“Never told you? How long were you there for?”
“About six months.”
“Jesus.” He cleared his throat. “Your videos weren’t like the one we saw of Nick. You weren’t wounded, and you didn’t…. you didn’t struggle like he did.”
A snake seemed to crawl in my guts. “What you saw was recorded after I’d been there for a while. I stopped struggling by that point.” As would Nick.
Hayden leaned forward, tension in his features. “When I got the email with your videos, you let me believe you did them willingly.”
Anger warmed my face. “I didn’tletyou believe anything—I just asked you to let it go, to pretend you didn’t see them.”
“And then you told me to leave, that we’re done.”
“I seem to remember a few more words being thrown during that fight.”
Whoever sent him those videos had done so as a warning to me—there was no other explanation. I was dating a detective, and though I’d never been forbidden from doing so, I should have known better.
Had Nick been taken because of me? But why? He had nothing to do with the police.
“I need to know everything, Jonah.”
Of course he did. “You’re putting both of us in danger.”
“How? They can’t be interested in you after all this time.”
I snorted. “Is that why you got those videos of me? Is that why I still have this?” I put my foot on the bench and raised my pant leg.
“What am I looking at?”
I took his hand and placed it on the back of my calf. “Press.”
He did, his eyes narrowing. “Is this…?”
“A tracking device.”
He pulled away as if I’d burned him.
I lowered my leg. “The years that passed mean nothing.”
He lowered his voice. “Can they hear us?”
I shook my head, but it wasn’t like I knew for sure. “It can’t be that sophisticated, though I had it replaced a few years ago.”
“Why would they need to track you?”
“I must stay within the borders of LA. This mountain is pretty much as far as I can go.”
He let my words sink in. “Is that why you didn’t want to join me on a trip to Phoenix?”
“Yes.”
Hayden rubbed his face, paler than I had ever seen him. “Were you ever going to tell me any of this, or were you going to make excuses every time I asked you to leave LA with me?”
I deserved his heated questions. I had been unfair to him from the start, though my plan had been to eventually change that. “I was going to tell you around this time. I first needed to be sure that…” That he loved me more than he loved being a cop, and that he would put aside his duty and let me live my life how I saw fit. “Never mind.”
“We should get the tracker removed,” Hayden said after we were quiet for a while. “Maybe they put it there to scare you, as a type of mind control.”
“I tried to disappear a year after they let me go, and it took them about a week to track me down and drag me back.”
