I felt like I was swimming to the surface in the water of a pool again. The sounds were muffled around me and I felt movement but it barely registered in my foggy brain.

Somewhere a female voice was talking rapidly but the things she was saying didn’t quite reach the part of my brain that could understand her.

It felt like I was laying down on some hard surface. When I moved my head, my cheek came in contact with something rough and cold. There was something gritty that scratched at my skin and stuck.

My head felt like it had been hit with a baseball bat. There was an intense ache that was starting to creep up into one of my temples and threatening to spread across the right side of my face.

Brock. Where was he?

The image of him floated across my mind. The look in his eyes just before he kissed me. The musky smell of his body as we kissed.

“Wake up sunshine!” I heard someone say as a light hit my closed eyelids. The brightness caused the ache in my head to plume.

I moved my head away from the light and tried to open my eyes. They fluttered once, then closed again.

“She’ll be awake in a minute,” I heard a voice that sounded like Angela.

The other female voice replied, “We could dump them now and just be done with it.”

I heard a deep muffled grunt and tried opening my eyes again. They fluttered open and I saw the back of someone in front of me. Brown hair cut short and wearing a t-shirt. My eyes shut again before I could register anything else.

My arms moved but they wouldn’t move the way I wanted them to. I tried again and felt a course restraint around my wrists. My shoulder dug into the hard surface I was on and I tried to flex my wrists. They were tied securely behind me.

There was another grunt from the person in front of me. The light was back on my face and I suddenly smelled something pungent. When the smell hit my nose, I jerked back and opened my eyes. The light blinded me for a moment until it moved away.

I blinked my eyes several times, trying to rid them of the blindness left from the light that had been in my face.

Everything flooded me at once. Two women, one Angela. Another that I didn’t recognize were standing to the side whispering something between them. Their voices echoed slightly in the room.

The other woman looked much older but there was a faint resemblance between the two that I couldn’t identify. Like they were related but possibly distantly. Her hair was whitening around the temples and whatever hair color she might have had at one point was faded into a lackluster grey tone that made her look haggard. She was fidgeting with it as she angrily argued with Angela.

Behind them was a blank wall and a table with a laptop open on it. When I swung my eyes up I could see an overhead light fixture that you might find in a house. The flooring in front of me was made of concrete but I couldn’t see any other part of the room.

The other person in front of me was wearing a shirt I recognized and his hands moved against his own restraints. Rope bound them and looked thoroughly knotted.

A man. No, a boy. Drew.

I struggled against the rope that was holding my wrists. Desperately trying to free them and reach out to Drew. A deep panic was rising within me. Whatever situation we were now in, I needed to help him.

I inched closer to him to see if I could tell if he was hurt.

“Drew?”

He grunted in front of me but didn’t say anything.

“Ahh, she’s up,” the older woman said.

My eyes swung to hers and I saw a malevolence behind them. This person had the same look of indifference on her face as my parents did the night we were attacked. The difference was that it looked like she wouldn’t be opposed to watching us suffer. Whoever the woman was, she lacked any semblance of care as she looked at me.

“What’s happening?” I managed to ask.

Angela grabbed the older woman’s arm for a moment but quickly retracted it when the woman gave her a glare.

“Well, you and your brother are guests of ours for a while until you aren’t. I’m Elaine and you know my daughter Angela,” she said with a slight sneer. “Behave and we might let you both go. Otherwise we’ll hurt you and your brother.”

They weren’t letting either of us go whether we behaved or not. I knew that for a fact. I had heard her say that she wanted to dump us very clearly whether she knew it or not. Just like I instinctually knew that Angela was afraid of her mother by the look of submissive acceptance and deference she was giving her.

Angela struck me as the kind of person that wouldn’t allow someone to rule her as a person outside of this room. She had been outgoing, flirtatious and capable. But the woman that stood in front of us wasn’t the Angela that I recognized. If I appealed to her alone, we might have a chance but with her mother clearly calling the shots it was a lost cause.

My eyes swung back to Elaine.

Drew shifted in front of me and I hoped he wouldn’t cause attention to be drawn to him.

“What is it that you want? We don’t have anything to give you.”

Angela gave a tight smile and went over to the computer on her desk. She began typing on it and ignored my question.

Elaine stepped closer to us and laughed.

“You have something very important that will get us what we want. Maybe I should rephrase that. You have nothing, but your boyfriend does.”

“Brock?”

“Hmm, yes. He’s been digging around too much with that stupid data leak of his. Angela has been trying to distract him for the last few months but then you came along. If it hadn’t been for you she might have provided enough entertainment for him to forget about digging any further.”

I frowned at her. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Let’s start from the beginning and I’ll try to use really small words since you don’t seem very bright.”

She walked around us and came back with a chair.

“He hasn’t checked it yet,” Angela said to her mother.

“He will. We have something that he wants.”

Elaine swung her gaze back to me then looked down at Drew.

“You were saying?” I asked.

She looked back at me. “Yes. Let’s start with my ex-husband. The pretentious asshole that left Angela and me thirty years ago. Colton. I think you’re familiar with him.”

My eyes widened.

“I see that you do,” she laughed. “He was always a dreamer. A wife and baby wasn’t exactly in his grand plan in life. Now he’s living his dream and making the millions he always wanted. He never looked back when he left us. We were never married so his little secret love-child was never in the spotlight when he made it big. Even if I had tried back then to out the details about it, half the media would have dismissed it as just another woman trying to extort money from him.”

Her face reddened and her mouth grimaced.

“Angela always knew this moment would come. When we had a chance to strike back at him. My daughter has been working toward this moment her entire life. Revenge comes in many forms and this one just happens to be in the form of his daughter.”

“Looks like he’s received it,” Angela murmured.

“Good.”

“So, what was the revenge?” I asked.

Elaine sighed and smiled. “Angela has a long extensive resume behind her in a lot of different areas with a lot of different skills. One of which was programing and server security but that’s not what they wanted her for. She was hired because of her pretty face and ability to manage people. It was a win for us that she was hired on at Mr. Latimer’s company.”

“What better way to strike back at Colton that through a competitor with the same interests. That wasn’t getting us very far though and not really quick enough. But what better way to strike back at her scum of a father than to frame him for corporate theft. It wouldn’t be a long jail sentence but it would ruin him and his little dream would come crashing down around him.”

I tried to process what she was telling me. This really didn’t have anything to do with Brock or his company. It had nothing to do with the recipe. Just some crazy old woman’s revenge.

“Why would a recipe matter to either of you? And you haven’t answered why we’re here.”

Elaine’s face changed to one of sarcasm and menace at the same time.

“All good things to those who wait.”

Angela’s eyes flicked to mine briefly then turned to her mother. “He’s offering money.”

Elaine chuckled. “Of course he is. Keep him hoping for a better outcome than the one he’s going to get.”

She turned back to me. “We’ve taken a picture of you two darlings and sent it to Brock. Leverage. But to answer your question, my idiot daughter stole the wrong thing. We used it anyway and sent it to Colton’s company. They used it and now he’s having some fun with a PR nightmare. He received a little gift last week too with all the financial records of Mr. Latimer’s extensive holdings. That will definitely get someone in some hot water.”

“Why leverage Brock at all if you’ve already sent that to Mr. Blackwell? Isn’t that overkill with what you’re doing?”

“Your little boyfriend is close to finding out some answers. A little too close. So what better way than to distract him from it? He’ll be so busy trying to find you that he won’t have time to do anything else. By the time he gets over it months from now, it’ll all be erased and covered up. Not a thing to look at.”

The chip. The thought occurred to me as she was talking. I was still chipped at this point so the likelihood of Brock finding us was greater than she thought.

I didn’t know anything about the chip in my arm. I should have asked him more about it. How close would he have to be to find the signal on it or was it something he could track from a distance?

She was right about one thing. I knew that Brock would be distracted with our disappearance. He would search until he found us. If we were found dead then he would never recover because of the loss of his sister.

“Where are we exactly?”

“A basement. My basement really although this house isn’t under my name.”

She waved her hand around. “This house was bought by Colton many years ago when I threatened to sue him for child support. I can’t stand looking at it, much less living in it. But I knew one day it would come in handy.”

I moved my hands around to keep circulation and felt around with my fingers to see if there was a way to loosen the knots. Her plan was to kill us here and make it look like Colton did it. That was her game. She didn’t say it but I could read between the lines of her sick little game.

If the charges against Mr. Blackwell didn’t stick in court, he would likely be accused of murder with two dead bodies in a basement of an abandoned house that his ex had never lived in.

“How did you get to Drew?”

She smiled and looked down at him. “You left a message on a service that we set up for tips on your whereabouts. That was a surprise we weren’t expecting. Angela has been sleeping with Robert since she hacked the original data. We had planned to leverage his assistance, willing or not, with some very scandalous pictures. His wife wouldn’t have appreciated it, I’m sure. Luckily the man gave her some interesting information after that little party at the hotel.”

She smiled.

“After that, we contacted your grandmother. What a funny woman. In any other circumstance, we might have been friends. Apparently, your money goes to her if you’re dead. So, I impersonated her and met with Drew tonight after getting call that you were out to dinner. It’s amazing how trusting everyone is. I told them we had already spoken and you wanted us to join you with Brock. I guess they were counting on Brock of all people to be in the loop.”

One thing I knew about Aiden was that he was not a trusting person when it came to protecting the people around him. I couldn’t imagine what might have been going through his head when he agreed to letting Drew go. Holden was the head of their security company but he was so distracted with Julia lately, he might not have run it by him.

My fingers started picking at a loop in one of the knots that felt loose.

“Where’s Brock?”

Elaine stood up and looked over at Angela.

She looked up at both of us. “Online and depositing a lot of money into an overseas account that can’t be traced. He got a good knock over his head in the alley earlier so it gave us some time to get things arranged here.”

“Who knocked him over the head?”

Elaine answered. “A friend of your grandmother. She’s rather resourceful.”

I snorted. “This is Brock we’re talking about, eventually he’ll track everything down.”

Angela shrugged. “By then we’ll be gone with the money in a different account. He can’t track everything, especially if he’s mourning your loss, can he?”

Her eyes sparkled when she looked at me. She looked more like her mother in that moment. My suspicions were confirmed. They were going to kill us tonight at some point.

I had to get Drew out of here.

“Let my brother go. I understand what we’re doing here but there’s no need to involve him in any of this.”

Elaine laughed. “There is though. Your grandmother has already paid us to make sure neither of you survive. Money is such an interesting motivator, wouldn’t you say?”

Angela looked up at her mother. “Done, they’re asking for their release.”

“We need to make a couple of phone calls I think and take care of some other items. Let’s head upstairs and discuss before we have to take care of the baggage.”

They both looked over at me briefly and walked around me. Their footsteps echoed in the room as they walked up the stairs.

“You two just sit tight and we’ll be back in a little while,” Elaine yelled down the staircase before shutting the door.

I started moving as soon as they left. My fingers frantically tugging at the loosen loop in the rope holding my wrists.

“Drew, roll over and look at me.”

He did as I asked and I sucked in a breath. He had duct tape over his mouth and a bruise forming around his eye.

“Well that’s a nice shiner,” I said to him, trying to lighten the mood. He looked at me with a wild expression and grunted.

“Alright kiddo, this is going to suck but you need to move your mouth over to me so I can try to get that tape off with my teeth. We’re never talking about this after we get out of here. I don’t want anyone knowing I licked your face or anything.”

He rolled his eyes which I took as an okay.

“Love you bud, we’re going to get out of here.”

He shimmied over to me and I bit at the tape several times. After a couple of tries a small piece came up and I yanked at it. Then I bit a larger portion and it came off, sticking to my cheek and some of my hair.

Drew sucked in a big breath the said, “They’re crazy!”

“Shh, Drew. Let’s not have them come down to check on us just yet.”

“Okay,” he whispered. “What about our hands?”

“Yeah, roll over and we’re going to be back to back. I have a knot loose but I can grab any more of it the way my hands are tied. You’re going to find it with your hands and get it untied. Then you can work at the next knot. Got me?”

He nodded and promptly flipped over. I did the same and scooted back against him. His hands started feeling around for mine.

“Don’t tell anyone I just grabbed your butt.”

I rolled my eyes. I’m sure anyone that heard this situation would understand either way.

I felt his hands meet mine and start tugging at the rope.

“Never talking about this. In fact, if anyone asks we’ll just say that we had superhuman strength and busted out of these ropes by ourselves.”

My eyes swept the rest of the room looking for anything that would help us. There wasn’t much but I spied a small window set up along the ceiling that a small person might be able to squeeze through.

My hands came free suddenly and I flipped back over and sat up. The circulation was terrible and my fingers felt a little numb but they were at least out of the rope.

A few minutes later we were both untying our feet.

“We need to grab that desk and carry it over to the window, kiddo. You’re going to climb up and out of here.”

Drew looked over at me with alarm. “What about you?”

“I’ll be right behind you. When you get out, don’t wait. Run as fast as you can to the end of the block and go two streets down. Start pounding on every door you can see. Get someone to let you use the phone and call 911.”

“I don’t know the address,” he hissed.

“They’ll come to you. Then bring them back here. When you get out of here just make sure you look at the street name when you make it around the corner. I’ll be right behind you. Remember, go to the corner then run two streets down from this one. If they figure it out, at least they won’t see you banging on doors.”

“Okay,” he said with more determination.

We both stood up on wobbly legs. I tugged my dress down because it had gotten pushed up higher than it should have during our captivity.

We easily picked up the table and put it under the window. Drew climbed up on it and faltered.

“I think it’s locked.”

“There should be a latch, just tug on it as hard as you can and get it undone.”

“Found it,” he said and pushed the window open. He grabbed the edge and started trying to lift himself through it.

I grabbed his legs and lifted him at the same time. He managed to squirm through the small opening then looked back and extended a hand to me.

“Go! Run, right now and get help. Go, Drew!” I barked at him.

He frowned and gave me a look. “I love you.”

“Me too, buddy. Go!”