Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 54589 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 273(@200wpm)___ 218(@250wpm)___ 182(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54589 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 273(@200wpm)___ 218(@250wpm)___ 182(@300wpm)
Fear is not an emotion I am familiar with on any level, not for a very long time, but fear is a living, breathing beast inside me in this moment. I snatch it up and pull a card from the inside that reads:
A formal meeting will be held at the Allen residence in exactly forty-five minutes.
—Bella
Chapter Nineteen
Tyler
I stare down at that note written in Bella’s delicate script, and the room spins around me. It’s her writing but not her words, which means she was alive when she wrote it and under duress though I have no doubt Bella has a calm head on her shoulders. I have to assume this is some kind of ransom exchange, but if I let myself think too hard, those thoughts are going no place good. Bella has a level head. She’ll be smart. She’ll stay alive. I sink into the cushion of the booth, and I can smell her sweet, floral perfume, realization crashing over me. She was just here. She’s close. I stand up and walk toward the rear exit sign.
“Tyler.”
Dash appears in front of me, inside the hallway I’m about to enter, and one look at my face and he says, “She’s gone.”
“Yes,” I confirm, my voice raw, the words rasping from my throat. “But she’s not been gone for long.” I shove the note at him. “She was just here. I can still smell her perfume. We need to check the area. Now.”
He eyes the note and gives a nod. “Yes, go. I’ll help, but I’m calling Dierk’s men and talking to the staff here.”
I’m already moving, walking down a short hallway, a mix of emotions driving my steps until I exit into the alleyway. I jerk my gaze left and right and there is nothing but a narrow path just big enough for a vehicle, and there’s nothing to be seen. They would have had a car waiting back here. She’s gone. I know she’s gone, but I have to keep looking.
My cellphone rings and I snatch it from my pocket, grappling with razor-sharp emotions mixed with dread as I bring the screen into view to find an “Unknown Caller” identification. Aware this is Bella’s kidnapper, I answer with, “Where is she?”
“Tyler.”
At the sound of Bella’s voice, relief floods the despair I’ve been living with these past two hours and washes it away, if only momentarily. She’s alive. “Bella, baby. Where are you?” I ask, and I swear for the first time in my entire life my voice cracks. “I’ll come get you now.”
“You can’t,” she whispers, and every emotion I feel is magnified by ten with the distress I hear in her voice. “Looking for me is a waste of time too. I’m okay and they want you to go to the meeting.”
They want me to go. She didn’t tell me she wants me to go. “Will you be there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. I’m not harmed. I just want to come home, you know?”
Talk about being punched in the gut. She wants to come home, our home. And I don’t even know how to make it happen. “Baby, you have to come home. I can’t—”
“Don’t. You’re not talking to just me right now. Keep our personal stuff personal. I need you to do that.”
In other words, don’t make her a weakness they can further exploit. “Bella—”
“I have to go,” she says. “And so do you. The meeting starts soon.”
She disconnects.
Chapter Twenty
Bella
Hanging up, my throat is cotton and my belly a bed of blades.
Oliver lifts the phone out of my hand oh so gently, his entire persona that of a gentleman and yet, twenty minutes ago he proved that premise to be nothing but a perfect lie. At present, we’re in the back of a black sedan with an angry-looking man with a smooshed face in the driver’s seat, but back then we were still at the bar, still sitting in that high back booth with drinks and dip in front of us. It had all seemed so very civil.
Then he’d slid a notecard in front of me and offered me a pen. I’d just stared at the pen. “Take it,” he’d ordered in a low voice that had crackled with authority.
I’d felt the strike of his sharpened energy, glanced up, and found his expression uncomfortably indiscernible but his eyes as chilly as an artic night.
At that moment, I’d decided this pen was meant to write my suicide note, and a goodbye to Tyler. I’d shaken my head. “No. No, I don’t think I feel up to taking dictation right now.”
“Take it,” he’d repeated and while his voice had not lifted, a brutal quality had etched in those two words, a bit how I believed a sword would flesh.
I’d taken the pen.
Approval had lit his dark eyes, but nothing about his mood had lightened. “Good,” he’d said, a patronizing quality to his voice that demoted me more to pet than person. “Very good. Now, write what I say.”