There was a shuffling near the other side of the room, and I looked over to see Mason standing in the doorway.

“How are you holding up?”

I sucked hard on my lip ring when my chin started shaking, and looked back to the wall. How the hell does he think I’m holding up? Rachel’s gone and probably being tortured, and I can’t do anything!

“We’ll find her, Kash.”

Unable to speak yet without breaking down, I nodded my head hard, once. We have to find her, and we have to do it tomorrow. I didn’t care if they’d given her a month to live or not. They also said there would be consequences if there wasn’t progress in two days, and I wasn’t willing to let her find out what those consequences were. Seeing how the possibility of giving the takers what they wanted was slim, finding her was the only other option.

“I love her too, I’ll do anything to get her back.”

“Do you mean that?” I choked out when he turned to leave.

He turned back and gave me an odd look. “Of course I do.”

“They aren’t going to release Juarez.”

“I know,” he said with a sigh.

“Chief told me tonight before I left that I was off this case.”

“Know that too. What are you getting at, Kash?”

I swallowed past the tightness in my throat and shook my head quickly. “We had to do a lot of things in the years that we were in undercover narcotics that I wish I could erase from my memory. But you and I agreed before we ever started, we would do anything to take the fuckers down.”

“Kash . . .”

“And I’ll do anything—anything, Mase—to bring these fuckers down too.”

He stared at me for a few tense moments before responding. “I know what we agreed on, and we’ll do what we always do. But don’t do something stupid. There are a lot of people looking for her. We’ll find her.”

Fear was quickly turning to rage and determination. “Yeah, we will.”

Rachel

WHEN I WOKE AGAIN, there was no dizziness, no need to empty the contents—or lack thereof—of my stomach, no headache, and no sense of how much time had passed. But there was fear, and very vivid memories of being taken.

Kash. My chest ached and tears burned my eyes. He has to know by now that I’m gone. What is he thinking? What is he doing to find me? And I had no doubt that he was trying to find me. I just didn’t know if he would.

Finally opening my eyes to the dark room when a sob tore free from my throat, I covered my face with my hands and curled into a ball on my side before I heard a shuffling noise, and my entire body stilled.

There was someone else in the room with me.

Was it him? The man who had dragged me out of the closet and kept me from escaping the last time I’d woken on this mattress?

I brought my hands down from my face and waited the few torturous seconds while my eyes adjusted to the dark. Even having had my eyes closed for so long, it was still nearly impossible to see anything past my mattress, it was that pitch-black in the room. A large shape came into focus before I was able to make out legs stretched out along the floor and crossed at the ankles, large arms crossed over an equally large chest, and the whites of a set of eyes fixed directly on me.

“Are you awake now?” his low voice rumbled through the room, and for some reason I shrank away from it. “Do you feel up to eating?” When I continued to stay silent, he rose from the floor with a grunt and I watched his shadowed body stretch before turning toward the wall he’d been up against. “Don’t go back to sleep. I’ll be right back.”

A bright light filled the room for the short time it took him to slip out the door, and I immediately bolted off the mattress and headed in the direction of the door. The room went pitch-black again and I felt along the wall for a handle. Beeps sounded—like electronic buttons were being pressed—before a series of short, staccato beeps, and then the sound of his heavy footfalls as he walked away from the door.

I finally found the handle and tried futilely to open the door, even though I knew, deep down, those beeps had been a code to lock the door from the outside. The tears were now falling freely as I alternated slapping my hands against the wall and screaming for help, and trying to open the door. I’d continued my useless attempt to get someone to help me even after I’d fallen to the ground, and after what seemed like half an hour later, the beeps came back and I shot to my feet in preparation.

As soon as the door cracked open, I pushed through it only to be caught by a pair of large arms and walked back into my room as I screamed for anyone to save me.

“Get off me! Someone help!”

He shut the door behind him with a foot and continued walking us both until my feet touched the mattress and he started pushing me down.

Oh God, no! “No, stop! Help me, please!” My body hit the mattress, and he kept his arms on my shoulders as he knelt to the ground beside me and I struggled against him.

“I need you to stay here, and stop fighting against me. If you get out of this room, I promise you there is no one who is going to help you. I can only keep you safe if you stay in here, do you understand me?”

My head was shaking back and forth as I sobbed and fought against him. I’d dealt with Blake and his psychotic claims; I wasn’t about to believe this man.

“Stay here so I can bring you your food.”

His body wasn’t coming closer, but I continued to push against him and struggled to get out from under his strong hold. Without warning, his hands were gone and he was stalking back over to the door. I shot upright, and my mind screamed to make another attempt at getting away from here, but I knew he would bring me right back in. Besides, he only had the door open long enough to bend down and grab something on the other side of the wall before it was shut and he was making his way back to me.

He set something down on the bed next to me and walked quickly away again. “Close your eyes,” he said in warning.

I kept them open.

The light flipped on and I blinked rapidly against it, refusing to cover my eyes for fear of what he would do if I stopped paying attention. When my eyes had finally adjusted, I looked to my left and saw a plate full of chips and a gourmet-looking turkey sandwich. The guy came back to me briefly to set a bottle of water down next to the plate, before retreating to the place and exact position he’d been in when I’d woken up. We stayed just like that for hours.

Him, sitting on the floor in front of the door, watching me.

Me, sitting on the bed with my knees up to my chin, staring directly past his head to the handle of the metal door.

The food untouched.

“GET UP, LET’S GO,” the man ordered the next time I woke up.

Afraid of where he was about to make me go, I stayed on the mattress, staring at my knees, which I had pulled up to my chest.

“You haven’t left this room since I brought you in. I know you need to use a bathroom, so either we go now, or you can wait until tonight.”

I didn’t even know how far away tonight was. I’d just woken up, but I’d been sleeping almost the entire time I’d been here. I desperately wanted to take him up on his offer, but a part of me didn’t want to acknowledge that I needed him for a task as simple as going to the bathroom.

Wait. “Go.” He’s about to take me out of the room! My body began pumping adrenaline at a fast pace as I thought about what this could mean. Forcing my face to not give anything away, I kept my eyes off him as I stood and met him near the door.

“Don’t try anything, and don’t leave my side.” When I didn’t respond, he grabbed my elbow. “Understood?”

I looked up at him, making deliberate eye contact for the first time since I’d woken up here.