Text (Take It Off) (5 page)

Nathan

Someone beat her. Someone used their hands—their fists—as weapons to inflict pain on her. She was small. I don’t know why her slight frame bothered me so much. Maybe it was because it didn’t match the determination, the absolute stubbornness buried deep in her icy blue eyes.

I laid the phone in my lap and looked across the table at the man whose phone I was getting texts from.
At first I thought he was playing a prank. But I watched him. He wasn’t holding a phone. He didn’t occasionally glance down at his lap like it was lying there. Lex’s hands remained above the table on his cards at all times.

He didn’t look like the kind of man that would kidnap a woman, beat her, dump her in the center of the woods
, and then drive to a poker game and have beer with the boys.

Yeah, and everyone thought Ted Bundy was nice.

He caught me looking at him and I forced myself to smile. “You gonna fold or raise?” I said, pretending like I was only looking at him because of the game.

He smiled and took
a pull of beer. “I’ll raise,” he said confidently and threw some chips in the center of the table. I didn’t even pay attention to how much he threw in.

How could someone just sit there and act like they didn’t have some hideous secret? How could he sit there and act like he wasn’t worth the scum on my shoe
?

Questions like that usually had no answers. Answers a sane man wouldn’t understand. I learned a long time ago, in the center of a warzone, that actions spoke louder than words. A man could open his mouth and spew forth a bunch of pretty lies and no one would think twice, yet that same man would then come back hours later with machine guns and homemade bombs and totally obliterate the ones he fooled just hours before.

I learned the hard way not to trust outward appearances.

I glanced back down at the phone hidden in my lap. The screen had gone dark. But it didn’t matter. Her image
—her face—was seared in my brain.

Dark, tangled hair, blue eyes, one of them swollen shut, a bloody lip
, and huddling against a very dark backdrop. It was almost like she was sitting in the center of a vast pit of nothing— waiting for its chance to swallow her whole.

Something about that image
—about her face—haunted me. It stirred up feelings deep in my gut that I didn’t expect.

Could I trust her appearance?

Could I trust that text? Was it some sort of sick game? A trick?

“Nate,” the man on my right said. “In or out?”

I glanced at the cards in my hand. I had a royal straight flush. I could take this game. I could have all the money piled in the center.

“Fold,” I said, shaking my head like I was mad at my lousy hand. I didn’t have time for this and I didn’t want the attention of winning. Not here. Not right now.
I hadn’t been wrong when I said I was lucky tonight, except now it seemed luck wasn’t the only thing I had tonight.

One of my buddies clapped me on the back. I grunted and pushed away from the table, tucking my phone in my back pocket. “I need another beer after that shitty hand.”

As the game continued, I walked toward the small wooden bar. I pulled out another Miller Light and looked up. Above the bar was a medium-sized flat screen showing sport highlights. The coverage clicked off and a news bulletin crossed the screen.

The search for twenty
-one-year-old Mary Greenberg is still underway. There have been no new leads or sightings since she was reported missing just over one month ago.

A picture of a blond
-haired woman with brown eyes and an innocent smile flashed onto the screen. My eyes went right to the image and got stuck there.

It wasn’t her face that held me captive.

It was what was hanging around her neck—a locket with a red gem in the center.

The girl in the picture
on my phone was holding up a necklace exactly like the one on the TV screen.

What were the odds they would both have identical necklaces?

Two missing girls, one necklace.

There was something else I learned during my time at war. There were no coincidences.

I turned away from the TV and leaned against the bar, pretending interest in the card game. Casually, I pulled out my phone and called up the photo, staring hard at her image.

What’s your name?
I finally texted. I needed a name to go with her face. It didn’t seem right that someone could affect me so much when I didn’t even know her name.

Honor Calhoun.

Honor.
I liked that name. It was strong. It was unexpected. I wasn’t going to ignore those texts. I couldn’t. If I did, it would haunt me for the rest of my life. I didn’t need anymore ghosts.

I’m going to get you out of there
, Honor.

It was a promise. It was a vow. I never broke a promise. And I never left a man (or woman) behind.

I’m scared.

Those two words did something to me. She could have said a million other things. But she chose those two words. Two words that made her even more vulnerable than
clearly she already was. I swallowed past the lump in my throat as my fingers moved over the keypad.

I know. We’re going to figure this out.

What’s your name?

Nathan.

Someone at the table whooped with joy, and I heard the sliding of a pile of chips across the table. It was Lex. I felt my lip curl in contempt as my body filled up with suppressed rage and adrenaline. I could just beat her location out of him.

I had ways of persuasion that would surely work.

But something inside me whispered to hold back. That a beating was letting this sicko off easy. If what I suspected was true, then he hadn’t just kidnapped one woman, but at least two… and if he did it twice, I had no doubt there was a string of violated and dead bodies behind him and plans for more in the future.

This guy deserved something far worse than just a beating.

Besides, Honor had been stuck God knows where for God knows how long. She was probably cold and hungry, and from the looks of her, I knew she was injured.

I s
et the still full beer on the bar and tucked my phone into my pocket. “Sorry, guys, I gotta head out.”

“So soon?” one of the guys said, glancing at me.

“Yeah, someone from work texted me, needed me to fill in for duty tomorrow all day.” I lied. I didn’t have to stand duty for another two weeks.

“That sucks
.”

“You’re telling me,” I drawled. That wasn’t a lie. Duty sucked. I had to go sit at the desk all day and night, do patrols around the facility
, and answer the phone in case messages came down and needed to be passed to the higher ranks I worked with. It was boring. It was endless. It was part of the job.

“
Gotta go get my beauty sleep,” I cracked. “I’ll see you next week? Same time, same place?” I asked, stopping beside the table and glancing at Lex.

“Absolutely, man
,” replied Patton. He was the one who introduced me to these weekly poker games. I was starting to rethink my decision of ever coming.

“Just don’t let Lex bring the beer
next time. We need that shit on time,” I said, grinning at Lex. I hoped it looked more friendly than I felt.

Lex grunted. “A guy runs late
one
time,” he muttered while he dealt a new hand of cards to everyone at the table. All the guys laughed.

“I sent you a text
, man. Did you get it?” I said, watching closely for his reaction. I hadn’t seen his phone in his hands all night. Now I knew why. Part of me hoped he would pull it out of his pocket and check it for the missed message. Part of me hoped I really was wrong about what I was thinking. I couldn’t think of anyone who would want to be right.

He made a face, like he didn’t know what I was talking about. He reached around to his back pocket where I assume
d he sought out his phone. I watched the alarm pass through his eyes as he patted his pockets a little more furiously.

Interesting.

He stood and reached into the front pocket of his jeans. They were empty too. His eyes flashed up, meeting mine. I recognized the look that lay deep within. Panic and fear.

Well, shit. If that wasn’t guilt
, then I wasn’t a Marine. A little surge of unease rippled through me. Would he know Honor had it? Would he leave here and go seek her out? Would he punish her for what I said?

Maybe I should have said nothing at all.

But I had to be sure… I had to be sure that this fucker really was guilty as sin.

And now I knew.

I forced myself to smile, not wanting to let on that I suspected a thing. “Probably fell out of your pocket on the way over here. It’s probably in your car.”

He relaxed
, a relieved look crossing his features. “Yeah, probably.”

“My damn phone is always disappearing on me. Too bad it hadn’t disappeared tonight before I got called in to stand duty.”

Lex laughed. “Yeah, I think I’ll enjoy my break without it and look for it later.”

I offered him the beer I hadn’t even bothered to take a sip of. “Refill?”

He took it and smiled. “Hell, yeah.”

After a few
jokes, I made my way out of the house and walked toward my Wrangler. It was olive green with a black top.

I sat in the dark inside my Jeep for several minutes, making sure that Lex hadn’t been faking his relief, making sure he didn’t rush out into the driveway to search his truck for his phone.

As I waited, I called up the picture on my phone once more and stared down at the photo. Even beaten and scared, she was beautiful.

Once I was sure Lex wasn’t going to be rushing away from the poker game
, I fired up the Jeep’s engine.

Give me all the details about where you are
,
I texted and slid the phone into a cup holder behind the gear shift.

I knew it would likely take a few minutes for her to reply. She must be somewhere with a shitty signal. I
put the Jeep in gear and pulled out onto the road.

I had somewhere to be.

Honor

He threw me in a hole in the woods,
I texted, desperately searching my brain for any kind of detail that would help save my life.

In the dark of the hole, I crouched, gripping the phone like it was my entire uni
verse and desperately awaiting Nathan’s reply.

None came.

I brought up the screen and peered down at the message. It had a red exclamation point beside it. The message hadn’t sent.

“Damn it!” I yelled, pissed at the shitty cell service. Pissed at being tossed into a hole like yesterday’s garbage.

My entire body hurt, my fingers and toes had gone numb from the cold, and a different type of exhaustion was beginning to cloak my entire body. I knew I couldn’t surrender. I knew I had to fight.

Why did fighting have to be so damn hard?

I forced myself to stand up, to walk around the small hole, sticking close to the sides and walking in circles. I was like a hamster running on a wheel but never getting anywhere.

I needed to generate all the warmth I could. Thankfully, it wasn’t winter, but it was fall, and at night the temperatures here dropped. I was only wearing a pair of spandex running capris, sneakers (with socks), a white Under Armour T-shirt, and a fitted hot-pink jacket.

It wasn’t enough protection against the elements at night or trapped in a damp hole. As I walked, I pulled out the phone and glanced at the screen. The battery was still less than half, but at least it wasn’t dangerously close to dying. I kept my eye on the signal bars as I moved, hoping I would eventually move into a spot where there was something I could use.

About ten minutes later, one lone bar appeared.

I stopped walking and kept my feet planted on the ground. I didn’t bother to shoot off another text, not just yet. Instead, I redialed 9-1-1.

The phone rang.

“9-1-1, please state your emergency.”

I sagged in relief. “My name is Honor Calhoun. I was kidnapped. I’m being held in the woods.”

The woman started to talk and then line went dead.

I screamed, my throat feeling raw and the force of my yell causing pain in my ribs. Tears blurred my vision, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t need to see down here. I was trapped, alone, in nothing but a dirt hole where I was to await some hideous fate.

Had my luck with the phone run out? As the night wore on, would the darkness chase away the slim signal I’d been clinging to since I pulled out this phone?

Dread was a hard knot that settled in the pit of my stomach. I glanced at it again. Still no signal. I thought about Nathan. About where he was. If he thought I was dead because I never replied
, would he give up on me?

Dear God, don’t let him give up.