The hand on her arm tightened again, warning.
“What? Tess, what are you talking about? Who?—”
“Andy—” Her voice broke on his name, guilt flaring hot and immediate. She couldn’t stop it. “Please.”
Something barked behind her—one sharp word she couldn’t make out, the scrape of a boot against concrete. The phone shifted in the man’s hand.
“Tess,” Andy said urgently. “Where are you? Tell me where you are.”
She opened her mouth.
Nothing came out.
Static crackled through the line—or maybe that was just her breath rushing too loud in her ears. The phone was pulled away from her before she could try again.
The call ended.
The silence afterward was brutal.
She sagged back against the wall, her heart racing and lungs burning as if she’d just run for her life instead of speaking a handful of sentences. Tears stung her eyes beneath the hood, but she blinked them back hard. Crying would only make this worse.
The deeper voice exhaled slowly.
“Good,” he said, satisfied. “That’ll keep him moving.”
Her stomach twisted.
Footsteps retreated. Somewhere nearby, a chair scraped across the floor, and someone sat as if this was business as usual.
Tess pressed her head back against the cold wall, shaking despite herself.
Andy knew now.
He knew she was alive. He knew she was in danger. And she had just told him—out loud, with her own voice—to do whatever these men demanded.
The guilt was a physical thing, heavy and crushing in her chest.
Andy, what did you do?
She didn’t need to hear anything else to understand. She was leverage. A deadline. A threat delivered in human form.
Flexing her fingers slowly behind her back, she fought the numbness and the fear that wanted to pull her apart piece by piece.
She couldn’t warn him.
She couldn’t help him.
All she could do now was survive long enough for him—or someone—to make the right move.
Even if every word she spoke earned her nothing but pain and the echo of “shut the hell up” in the dark.
It’d been a hell of a day, starting with an Amber Alert for a little girl that hijacked their morning. The arrest of the nanny’s boyfriend and the flood of follow-up interviews and paperwork that came after had already started to blur. Even the press briefing—once the girl was safely back in her parents’ arms—had faded into background noise.
Now that the chaos was over, he could focus on what would easily be the best part of his day.
Dinner. With Tess.
Thoughts of her kept drifting in whenever his attention wavered. Images of Tess relaxing on the beach house’s back porch, the ocean stretching out before her, and the quiet promise of an evening that didn’t ask anything of him except to show up.
