1
Lincoln Hill never imagined himself the kind of man capable of kidnapping an innocent woman, but after watching his beloved wife draw her last breath in his arms, all bets were off.
A sob left his lips as he sank into the street with Lisa in his arms, teeth chattering as he frantically tried to cover the bullet wounds gushing blood all over her white dress. Every wound he covered, it seemed, caused another to bleed more profusely, making a new piece of his heart shatter to a million pieces. For five years he’d dreamed of the day when he’d finally hold her in his arms again, but he’d never imagined it would be like this.
Searing heat crept up his chiseled cheeks at the memory, invading his tan skin and painting his face beet red. He forced his heated green eyes closed, hoping the black world behind his lids would erase the vision of her bleeding to death. Of her skin growing paler with every strangled breath. Of the rasping coughs that had given rise to a geyser of blood gushing from her lips, staining her pale skin. Of the final, violent shudder of her body in his arms as the last wisps of life finally left her.
He drew in a sharp breath that burned his chest, eyes blinking back open, accepting that there was no escape from the images of that horrific day, playing on a loop in his mind. Tightening his callused fingers around the binoculars in one trembling hand, he cracked each knuckle on the other. Each crack rose to the vaulted ceilings of the gutted mansion and echoed off its empty walls. He shifted to the very edge of a beige metal folding chair he’d placed in front of the tall domed window in the corner.
Wires sprouted from power outlets at every turn in the desolate room lined with exposed wooden beams and topped by a halfway demolished ceiling. Piles of dirt and debris covered the mangled floors, and a historical, British-style tufted sofa sat abandoned in the middle of the room, alerting Linc to the fact that this had once been someone’s opulent living room before the foreclosure that had left it all disarray, making it look like a bomb had gone off.
A lacerated hole in the ceiling now served as a makeshift skylight. Moonlight petered in from the night sky overhead as well as the tall window he sat in front of, causing the natural highlights in his wavy brown hair, falling well past his collarbones, to amplify. He shifted in his seat, leaning forward on his jean-clad knees, chest heaving under his black t-shirt in anticipation, the way it always did at this time of night, when the end of the hour was near.
He checked the watch on his wrist before bringing the binoculars back up to his eyes. Through the dirty window before him—with a hole smashed into it, causing a ripple effect along the glass that he always felt resembled the shattered state of his heart—was a perfect view of the sprawling white mansion that sat across the street. His binoculars amplified the estate that sat nearly an acre away, bringing his field of vision so close to the hundred million dollar residence—which always reminded him of an eighteenth-century castle—he felt like he was standing at the front door.
He squinted into the binocular’s eyecups, the objective lenses blurring and then re-focusing as he moved them along the armed guards that manned the twenty-foot concrete gate surrounding the property. Several snipers manned the rooftop, and a guard was stationed no less than every ten feet on the ground. All stone-faced, they scanned their surroundings without relent. They were scattered strategically all over the home’s one-hundred-and-thirty-foot garden and along every peak and valley of the luscious green land that seemed to stretch on for miles.
Linc took them all in, the way he did every night. A new shot of fury blasting through his body, the way it did every night. He’d learned, months earlier, that there was no way inside that house without engaging in a deadly altercation with the hundreds of goons that protected it like Alcatraz.
Nostrils flaring, he shifted the binoculars to London’s largest mansion and lifted them up slowly. Stopping at the second story, he lingered on the unveiled window of a massive walk-in closet. A long, lean ebony goddess greeted him beyond the window in the closet that had been decorated in all white, its brightness amplified by glaring white lights that made the room glow. She glowed, too, all five feet eleven inches of her, and bore the face of an angel. She was standing patiently atop a small podium—her long ballerina arms stretched wide like an eagle, moments from taking flight. A tailor kneeled at her feet with a sewing needle trapped between his teeth, fitting her into a glimmering gold evening gown that hugged her curves to perfection.
The very gown, Linc assumed, she’d be wearing at the gala that evening.
His stomach tightened.
He abandoned the closet, knowing the most important time of the night was coming any second. And it did. Mere moments after he’d settled the binoculars on the top floor of the mansion, where a small window sat in a lone room at its peak. A window, that, to him, shone brighter than all the rest. Right on schedule, a flash of curly blonde hair breezed past the window, so quickly a single blink of his eye would’ve caused him to miss it.
But Linc never missed it.
The pulse in his wrist picked up speed and surged quickly throughout his body, causing his breath to come up short and his palms to grow damp with sweat. That curly blonde hair was there and gone in a flash, but its residual effects lingered much longer inside him. Every muscle in his six-foot-five, twenty-two-pound body clenched to the point of breaking, and a slow quiver crawled up his every bone as well. He lowered the binoculars from his eyes, seconds from shattering them under the violent squeeze of his fingers. Instead, he let them thud to the floor. Their heavy aluminum body caused dirt and dust to rise up from the floor and float through the air.
Just as the binoculars hit the floor, he seized the yellow stuffed bear that had been resting between his legs. A bear he’d found in a toy shop on Oxford Street, months earlier. His big hands nearly swallowed it whole, clenching the bear so tightly that the stuffing inside was in real danger of popping out of the bear’s smiling lips and beady eyes. He closed his own eyes—another foolish attempt to escape the memory of his wife’s beautiful face, and the deep love that had always shone in her gray-blue eyes whenever she’d been looking at him. The same love that had petered out of her slowly, like a clogged drain whose plug had been pulled, until no life had remained.
His heart caught fire as his eyes flew open, glistening under the strike of the moonlight.
No.
There was still no escape behind the closed lids of his eyes. No salvation. No peace. He would never feel peace again. Not until he’d fulfilled Lisa’s final request. Her last, desperate plea before she’d drawn her last breath.
“The last time I saw Emma, she was in London…” Lisa fell into a fit of coughs again—but no blood came that time—driving her to choose her words wisely. “Find her. Save her. No police. Just you. You have to… get inside… and do it on your own.” She heaved softly. “Do you understand?”
The skin between his eyebrows bunched together as Linc clenched his teeth and tightened his hands into fists—putting the yellow bear in grave danger once more—his squinted eyes never moving from the house across the street.
He did understand.
Completely.
He intended to fulfill the unspoken promise he’d made to his wife, nearly a year ago, moments before she’d drawn her last breath in his arms.
And he intended to fulfill it tonight.