“They have her.” I snarl before he can speak.
“I know.” Chase’s tone is solemn. “The camera you planted? It’s moving. She’s not at the property anymore.”
The camera. The tiny device I hid in her headboard.
“She grabbed it?” My voice cracks.
“Must have. When they took her.” A pause. “It’s not transmitting video, but it’s still pinging. Van’s tracking the signal now.”
Clever girl. Even terrified, even being dragged out of that bed by Kozlov’s men, she thought to take it.
She’s fighting. She’s giving me a way to find her.
Through the bond, I feel her: terrified, furious, and underneath it all, reaching for me. Calling for me. She knows I’m coming.
“Where are they taking her?” I demand, but the two broken men at my feet just shake their heads.
Clearly, Dimitri didn’t share that information. They’re too low down on the food chain.
Pavel’s phone buzzes again. Another message. This time, an image.
Despite the feeling of nausea that rolls in my gut, I open it.
Emma, bound to a chair, a gag between her lips, and mascara streaking down her cheeks. Behind her, there’s a blurred shape of a man adjusting a camera on a tripod, and in the corner of the frame, Mrs. Ashworth is standing in the doorway, her elegant hand resting on her husband’s shoulder as he leers at my mate, her wedding ring glinting in the harsh light.
My vision turns red.
Chase is still talking. Something about using the signal to triangulate her location.
“Send me the picture.” He demands, and robotically, I do, but nothing else he says to me gets through, as my bear tests my control to its absolute limits, demanding I step back and let him take over. But all he’ll do is wreak violence.
I need to find her first. Vengeance can come later.
“What the hell... what are you?” Pavel stares at me as I struggle to fight back the shift, my skin rippling, body swelling, and my bones cracking.
“Bodhi, stay with me.”
I can hear Chase’s voice, tiny and distant, but the words don’t register. Nothing registers except the image burned into my retinas and the roar of blood in my ears.
“Bodhi. Wait. We’re twenty minutes out.”
The phone slips from my hand, falling with a dull thud onto the damp ground.
Pavel is trying to crawl away. He drags himself across the gravel, whimpering, leaving a smear of blood from his shattered wrist, and something cold and final settles in my chest.
Chase thinks they aren’t worth it.
My bear thinks he’s wrong.
24
EMMA
The sedan’s engine cuts off, leaving nothing but the kind of silence that exists only in the deepest wilderness. No traffic hum or distant voices, no city sounds at all, just the whisper of wind through towering pines, and the occasional crack of settling wood.
The absence of human noise is so complete it makes my ears ring. That and the abject terror that’s had me in its grip since Dimitri and Kozlov dragged me from my room and told me we were taking a little trip.
Alone. Without Bodhi.
