Shana and Len didn’t want their Aunt Tiana to leave. It was the first time she’d visited their house since leaving to go live with Jean-Claude Van Easterling, and they insisted she at least stay for dinner, or, better still, take them to Burger King. Tiana promised she’d visit again soon, but Jean-Claude, a.k.a. Dax—an even cooler fighting name, they agreed—was coming to pick her up at any minute.
After hugging her nieces and her sister, Tiana said goodbye. She waited at the edge of the driveway to save Dax having to puzzle out which house was which. There were so many cars parked on the street this afternoon—somebody popular was having a birthday party a few houses down—his Jeep would barely squeeze through as it was. Finding Cassie’s house in the middle of this vehicular mayhem? Forget it.
The sound of firecrackers made her jump. She glanced across to the party house and saw a bunch of balloons rising high in the sky, then a few streamers arcing just above the roof. She smiled as they sang Happy Birthday at a raucous volume. She almost wanted to join in.
On the second “Hip, hip, hooray!” a car pulled up in the middle of the street. A dark gray sedan. Sunlight reflected blindingly off the minted bodywork. Tiana shielded her eyes to see who it was. Probably someone looking for a parking space or wanting directions. A door opened—the passenger’s, not the driver’s. A partygoer running late? She half-expected a girl dressed in a Frozen princess dress to climb out waving a handmade silver wand.
It was a man instead. The blinding sun hid his face, but she saw he was not in a hurry.
Tiana took a few steps back. “Can I help you?”
No reply.
She clipped the stone lawn border with her shoe, stumbled backward onto the grass. No longer blinded by the reflection of the sun, she watched the man approach. He wore a plain blue polo shirt. Gray trousers. Shades. He looked fit, like a tennis pro. Maybe thirty-five years old. She was about to repeat her question more firmly when he nodded at her. He stopped just before the lawn.
Tiana remembered the distress signal on her bracelet, but it was too late. A second man grabbed her from behind, covered her mouth with his hand. He roughed her to the car and shoved her onto the back seat, where the first man joined her from the opposite side. Her scream for help lasted maybe a couple of seconds before the door closed. Even if anyone heard it, they’d just think it had come from the party.
She kicked and screamed and fought him with everything she had, but it was no use. He held her down while he pressed the needle into her neck. The last thing she thought before she blacked out was that Dax would soon be following. All she needed to do was press the emergency button on her bracelet…twice…in quick…succession and he’d…be on…his…waaaaaay…
***
Waking was a struggle. Three or four times she tried, and failed, to keep her eyes open long enough to get a grip on the world. The sedative they’d injected in her had hit her like a heavy, inky tsunami. Now that it was receding, she felt thoroughly wrecked and waterlogged.
She was in the back of the sedan traveling at a regular speed. Maybe fifty miles per hour. Bits of gravel peppered the underside. It might be a new road, or maybe one out in the desert. It seemed dark outside, but maybe that was just the tinted windows. Her hands were bound by plastic cord behind her back. Apart from the driver, there was one other man in the car, the one who’d injected her. He was next to her, texting on his phone.
Who are they? Who sent them? Where are they taking me?
Slowly but surely she became lucid enough to start thinking of creative ways to get herself out of the situation. They were all daft non-starters, certain to get her killed within a couple of seconds. Dax’s security measures hadn’t worked, or rather she hadn’t been quick enough to use them! They’d taken her purse with the Taser inside. She’d failed to activate the tracking signal on her bracelet…though it was still on her wrist; she just couldn’t reach it.
Then there was…the flick-knife.
That was still there too, wedged in the back pocket of her jeans, tight against her butt. And she could probably reach it. But the trick was...how to reach for it without being seen. The guy was right there, breathing her air.
Breathing my air. Hmm, would that angle work? She had just recovered from a strong dose of instant-lights-out. That was a better excuse than most to be feeling sick, to have to turn over in agony. Worth a try?
Her groan was a little over-baked, but so was his body odor. First she climbed onto her knees, pretending discomfort, a need to shift position in order to find the one elusive comfortable one. She really was a little queasy as she collapsed onto her side, her other side this time, hiding her butt from him. He watched her for a few moments, then resumed his texting. With the fingers of a bound hand, she reached into her back pocket...forcing, feeling, grasping. Her fingertips were either millimeters or miles away from making contact.
He grabbed her by the hair, pulled her upright. Tiana played woozy and flopped onto him. He shoved her off, jabbered something in an accent she didn’t understand, threatening to smack her if she didn’t stop wriggling. So she dutifully curled up into a ball—complete with whimpers and sobs—all the while digging in for the flick-knife.
The bad news? Her jeans were way too tight against her butt while she was curled up like this. No way could she reach inside far enough with her hands bound. The good news? If she straightened her legs, stretched out fully, that would take enough pressure off the pocket. It would mean squirming some more, maybe incurring a beating, but if she didn’t do this now, she might never get another chance.
Tiana decided it was worth the price of a beating.
With a deep breath, she began to slide her legs out from under her. Toward him. It was cramped here in the back, with little legroom as it was. But this was really all about position...and timing.
Screw it.
She thrust her hips out toward him and arched her body backward. She dipped into her back pocket and, with straining fingertips, plucked the knife out. Clasped it in her fist. He reacted so violently she wasn’t sure if she’d signed her death warrant. Heavy blows rained down on her back and her ass and legs and any other part of her he happened to take a dislike to. However, through all this, she clung to the knife.
When he was finally done punishing her, she was bruised, sore all over, and didn’t move for some time. He must have thought she’d learned her lesson. But underneath the semi-fake, convulsing sobs, she cut away at her plastic bonds using the most “intimate” weapon from Dax’s inventory. Out of sight. Out of choices.
How long it took to saw through the cuffs she had no idea. None. It was getting dark for real outside, she could tell. Where were they now? How far were they taking her? Maybe they were almost at their destination. What chance did she have of escaping then, when there were likely more than just two men to deal with at the other end?
No, she had to make her move now. On the move, when they least expected it.
Dax, please hurry. I just hope I’m still here when you get here.
First, she pressed the screw head on her bracelet, twice, as he’d told her. But she didn’t trust her shaking fingers; the second press had been too quick; it might not have registered. She repeated the sequence, this time with emphatic, staccato presses. Now he would know where she was. Then she sat up slowly, wrists together, hiding the cut bonds. The knife was in her right fist. The man looked at her, muttered to himself. Then he continued surfing the net.
She waited for a bump in the road or a sharp turn, any unusual motion she could feasibly exaggerate into this killing strike. His neck was exposed—his jugular. Using her right hand, it will have to be a backhand stab. She’d played plenty of tennis at high school; the backhand was her wildest shot, but it had some zip when it hit.
They turned onto a road with a few potholes. More than a few. It felt more like an exploded minefield—a typical desert road. Then it hit her: she didn’t know how long she’d been asleep. They could be halfway across the country right now. Maybe in another country altogether, like Mexico!
Something told her no. It was somewhere remote, but it didn’t feel like Mexico. Okay, enough stalling. If she didn’t do this now, she might be in a far worse situation soon.
A couple of fake sniffs for distraction...wait for a rough bump...no, an even rougher one, so rough he’ll be cursing the road...
The car’s underside scraped on the gravel. She flung the point of Dax’s blade into the man’s jugular. Used the heel of her other hand to jam it all the way in. The half-formed sounds he made were stilted, manic, like the confused airbursts from someone drowning. He reached for her without looking, so she jumped onto the seat and fended him off with kicks.
The driver shouted in a foreign tongue. Christ, if he stopped the car she’d be history. She reached for the dying man’s holster tucked into his pants, fumbled the catch. He was in no state to stop her. His hands clasped over the wound; he was quickly bleeding out. Tiana managed to wrench the Beretta out of its pouch and, cocking it on the turn, fired once at the back of the driver’s seat.
He reacted with a hard left. It threw her into the dying man, and his head cracked the side window. The car started to overturn, as though it was on a steep slope. She wrapped her arm around the seatbelt and tried to wedge herself in behind the dying man. The next thing she knew, they were upside down, and she was on top of him.
She listened in horror as the driver’s door creaked open and the driver crawled out. After a couple of heavy, shuffling steps, there was a thump on the ground outside. Both the back doors were centrally locked, so she squeezed through to the front and opened the passenger door. Beretta still in hand, she climbed out...
They were at the bottom of a short but steep, sandy verge between the road and a line of palm trees. She limped around the car, ready to empty her clip into the driver. But when she got there, he was already dead. The thump she heard was the driver falling sideways. His head had hit a tree root. And the bullet she’d fired earlier had gone right through his chest.
Tiana stared for a while, not really comprehending what she’d done. What she’d been forced to do. It was fully dark now, and there was a nip in the air. She searched the driver for ID, or some other clue as to whom he was working for. Nothing. She tried the glove box. Still no luck. Then the other, blood-soaked man in the back. A totally icky no-joy—even his cell phone was smashed.
So she was left with the vehicle’s navigation system, which still worked, and the coordinates and names of the last five places entered into the system. The previous one was Cassie’s address. The one before that was exactly the same as the new destination, the place these men were taking her.
Tiana’s heart sank as she saw the coordinates, both current and intended, were practically the same. Way out in the Mojave Desert, she was almost at her abductors’ destination. The lights of a settlement blazed up the road ahead. It looked like a ranch or a hacienda. And on the road were three pairs of headlights, snaking toward her through the night.
She thought about running for cover, maybe into the trees. A voice from the tree line stopped her cold. “Drop the gun, Miss Crowe!”
She obeyed.
“Now walk away from it.”
She did as she was told.
“Bernal said you’d be trouble.” The man was wreathed in darkness, but she could tell he was surveying the crash. “A brave try,” he said, “but I’m afraid you’re too late. We have you now. And we’ll make you pay for that.”
***
Inside the white stucco walls of the estate, it was like an oasis: green everywhere, with ponds and attractive fountain features that made Tiana lick her lips with thirst. Six men had ventured out to retrieve her. They weren’t nearly as rough as the assholes in the sedan, though, at least not yet. And they didn’t need to be. She was completely at their mercy now. It would be a long time before help arrived, if it ever would. Did the tracking signal even work over such long distances? This far out in the desert, she might as well be on the moon.
She recognized the two men Dax had thrashed outside the courthouse. One was wearing a neck brace. He pointed at her, then lightly punched his own palm, as if to say, I’m going to enjoy taking you apart. The other man’s black eye and busted lip hadn’t fully healed. He just glared at her, which was equally threatening in its own way.
Whatever they had in store for her, she prayed it would be over quick.
Those two, plus the man who’d found her back at the crash site, ushered Tiana inside a large, white Mediterranean-style residential building with a red-tiled roof. They took her downstairs. She imagined a dungeon awaiting her, but instead found an enormous, lively rec room. A pool table, video arcade games, pinball machines, a hot tub in the corner, gym equipment, and one of those virtual reality full-body rigs she’d seen demoed at a charity science expo one time. It was the ultimate man cave.
Yes, Isaiah Bernal had done very well for himself. Getting fighters hooked on performance-enhancing drugs and then taking bribes to fudge the medical test results, he’d made a small fortune. Corruption was a lucrative racket.
“How many lives have you wrecked to pay for all this?” she called, as he approached from the far end of the room, unlacing his kickboxing gloves. He was sweaty after an intensive workout. Good thing the air conditioning was working.
“If you’re talking about Thad,” he replied, “I never made him do anything he didn’t insist on doing himself. Is it my fault he overdid it?”
“Sure, he never did anything halfway. But then, that’s how you operate, isn’t it, Isaiah? You, and sleaze balls like you? You make out you’re helping fighters achieve their dreams when all you’re really doing is turning them into ticking time bombs. Thad was always obsessed with winning; he’d have done anything to keep fighting and keep winning. And he might have self-destructed on his own. I don’t know. We’ll never know. But one thing I know for certain is that you helped it happen. You, his doctor, his best friend—you helped to destroy him!”
He was silent while he wiped his face, neck, and underarms with a towel, and Tiana thought that maybe she’d struck a chord in him, maybe got him to see himself in a new light. At the very least, he had to be suffering a pang or two of regret, knowing his best friend had killed himself like that, and that he was in some way responsible.
“Thad and I were under no illusions about the parts we played,” he said rather cryptically. “To be honest, you were the only one who didn’t get it, Tiana. And you still don’t. Thad always liked that about you, how naïve you were. He said you were like an antidote to all the cruel shit out there.”
Through Tiana’s hardest defenses, a shot to her heart. Proof that Thad had loved her, just as she’d always known. Which made the whole thing all the more tragic. It also made Isaiah Bernal’s betrayal all the more contemptible. Her heart would always be wounded, but thanks to Dax, and Cassie, and Shana and Len, she’d learned that it could heal over that wound, and that after healing, her heart was even stronger because she knew she was loved. She’d forgiven herself for Thad. And right now she was in love with a man who was strong in all the ways Thad had been weak. That was why she could harden herself to Bernal and his threats, because Dax was with her. Inside her. That would be her best defense in this, her fight to stay alive.
To stay alive long enough for him to come rescue her.
“Me? I never did see the virtue in being naïve,” Bernal went on. “Children are naïve, but they have no choice. They don’t know how the world works. But when a grown man or woman is naïve, it tells me they’ve been too afraid to take the world on. They’re spineless. And when a man like Thad says he prefers a naïve woman as a partner…that tells me he’s weak. He was a helluva fighter in the ring, but he was weak outside it. He let the world get the upper hand, and in the end he couldn’t take it. He let it beat him. Why do you think he tried to kill you, Tiana?” The guy was so full of himself, he even paused for emphasis before answering his own rhetorical question. “I’ll tell you why: it was because you represented everything that was weak about him. He hated himself, so he hated you, too, in the end. You were the destructive force in his life because you encouraged him to be spineless.”
Yep, if the Devil had taken a stab at rationalizing Thad’s suicide, he’d have probably spouted the exact same bullshit. It steeled Tiana. She might be naïve about a lot of things, but she knew self-deluded crap when she heard it. This bozo was full of it.
“Are you going to talk all day, Isaiah? My hourly rate might have to go up if I have to listen to any more of that horseshit.”
He twitched a smile, then nodded to his goons. They grabbed hold of her so that she could barely move. “Bring her,” he said. “But not too rough. Not yet. Something tells me she’ll break sooner than she thinks.”
Yeah, we’ll see about that, asshat.
They took her over to the gym area, where several punching bags of various types and sizes lay on the laminate wood floor. Attached to the ceiling were four strong-looking metal brackets, onto which the bags ought to be hung. Instead, Bernal had attached ropes to two of them.
“Strip her,” he told his men.
One of them, the man with the neck brace, grinned as he took hold of her hips. “All the way?” he asked Bernal.
“What are you, an animal?”
The man shrugged.
“Same as last time,” Bernal told him. “And no more. She’ll break without that.”
Tiana tried her best to hold a stoic poise and expression while they undressed her, but her heart was thumping. She mashed her lips together. Her near-panic breaths rushed loudly in and out through her nostrils. All the while Bernal looked on, holding the ends of the towel draped around his neck.
They stripped her to her underwear. Then they tied the ropes around her wrists, tightened them until they bit, and hoisted her onto her tiptoes.