Luke and Chad were making good time. They’d traveled more than an hour, mostly in tense silence, when Luke’s cell phone rang. His heart kicked into gear when he saw a phone number he didn’t recognize. In fact, he didn’t recognize the area code of the number, for that matter.

“Hello?” He gave Chad a sidelong look as he answered.

“Hello, is this Luke?” The voice on the other end of the phone sounded like the person was older. A man.

“Yes, this is Luke. How can I help you?” Luke made sure his voice sounded even and steady before shaking his head at Chad’s questioning look, giving him an I got no clue shrug.

“I’ve got your niece here. Says she’s lost.”

Luke’s gut churned. He opened his mouth, prepared to tell the man to put Naomi on the phone. He didn’t know how she’d gotten away, but he didn’t care. If she was safe, that’s what mattered. He didn’t have time to speak when the man began talking again.

“Prentiss, she says her name is, but she didn’t tell me much more than that. Just raised up her shirt and showed me her Uncle Luke’s number written on her back.” The comment held a question and Luke didn’t blame the guy.

He paused a beat before answering, putting the phone on speaker, so Chad could hear the conversation. Chad pulled off to the side of the highway and hit the hazard lights as he pulled out his own phone.

“She’s safe?” It wasn’t hard for Luke to put the right tone of relief in his voice. There was nothing fake about it. What was hard was trying to come up with a story that would keep the guy from getting the police involved right away. Luke needed to get to Lyra and Alyssa and give Zach a chance to free Naomi before they went after Damon. “Where is she?”

The man sounded relieved himself and Luke flicked through a few stories in his mind before settling on one as the man replied. “She wandered right out of the woods up to our vacation cabin. Been coming here for twenty-six years and we never had a child wander out of the woods like that. She says to us, ‘I’m Prentiss. I need you to call my uncle.’ Then she lifts her shirt and shows us your number right there on her back.”

Luke forced a chuckle but it sounded choked. “It’s a precaution we take whenever we’re camping with the kids. Never needed it until today. Thank you so much for helping her,” Luke said. “We’ve been worried sick.” Not a lie.

“Well, we’re over near Mount Monadnock. On the property on the west side of the pond.”

“The pond?” Luke echoed. Chad was pulling up the map app on his phone.

“Rockwood pond.” The man rattled off an address and Chad plugged it into the phone, tilting the screen toward Luke. The map showed they were over an hour away, but they were closer than they would have been had they stayed in New Haven.

“I can’t believe she made it that far,” Luke improvised. “We’ve got a search party out but we thought she’d gone off the other way. I need to hike back out to my car and drive around to you. Might take me forty-five minutes or so. I also need to call off the search, let everyone know she’s safe. Can she stay with you for that long?”

“Oh, you bet,” the man said, and Luke prayed her captor didn’t pursue Prentiss to this man’s doorstep and hurt him. “My wife is making her something to eat right now. We’re happy to keep her here with us.”

“I don’t know how to thank you, sir. Can I speak with Prentiss for a minute? I’d like to let her know I’m on my way.”

Chad had already pulled back out into traffic and begun their altered route when Luke heard Prentiss’s voice. He could hear her voice break a bit when she said hello, and the thought of what she’d been through speared him straight through the heart.

“Hey, sweet girl.” He softened his voice for her. “Are you all right? I’m on my way to you right now, but I don’t want you to say anything to these people about the men who took you for now. Can you do that for me?”

“Yes.” She didn’t ask why and he didn’t want to explain that the last thing he needed was the police getting involved. If that happened, Damon would kill Naomi. It wasn’t a risk he could take.

“Are you okay? Are you hurt at all?” He asked again.

“I’m okay.” She paused and he could almost hear the gears running as her brain worked. She was crazy smart for her age. Hell, for any age. She amazed him. “I marked a trail where I walked, Uncle Luke. When I realized I was lost, I marked a path so you could see where I had gone,” she said, and he understood her message.

“You marked the path from the cabin you’re in to where your mom and ’Lyssa are?”

“Yes,” she said. “A cabin.”

“They’re in a cabin also?” he asked.

“Uh huh. With Murphy.”

Luke’s gaze shot to Chad’s. She’d just named Damon’s partner. “Okay, baby. You hang tight. I’m coming. Just hang tight, okay.”

“Okay, Uncle Luke.”