His best friend didn’t seem to respond, falling back into that restless, twitchy slumber. Ghost and Tessa left the room, but Tessa didn’t let him get far.
“That’s the second time he’s mentioned gates,” she told Ghost. “There’s got to be something there.”
Ghost was thinking the same thing, but he had no idea what it meant. Where would there be something with gates that would be suitable for holding people against their will? He frowned down at the five-foot-two doctor. “What if it wasn’t gates he was seeing? What if it wasbars?”
Tessa’s eyes flew up as she cocked her head. “Like a cage?”
“Could be,” Ghost nodded, feeling the first sparks of hope in nearly five days. He needed to get back to Keys. “Somewhere with light shining through.” Like those depictions of Heaven with tall gates sitting on fluffy clouds surrounded by golden light.
Tessa did not seem to feel the same growing excitement as Ghost did. “You do realize the possibilities of somewhere like that are endless, right? That’s so vague.”
Ghost didn’t care. He’d search every place on a list Keys gave him, no matter how many places or how long the list. Hefinallyhad a starting point, and he wouldn’t stop. Not until Becks was back in his arms.
“You lying bitch!”
Becks cried out, bringing her arms up to protect her face against the next punch. She’d gotten her wish. They’d releasedLiam the night before last. Her deception had worked…until it hadn’t.
Yesterday, Cameron had spent the day making Becks ‘pretty’. They let her take an actual shower before Cameron did her hair and makeup in a style that Cameron called ‘passible presentable’ and Becks called ‘raccoon whore’.
Then they traveled four and a half hours away in a car that was neither Cameron’s Camry nor Ritchie’s Camaro. Becks’ hands had been bound with fuzzy pink handcuffs behind her back for the entire drive. For the first time in five days, Becks had been grateful they hadn’t been shoving food and water down her throat, because she was fairly certain they weren’t stopping for bathroom breaks. Then again, if she’d peed herself, maybe it would have forced them to stop, because there was no way they could have walked her into that bank with pee-soaked pants.
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, though, and Becks had been concentrating on breathing through her panic rather than spy movie-worthy escape attempts.
At the bank, which was an out of state branch of hers, the two marched Becks inside as casually as two people could when one was high on coke and the other was dreaming of her new beach house on a non-extradition country’s beach. Becks had been all prepared to mouth ‘help me’ to the security guard, but the man never even looked up from his fucking newspaper. Then it was their turn at the counter.
Ritchie had Cameron stay back while he took Becks up to the counter.“My fiancée would like to make a withdrawal, please,” he’d said in a sweet voice. Becks had flinched, because it reminded her of the tone he used to use on her.“And since we haven’t set up our new account yet, it’d be helpful if we could get it in a cashier’s check too.”
Her compliance wasn’t just out of holding up her end of the deal. She wasn’tthatgood of a person. For the first time, she wasout in public with her kidnappers, and she had every intention of gettingsomeone’sattention that could help her. But Ritchie’s hand around her waist and over her hip wasn’t just there as a show of affection to their audience.
In his sleeve was a syringe, filled to the brim with heroin. Becks knew from watching them inject Liam for four days that it was easily three times the dose they’d given her brother. And if Ritchie so much as suspected she was trying to get away or to signal to someone to get the police, he would inject her with it. Becks didn’t know enough about heroin usage to know if he was lying or not when he said it would kill her in seconds, and she wasn’t willing to take that chance.
The woman at the counter smiled at them like she thought they were a lovely couple. She’d been mid-sentence in asking Becks for her ID—which Becks only just then realized she did not have—when the woman paused to read something on her screen. Unfortunately, her large glasses reflected the large letters right back to Becks and Ritchie.
STALL
Ritchie took Becks’ arm, and pulled her from the bank so quickly, Becks broke a heel over the threshold. Cameron was slower to follow, and ended up kicking the security guard, who finally got off his ass, in the balls to make her escape. Sirens echoed in the distance as Ritchie pulled his car out of the parking lot.
From there, Ritchie had taken them into the mountains. He ditched the car and the burner phones he and Cameron had been using to communicate. Now they were at a rundown campground with wooden structures that barely counted as a rustic cabin.
Cameron would not stop bitching about the lack of indoor plumbing. Through the night, every noise Becks heard, she prayed was the roar of motorcycles approaching, but it was either thunder, a branch snapping in the distance, or a plane passing by overhead. Ritchie had dumped out a shit ton of white powder on the card table the campground called a kitchen table, used a credit card to make practiced lines, and then snorted line after line up his nose.
Unlike when they had injected Liam, though, Ritchie was now a hyper-ball of energy. He kept punching the air, letting out war cries, and pacing like he was a caged animal. The worst part, though, was when he threatened her with that needle. She had no idea if it was the same syringe that they’d used on Liam, though she doubted these two cared that much about infection. Then again, if there really was that much heroin in there to kill her in seconds, infection would be the least of her worries.
“Who did you tell? Why did they want the teller to stall? I shouldn’t have run! I could have taken them! Taken them all! Weak pussy bikers, they have no idea who they’re dealing with! It would have been easy. Bring them on! And the police. I’ll take them on too!”
Ritchie’s ramblings continued on and on, until Cameron threw a toaster oven that looked circa 1950s at his head. Becks didn’t care. Let them fight, and not pay attention to her. She’d stay on her corner cot and listen… Because she had no doubt that that message had come from Keys. Which meant he knew where she’d been, and that meant the club was coming.
Something was different about Ritchie the next morning. Even high on cocaine, Ritchie was calculating and charismatic. But by the time the sun rose, and Becks started to rouse, he was short-tempered, fidgety, and erratic.
He got it into his head to borrow the campground owner or manager’s laptop. Becks wasn’t sure how he pulled that one off,but then again, she wasn’t sure the owner was all that caring, so long as Ritchie lined his pocket with cash.
Though she was nowhere near as presentable as the day before, Ritchie got it into his head that he could video call a former client to make a wire transfer from Becks’ account to his. The client argued with him for close to ten minutes before finally hanging up. Apparently that wasn’t how bank transfers worked.
Cameron and Ritchie started fighting, shouting at each other, and even threw the occasional punch. It took Becks far too long to realize that neither one was paying any attention to her. As slowly as she could, Becks closed the laptop, waited a few seconds to see if they noticed, and then stood. Again, neither one made any indication that they saw her.
She picked up the laptop, and waited. Heart hammering, she watched as the stepsiblings started shoving at one another like they were on an elementary school playground.
She backed towards the door. They were surrounded by woods and the very unhelpful owner, but he was still a person and a witness. Maybe he would even have a phone. She’d have to call her own because she didn’t have any other numbers memorized, but she had to believe that Keys was monitoring her calls too. Somehow, he’d found her at the bank. And if the owner did not help her, then she would use the laptop. Maybe it was stupid to take, but it was the closest thing she had to her and it could also be turned into a makeshift weapon.
