A Prince's Ransom: Kidnapped by the Billionaire (33 page)

That was when she finally took off the bag, letting out a sobbing breath as she dropped it onto the seat like it was a snake before shoving her way out of the car. It was only a few seconds later, the few feet she could make, that she was falling to her knees and vomiting, breaking her silence only for the tears she couldn’t stop from falling. A long moment later, she pushed herself to her feet, moving back to her car long enough to grab her purse from where it had been unceremoniously dumped on the ground. The streets were quiet, empty—it was still too early for anyone to really be out.

Tobin stumbled across the street, dazed, and walked up the steps to her apartment building. She managed, after several attempts, to shove her key into the lock and turn it, pushing it open and moving inside. It was warmer inside. A noise from the staircase nearby drew her attention and she looked toward the sound and saw a face she recognize—one of her neighbors, heading down with his large yellow Labrador for their morning walk. She stared at him, unmoving, and it took him a few moments to realize she was there.

“Oh, hey, Tobin! Are you just getting in? Must’ve been a crazy night at the vet… hey, are you okay?” A customary, upbeat greeting fell away as he actually looked at her. She could only wonder what she looked like, her fingers stained with blood and her hair a tangled mess, parts of her face surely bruised or swollen, and tears streaming down her cheeks. Some part of her wanted to scream, wanted to tell him everything that had happened, but she couldn’t find the words. His dog barked at her in happy recognition, but its tail seemed to slow its wagging as the pair stared at her. “Tobin? Tobin, what’s wrong, did something happen? Are you okay?”

“No,” she whispered, and then her knees were giving out, and she fell to the floor.

“Tobin!”

There was a blanket around her shoulders and she was sitting on her couch. Her cats were wandering around restlessly, meowing in complaint at the strangers that had invaded their territory. Autumn was rubbing against Tobin’s leg, trying to get her attention. She could hear her neighbor somewhat frantically talking to the police he had called. “No, no, she didn’t say anything. I just saw her coming in the front door—she’s a vet, I figured she had to work late or something and I… she just collapsed! I don’t know what happened, I don’t know…” She turned her attention away from the conversation, some part of her not able to bear it.

A warm cup of tea was slid into her trembling fingers. Chamomile, her favorite. Someone had taken swabs of the blood on her fingers, and she didn’t really care what they did with it at this point.

“Ms. Emerson?” A kind voice roused her from her stupor a bit, and she looked up toward a woman who was probably a detective, older than she was but pretty, with black hair pulled into a bun. “Do you think you can tell me what happened? Your neighbor said you collapsed when you came into the building this morning. Do you remember that?”

Tobin nodded.

“That’s good. Where were you before that?”

“I don’t know,” she murmured, and her first coherent words in the flurry of activity around her seemed to draw everyone’s attention to her at once. “A… a warehouse somewhere.”

The detective frowned. “A warehouse? Why were you there?”

“I was taken there.”

“By who?”

She stopped, that man’s face flashing in front of her eyes and her throat tightened. She shut her eyes and took a long breath, trying to keep herself calm. “I don’t know.” Her voice fractured with tears.

“Do you know why you were taken?”

Tobin looked up again. “One of them… one of them had been shot. They wanted me to… to take the bullet out.”

The surprise on the detective’s face was plain, and for a long moment she didn’t say anything. “How many of them were there, Ms. Emerson?” she asked at last, gently.

She paused, thinking. “Uhm… four. Four including the one who’d been shot.”

“Do you know how he was shot?”

Tobin shook her head rapidly, starting to stumble through excuses, through anything—but then she stopped. “The other guy, the other guy who was watching me, who… who was making me take the bullet out, he stopped the guy who been shot from telling me. But I think… I think he mentioned a jewelry store.” The detective let out a breath, like she knew something that actually made sense in all of this. “What? What aren’t you telling me?”

The other woman hesitated before sighing. “There was what appears to be a robbery downtown yesterday. The jewelry store owner was killed, but it appeared he had fired his own weapon.”

A hard, icy ball formed in her stomach, and tears welled in her eyes. “I didn’t know that… I didn’t know that—I didn’t know that that had happened, I didn’t know them! I didn’t know any of them, I’d never seen them before! I was just at the hospital because my dad had a heart attack and they had guns and they took me and I didn’t know them! I didn’t know them, I thought they were going to kill me, I was so certain that they were going to kill me!” It all spilled out in a terrified, panicked rush, and the detective was quickly moving to sit beside her. She rubbed Tobin’s back, taking the tea back, even though she hadn’t touched it, probably to stop her from spilling anything.

“Shh, it’s alright, Ms. Emerson, you didn’t do anything wrong. You did what you needed to do to survive, and no one can fault you for that. I believe you when you say you didn’t know the men who took you, I do, and that you had nothing to do with what happened in the jewelry store. Just breathe now, just calm down. Everything’s going to be alright,” she soothed gently, smiling at her comfortingly.

“They know where I live!” she cried. “They know where I live. They drove my car back to my apartment after looking through my purse! They know where I live—what if they come back? What if they come back here and kill me because I saw them? I saw their faces, and I was so sure… I was so sure…” Her panic hadn’t faded, but all of a sudden it devolved into sobbing, and she bent over her lap, pressing her face to her knees and shaking hard.

“Hi, I’m sorry, what’s going on?” Kate’s voice caught her attention from the doorway, and Tobin looked up a little bit.

“I’m sorry, who are you?” the officer standing there asked.

“Kate Fields. I’m a friend and coworker of Tobin Emerson—she lives here. I’ve been trying to get a hold of her and haven’t been able to. Has something happened?”

“Kate?” Tobin croaked, pushing away from the detective and standing, and her friend looked toward her quickly. Her eyes widened with concern, and she pushed past the officer.

“Oh my God, Tobin, what happened? Are you alright?” She couldn’t answer, pressing herself into Kate’s hug and shaking hard.

It was the detective who answered quietly, “She was kidnapped last night, leaving the hospital after seeing her father. They brought her home this morning and her neighbor found her like this. He called us.”

Kate’s silence was palpable as she stared at the detective. “Kidnapped? By who?”

“We don’t know yet. We know they made her perform surgery on one of them, who had been shot, but Ms. Emerson has been distraught. It would be best if she was taken to the hospital and checked out.”

“I… of course. Wait, they brought her back here?”

“That’s what Ms. Emerson said.”

“I… okay, uhm. I’ll meet you at the hospital? Her father just had a heart attack, she doesn’t have anyone else. I just want to find her a change of clothes and take care of her cats.”

“Of course.” A hand was gently placed on her back. “Please come with me, Ms. Emerson.” Tobin nodded, reluctantly releasing Kate and following the detective out of her apartment. At the very least, she knew that Kate would take care of things here. She didn’t know if she’d be able to stand being at home for a long, long time.

It was around noon, after she had been looked over for a long time by doctors at the hospital—a different one from where her dad had been admitted—before the haze of shock and panic started to fade away. The detective had followed her to the hospital, and once Tobin had started to be more lucid, she had explained in a bit more coherency and detail what had happened the night before, as much of it as she could remember. She hadn’t said anything to the idea that she sit with a sketch artist for the two men whose faces she had seen the most clearly.

Kate had shown up not long after she had been admitted, telling her that she’d called Lisa to close the clinic for the day, and that she had packed a bag of her things and loaded her cats into their carriers. They were in Kate’s car, and Tobin would be spending several days, if not longer, at her apartment. Tobin was grateful for that. Her own car had been taken by the police to be searched for DNA and fingerprints that her kidnappers might have left behind, but the burlap sack in the back had more than confirmed that she had had no idea where she had been taken.

Finally the detective left, and the doctors left, and she was left alone with Kate, who had refrained from asking anything after the endless series of questions she had already been subjected to. But the silence was mind-numbing, and they both felt it.

“How’s your dad?” she asked at last.

“Hard to say. The surgery took a long time. I got to talk to him a little bit before leaving, but he was pretty out of it,” Tobin answered quietly. “I asked Detective Lucas not to tell my dad what happened, though. The last thing he needs after that is more stress.”

“You’ll have to tell him at some point, Tobin,” Kate pointed out with a lifted brow.

“Not less than twelve hours since he got out of surgery.”

“Fair enough. Do you want me to get sandwiches from across the street? You were already stuck with vending machine food all day yesterday.”

“That would be great, just… just not right now, okay?” Kate had started to get up, to get them both lunch, but all at once, realization of how frightened Tobin was to be alone dawned on her.

“Sure. I know you just… talked about it for hours, but do you… want to talk about it?”

Tobin was silent, starting at her friend. She was pretty sure she was cried out at this point, which honestly she was glad for, but… where did she even begin? “He let me go. He had a gun to the back of my head, and he said it was what he should do. But he faked that he killed me, and he let me go.”

Kate was quiet. “I don’t know, Tobin. He still threatened to rape you if you didn’t do what he said.”

“I know that—believe me, I know that. I will… never get the feeling of his lips off of mine. Never. That doesn’t excuse him from anything! But he let me go. Why? Why did he let me go? Whatever that was, he clearly thought he should have killed me.” Her voice was frightened. She could hear it in her own ears, and Kate moved to sit beside her on her hospital bed.

“I doubt killing someone is that easy to do.”

“But he might have killed someone already. He was definitely in charge.”

Kate sighed. “I’m just glad he didn’t kill you, Tobin. They’ll find him.”

“What if they find me again first?”

Sebastian refused to allow himself to become agitated as he waited at the bar. He refused to let himself become angry or impatient, and he refused to let himself drink, regardless of the fact that the bartender kept shooting him glances. He could look annoyed all he wanted that Sebastian was sitting at the bar and not ordering anything. For the moment, this was where he would stay, until he was able to see Capozzi, who had specifically requested to see him. And the bartender would be a damn idiot to try and kick Sebastian out, when he knew perfectly well who he was and who he was waiting for.

Jesse was fine. He was groggy and in a lot of pain, but he was fine—he would live, that was the important thing. It was his own damn fault anyway. Joe wasn’t supposed to have been there, no, but he never would have heard anything if the kid had shut his trap and done as he was told. Never mind that, though—that was long since past and no longer nearly so important. Joe was dead either way, Jesse was alive, that was all there was to it. Or at least, Sebastian admitted silently to himself, he hoped that that was all there was to it. He’d probably get reprimanded anyway, but there wasn’t anything he could have done in that situation other than what he did. Besides one little detail.

That girl had not deserved to die just because she had been the unlucky winner of “who gets to stitch up the idiot.” That hadn’t been her fault, and she had done all she had been able to, under the circumstances. Considering she hadn’t even been a damn real doctor, just a vet, that was more than could be expected of her. And she’d had a bit of spunk in there, beneath the layers of fear. She hadn’t deserved to die, and Sebastian wasn’t going to be the one to kill any innocent woman that way. Not over Jesse. Kid should’ve been grateful to her, but when he’d finally been lucid enough, first thing he had asked was if she was still breathing, could still line them up in a police station if she was. Like father, like son. At least his uncle had a bit more damn sense than that. But the fact that he had asked at all, that he didn’t remember Sebastian walking her out of that room—that was a good thing. That was about the best news he’d had in a week.

She had been shocked when he hadn’t shot her. Sebastian supposed he couldn’t blame her for that either, considering what he was supposed to have done was very different from what he had done. But it had just felt wrong—with tears on her cheeks, and those words on her lips. Begging him not to kill her. He was not so cold, he was not so heartless. He would not thoughtlessly kill someone, anyone, with those being their last words. Especially not a girl like her.

“Seb?” A voice stirred him, and he realized he’d been brooding a bit more than he should be in public. He looked up, and smirked at the attractive blonde who’d been sent to fetch him—Capozzi’s latest, he’d guess.

“That’d be me,” he confirmed, propping his elbows on the bar as he swiveled around to face her, eyes making an appreciative glance over her young, taut form that made the corner of her lips twitch in a smile, even though she rolled her eyes.

“He’s ready for you,” she told him and sauntered off, swinging her hips suggestively. He lifted a brow and tilted his head, watching her go before pushing himself off the barstool. He knew the way, of course, and pushed open the door that led upstairs, to where Capozzi could be found above the bar, attending to various business. The girl disappeared into another door after glancing back at him, and he chuckled to himself before rapping his knuckles on the door to his boss’s office.