My stomach sinks. Rage turns everything red before my eyes, and I close them for a moment while Max takes over the wireless mouse to click on the video file.
“Open it,” Vincent says.
A video comes on, full screen and terrifying, as it gives us a clear camera view of Raina. Her hands are tied behind her back. Disheveled and scared out of her mind, she’s crying as she listens to someone’s instructions.
She nods slowly and clears her throat.
“Fuck,” Vincent whispers.
“My name is Raina Redford,” she says with a trembling voice. I see the fear in her eyes. It tears me apart and makes my blood boiling as I become restless in my seat.
“I am being treated well, and I will continue to be treated well, unless the ransom demand isn’t met. You have twenty-four hours.”
“Where the hell is she?” Max mutters, inching closer as he tries to get a better look at the video, to pick up some kind of details that might clue us in as to her whereabouts.
I can’t see anything useful. She’s sitting in a chair against a plain, white wall. I turn the volume up, hoping for somebackground noise. The lighting looks natural, so there’s a window in that room, likely on the other side of the camera.
The look on her face breaks me.
“If you don’t pay,” she says, tearing up again, “they’ll kill me.”
She’s about to say something else when the video cuts off into a black screen. Rage takes over, and I slam my fist into the desk. The whole thing jiggles and trembles before me as Max and Vincent jump back.
“This can’t be fucking happening!” I snarl.
A split second later, our secretary, Marie, pokes her head through the door. “Is everything okay?” She pauses, then the blood drains from her face as she notes the room’s sudden change in temperature. “What’s wrong?”
“Call Detective Wilcox from Portland PD,” Max quickly instructs her. “Have him transferred to our confidential line ASAP.”
Marie nods and hurries back to her desk.
My blood simmers as I pace the office like a lion trapped in its cage. “This can’t be fucking happening,” I repeat.
“But it is happening,” Vincent replies. He watches the video again and again, and Raina’s terrified voice makes me angrier with each replay, yet I know he’s doing it to analyze the video, to figure something, anything, out. “Someone kidnapped Raina. And they want us to pay five million dollars for her safe return.”
“They don’t mention a safe return,” Max bitterly remarks. “They want five million just to keep her alive.”
“Wilcox will have to go by Portland PD’s protocols,” Vincent says. “That’s time we don’t have. We do have the money, though. I can just transfer it?—”
“Not yet,” I reply. “Get Luke Parrish on the line and give him remote access to my computer. He needs to trace that email back to its original sender.”
“He didn’t have much luck with the previous message,” he reminds me.
“I don’t fucking care. He can go over the video, analyze, whatever the fuck it takes, to get us closer to finding her. We’ll notify Wilcox in the meantime and have him do his job on his end. Everybody needs to do something about this,” I say, shaken to the core.
Max straightens his back and gives me a hard look. “You know this has Jeremy written all over it, right?”
“Yes.”
Which means we’re not about to sit on our hands. Jeremy picked the wrong men to fuck with.
From the moment we came back from the military, Max, Vincent, and I swore we’d put that side of us behind us. We’d put those demons and those wretched memories to rest. The past had to stay in the past in order for us to build a better future. But Jeremy seems hell-bent on dragging our dark side out of the archives.
And he has no idea what his greed and blinding ego have just unleashed.
By the time we reach Bancroft’s main offices at the top of the building their law firm occupies, it’s too late for anyone to react. Moving swiftly, like panthers on a hunt, we spreadout across the bullpen and catch Jeremy just as he walks out of the men’s room.
“Hey, what are you?—”
