buzzed in her purse hours earlier might as well have detonated a bomb in her carefully constructed world.
She’d done this, walked right into a trap to save a child. After the threat had been made, how could she ignore it?
They wanted her to stop drawing attention to their charity. That was easy—she never wanted another thing to do with it other than see them all behind bars.
Fact was, she would have bartered more than her great-grandmother’s precious violin in order to keep the child safe.
But now, trapped in the plush, eerily quiet limo, doubt clawed at her chest.
“Is Emil even in danger?” she asked the man next to her, her voice tight. “Or was that just to get to me?”
The man didn’t bother looking at her. “He’s fine.” His response was smug and disinterested. “The kid was never in danger. He’s valuable. We don’t break the merchandise.”
Merchandise.
Juliette’s stomach turned. “He’s a child.”
“A very expensive one.”
She wanted to scream. To hurl her violin case at the man’s face or at the driver behind the glass divider. But the limo kept moving, and so did the sinking realization that she hadn’t saved Emil. She hadn’t stopped anything.
All she’d done was make herself the leverage. And now she’d also placed Theo, the man she was in love with, and all his brothers in danger.
They turned off the main road, tires crunching gravel. The country club’s lights had long since disappeared in the distance, swallowed by darkness. She pressed her face to the tinted window. A wide, empty parking lot stretched before them. Her pulse quickened.
The car slowed.
Juliette’s heart thundered. Her fingers fumbled for the violin case and she drew it across her chest, holding it like a shield. She’d been rehearsing how she’d be brave since the moment she got in this car. But bravery didn’t stop the fear coursing through her.
Juliette’s mind spun as fast as the tires beneath her. Every bump in the road felt like a countdown to the unknown, and no matter how tightly she gripped the violin case, it couldn’t protect her from what waited ahead.
The dark, tinted windows might as well have been walls. She couldn’t see where they were going, couldn’t track the route, couldn’t orient herself in the dark.
She didn’t know this area anyway. Her only landmarks were rising panic and the knowledge that she’d just handed herself over without a fight. Now she might not live long enough to make up for her mistakes.
A cold sweat broke across her neck. What if this wasn’t just a warning? These people were angry enough to upend her life, to scare her and the people she cared about.
What if the moment they reached their destination, she disappeared for good—shuffled into the dark corners of the same network they used to move children like Emil? She wasn’t as valuable as them, but she had something else they wanted. She’d already shown them she was willing to trade herself to keep a child safe. That made her useful.
But for how long?
She wasn’t a person to them—just a bargaining chip.
