“Help you what? Die faster when he shows up and you’re trying to escape?”
A door opened, spilling light into the room. A dark, backlit figure stepped in and slapped on the light switch. Overhead fluorescents hummed to life, nearly blinding me with pain.
“You piece of shit,” I said as Luke stepped into the room.
He glared at me. “You think you’re some hotshot do-gooder with your college degree and nonprofit. But I know where you’re from. I know what happened to your mom. Where are your goddamn manners? Is that any way to treat the man who took a chance and gave your loser brother a job?”
I looked pointedly across the room at Ben, who looked even worse than I felt, with a colorful collection of fading bruises under new, darker ones. “I didn’t realize that was how you treated your employees, or he never would have taken it. You broke into the preschool, didn’t you?”
Luke shrugged. “Not me personally.”
“Why would you do something like that? It’s a safe place for little kids. Why would you take that from them?”
“I didn’t. I took it from you because you need to remember where you came from. You blocked my number, and this little fucker stole from me. I’ve had about as much disrespect as I can take.”
This was crazy. Who the hell did he think he was? Some kind of mob boss? But then his words sank in, and my gaze snapped back to Ben, whose stoic expression gave nothing away. “What’s he talking about?”
“This is my mistake,” Ben said, his eyes fixed on Luke. “I haven’t told her shit. You can still let her walk away.”
“Mistake?” Luke scoffed, his face turning an unnatural shade of red that made me want to run and hide. “You think stealing from me is a mistake?”
“What did he steal?” I asked, jumping in to divert his attention away from Ben.
Luke focused back on me, and, as I’d hoped, a little of the fury drained from his face, replaced with amusement. “A bag of fent.”
It took my mind a moment to register the street name, but when it did, I wanted to fly across the room and slap my brother. “Fentanyl? You stole fentanyl from your boss?” My attention whipped back to Luke. “What sort of operation are you running here that you have bags of fent lying around?”
Luke’s chuckle sent goosebumps across my skin. “The profitable kind. Which is why I can’t let shit like this stand.”
“I came to my senses and was putting it back when your guys caught me,” Ben pleaded. “Nothing was actually taken.”
“You got away that time, but I knew how to get you.” Luke’s mouth drew tight as he looked me over. “All we had to do was bait the trap. Once we had your sister, you stormed in here like some lone dumbass FBI agent, making it possible to solve this problem once and for all.”
There was a knock on the door, and a man poked his head in. “You ready for us yet, boss?”
“Yeah. Come on in.” Luke waved two men in. The second was carrying a ten-foot roll of plastic.
The first one grabbed the chair I was zip-tied to and dragged it across the cement floor, making my teeth rattle in time with my head. Once he positioned me next to Ben, he helped the first guy cover part of the floor and the back wall with plastic.
“So, you’re just gonna kill us?” I asked, trying to come to grips with the realization that my life was about to end up just like my mom’s, taken by a man who’d broken my trust.
Despite the near-paralyzing terror of my and my brother’s impending doom, all I could think about was Landon. I shouldn’t care if he screwed Peach. All my signals had been neon “fuck off” signs, so I had no right to feel jealous.
But I thought he was different.
“All that flirting didn’t mean anything, did it?” I asked.
Luke, not Landon, sneered back at me. “Did you really think it did?”
Having nothing more to say to the asshat, I focused on my brother. “I love you, Ben.”
There was so much more to tell him, but we were running out of time. Our captors situated us side by side on the tarp, still bound to our chairs, and the gun in Luke’s hand made it clear he was done messing around.
“Your ego can’t seriously be this fragile.” I frowned at the gun, not trying to provoke him, but my fear had me straddling the line of sanity, and I could see my end in his eyes. “Shooting us while we’re tied down… you have to be a horrible shot.”
He leveled a pistol at my brother, and all teasing fell from my tone.
“I’m sorry, Luke. Whatever you want. We can fix this.”
