Let’s just say that trying to use your feet against someone when you’re wearing a pencil skirt that really tucks in around the knees is nearly impossible. I put it on my list of things never to do again—and then crossed all pencil skirts off my list of wardrobe requirements.
If I got out of this alive, I was never going to wear one of the stupid things again. Cute and flattering, yeah. But far, far more trouble than they were worth when you were in the middle of being kidnapped and needed to use your stilettos as weapons.
I had the brushing thought that this had better never happen to me again, or I was going to be really pissed, but I shoved it to the side and swept forward again with my anger. Anger was where I was at right now, not logic. I needed to get the hell out of here, and anger was the emotion that was going to give me the strength to do it.
I just needed to harness it somehow. Get it to work for me.
“Put. Me. Down!” I shouted, doing my best to make each word louder than the last and working up a really good head of steam.
Which made me wonder… We were making quite a bit of noise now, and this man was literally carrying me down the stairwell with me screaming at him. Where the hell were his neighbors? Where was the sweet old lady who came running out of her apartment in her curlers, demanding to know what was going on out here and why we were making such a ruckus? Shouldn’t there have been some concern for a woman clearly screaming her head off?
Then I remembered who I was with—and where. I lived in a gorgeous area of San Jose, but not all the neighborhoods were like that. And if this guy, the so-called Jack, was truly some sort of career kidnapper, then he probably didn’t live on the right side of the tracks. So to speak. Maybe the neighbors didn’t believe in looking into ruckus…es. Ruckesi? Rucki?
What the fuck. I was trying to pluralize nouns now, when I was in the midst of being kidnapped?!
Jack hadn’t responded to my request, so I decided to take the next step. I reached up and slightly behind me, found one of his ears, and twisted.
And at that, he did put me down. Dropped me, in fact, right on my butt on the pavement. Which hurt quite a bit—but also meant that I was free.
I was just struggling to my feet—also very difficult in that stupid, hellish skirt and the heels I would be throwing out the moment I found a garbage can—ready to run like hell for the nearest cop car, when his hands came down, grabbed me beneath the armpits, and shoved me into a van I hadn’t even noticed until right then. He took the time to grab the purse that I’d still had over my shoulder—which I’d completely forgotten about up in the apartment, when we’d been too busy with the whole make-out session to really get comfortable—and then slammed the door behind me.
A moment later, he was struggling into the driver’s side of the van, one hand on his ear, and slamming his own door. He turned around, his face a mixture of frustration and apology, and gestured me forward.
“Passenger seat,” he muttered. “There aren’t any seats back there and I want you to have a seatbelt.”
I snorted. “You’ve just kidnapped me and threatened to hold me for ransom, but you want me to put on a seatbelt? Though I guess that makes sense. Awfully hard to ransom someone who’s already dead, isn’t it? And I bet you’d get in a whole lot of trouble with your—what do you call them, clients?—if you killed me in a car accident.”
He pressed his lips together and narrowed his eyes at me, then got out of the seat and shuffled back into the cargo compartment, where I was sitting on my ass and trying to kill him with the lightning bolts I was shooting from my eyes.
That whole death-glare thing wasn’t working so great. Yet. But I was still trying to figure out how to optimize it.
When he got to me, he dropped down to his knees at my side and pulled out a key. I jerked away from him, but he grabbed at me, shoved the key into the handcuffs, and turned it, freeing me.
“I’m not the one ransoming you,” he said roughly. “I was just paid to take you to the people who are. As long as you’re with me, you’ll be safe. And part of that safety is sitting in a seat with a seatbelt. If you please.”
“Safe?” I hissed. “You’re taking me to people who want to hold me for ransom! How safe do you think that actually is? You don’t strike me as the I sort, Jack.” I put emphasis on that last word, not believing for a moment that it was his real name—and he seemed to recognize that.
“Jack is my real name,” he said, lifting me up again and shoving me toward the seat in question. “I don’t have any reason to lie to you about that. And you’ll be perfectly safe. My bosses have already done their research. They know how much you’re worth. They also know that you don’t have that much hard cash yourself—but that your company does. Be good, keep that smart mouth of yours shut, and your company will make the exchange. Then you can go home to your little girl. No harm done.”
I dropped into the seat he’d shoved me toward, my eyes on him the entire time, and reached for the seatbelt. Then, instead of grabbing it, I grabbed for the door, jerking on the handle and ready to run once more.
But the handle was stuck. The door was locked, I realized, and when my hand shot up to find the lock, I found that it didn’t exist at all.
Jack reached over, pushed me back in the seat, and then made quick work of buckling me in, his eyes on mine the entire time.
“You won’t get out that door, or the one behind you,” he told me coldly. “I’m not stupid, and this isn’t my first time. You’re stuck here, Alice, and if you do as I tell you, then I can keep you safe. Misbehave, though, and there will be trouble. If not for you, then for the people you love. Keep that in mind.”
And without another word, he grabbed my phone out of my purse and turned it off, then turned on the van and took it squealing out of the parking space it had been sitting in, his eyes on the road ahead of us.
My eyes stayed on the parking lot for as long as I could see it—and the shoe I’d left behind.
Chapter 9
Jack
I saw it the moment she finally figured out that there wasn’t anything she could do right now. The moment she realized that although she might be able to run circles around me intellectually—and was probably working on how to do it right this very second—my clients also knew who she was. Which meant they knew where her kid was… and how to get to her.
I saw it the moment Alice realized that if she made one wrong move, it could mean her daughter’s life.
And though part of me was relieved that she’d stop fighting me, there was also a part of me that felt deeply disturbed about what I was doing.
And who I was doing it to.
I hadn’t lied when I told her this wasn’t my first time. Hell, this wasn’t even my first time doing it for these specific clients. We’d pulled several jobs together in the past, and they’d always gone off without a hitch. I mean, relatively speaking. I snagged the target, the calls were made, the clients got their money and the target got to go home without a scratch on them. Easy peasy.
Relatively speaking.
The problem was, none of those targets had ever meant much to me.
I know, I know, I’d known this woman for what, like four hours, tops? Barely enough time to get her eye color secured in my memory—brown with hints of amber in it—much less figure out whether she was a good person or not. I didn’t know anything more than what I’d read in the bio, really. I mean, if you didn’t count all the things she’d told me when we were sitting in that bar. All the laughs she’d let slip, all the secrets about her past.