Page 69 of Steal My Breath Away

Chad shrugged. “She looked scared, but everyone is scared so I didn’t think anything of it.”

The bad feeling I’d had all night morphed into sickening fear, and the fear became a reality when my phone beeped with an emergency text from Haley’s necklace. I checked the coordinates on the security app. She was five blocks away. Not a distance she could have gone on foot in the short amount of time we’d been separated, and that meant only one thing. My worst nightmare had come true.

CHAPTER 29Haley

Breathe. Breathe. You’re fine. Lock it away.

I should have been scared.

After all, I’d just been kidnapped by a man pretending to be a record executive. He’d shoved a gun into my side in the alley, and quietly threatened to shoot Chad if I didn’t lie about where we were going. He had two buddies dressed as police officers who had ushered us out of the alley, and a very thick hand that he’d placed over my nose and mouth when we were out of sight, making it difficult to breathe, much less scream. He and another dude had forced me into an SUV parked on the street, and we’d been quickly joined by the last member of his team, the guy who had fired his gun in the bar to cause a commotion to separate me from Ace.

But fear wasn’t the emotion that was making my body tremble or my heart pound. Instead, it was fury—at myself for being so stupid and naive, at these idiots for messing with my life, and at a music industry that had made it plausible that a record executive would come to a run-down karaoke bar to hear me sing, throwing me off guard just long enough to get me away from Ace and my friends. Or maybe that was my ego.

I raised my bound hands to my necklace again and pressed it against my chest two times just in case it hadn’t worked the first time. Of course, they’d taken my phone and tossed it out the window. Mark—if that was even his real name—had shoved me into the back seat of the vehicle, and the driver had tied my hands while they waited for their fake police buddies—Tom and Luis they’d called each other—to join them. For some reason, Iwasn’t surprised when Tom took off his wig and turned out to be the man who had come to the station pretending to be early for an interview.

“Ace was right,” I said bitterly as Tom climbed into the seat beside me. “I’m never going to live this down.”

Tom ran his hand through his hair. “You’ve got one hell of an overprotective boyfriend, honey. It was a challenge to get him away from you. You might want to rethink that relationship if this works out the way we hope it will.”

I allowed myself a moment to process the fact that there was a slim possibility I might get out of this alive. “Don’t underestimate him.”

“Is that why you’re so calm?” Tom laughed. “You think he’s going to save you? He’s probably still looking for you around the bar.”

I wasn’t calm in any sense of the word, but I was an expert at dealing with negative emotions. I’d already put fear away in its black box and my brain was in fifty places at once, considering options, noting landmarks, watching the time and the direction notification on the dashboard screen, praying that the GPS necklace was working its magic, and making a plan in the very unlikely case that it wasn’t. I couldn’t physically take on four men, but I was resourceful, an expert escape artist, and after years of being chased around the house by Matt, I could run at a respectable speed.

“He knows me,” I said. “He knows I wouldn’t leave Paige.”

“You know what I know?” Tom asked, his voice thick with menace. “If he gets in our way, he’s dead.”

“Why are you doing this? What do you want with me?” I buried my hands deeper in my lap as I worked the knots on the ropes they’d used to tie me up.

“The why is not our business.”

“Shut it,” Mark said from the front. “No chatter.”

I checked for landmarks out the window again. We’d turned north up the 90 and then west on the 290, passing a high schooland hospital and then a small park. Mark called someone en route to report that they’d made a clean exit from the bar.

“We’ve got an address,” he told the driver. “Warehouse on West Arthington. Turn off on Cicero Avenue. I’ve got the gate code.”

By the time the driver turned off the 290, I had fully loosened the ropes and my heart was pounding so hard I was sure they could hear it. We drove through the industrial stretch of a rough neighborhood and pulled up in front of a redbrick single-story warehouse with a tall barbed-wire fence. It was the kind of place police found dead bodies, and the fear I’d managed to contain started to spill out. Even if I escaped the vehicle, how would I get over the fence? And if I did, where would I go? There were no houses, no stores, no police stations, and the people I’d seen lurking about looked to be just as dangerous as the men in the car.

Mark opened the gate and we drove through. I held on to the ropes so they didn’t slip as they pulled me out of the car and marched me into the dark, vacant building.

“No fucking electricity.” Tom flicked the light switch. “We’re going to freeze our asses off.”

“They left a portable light in the office and some generators out back,” Mark said. “We don’t want to draw unnecessary attention. Take her to the office. The car needs to be parked out back so it isn’t visible. Luis can get the generators.”

Tom grabbed my arm and marched me into the office. My stomach heaved at the overpowering smell of rot, and my nausea worsened when Tom turned on the light to reveal soggy, molding carpeting, crumbling ceiling tiles, two scurrying rats, and a broken sofa with a large, dark stain that looked suspiciously like blood.

The bitter taste of bile coated my tongue and I forced myself to swallow it back down. I didn’t want to show them any more weakness than I had already.

“You want her on the couch?” Tom asked.

“She needs to be roughed up for the pictures,” Mark said. “Hold her while I put some bruises on that pretty face.”

“No!” A wave of terror overwhelmed me, crashing throughmy body. I dropped the ropes and used Tom’s momentary surprise to twist away. Adrenaline pumped through my veins as I raced for the door, navigating the darkness with the thin strands of light spilling from the office.

As if on cue, the door opened. For a second, I thought it was Ace outlined in the darkness and hope swelled inside me. Only when I was too close to turn away did I recognize Luis. I veered to the right but he grabbed my left hand and twisted it, using my momentum against me. I jerked to a stop, my wrist bending in ways wrists shouldn’t bend, and the sharp, intense pain almost dropped me to my knees.

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