I checked my watch, wishing I could leave Lord’s Cricket Ground right now, but I knew I had at least another hour here. Ivan had just finished announcing the archery and the media crew was done with their telecast, but the stands were still being cleared, and I knew that would take some time. I was giving my cousin the personal treatment, the same as I did for members of the royal family, and so far, so good. The men’s individual elimination had proved no great surprise, and I could think of nothing I wanted more than to get home to my girl, and back into her good graces. I had some humble pie being served to me this evening and I was good with that.
Ivan was making his way over to me when my mobile went off. I hoped it was Brynne. She’d never replied to my text from earlier. I smiled when I saw her name . . . but I read what she had typed in her message.
And then my whole world collapsed.
I can’t do this anymore with u. Ethan, u killed us last nite. My Old life is what I want back now . . . I don’t love u anymore . . . and not having ur baby either. I’m goin home where I want to be left alone . . . don’t come after me an don’t Phone me! Get some help, ethan, I think u need It desperately.—Brynne
I don’t remember how I got out of there. I know Ivan was with me so he must have helped. My dad showed up later too. I wanted to get home because the GPS told me that Brynne was at home. The last signal from her mobile registered from my flat. Our flat.
She wasn’t at the flat, though.
When I discovered her engagement ring and her mobile lying at the bottom of Simba’s tank, I wanted to curl up and die. It was a message loud and clear. A brutally painful and cruel one, but one I understood implicitly.
Our first meeting had been in the aquarium shop, even though neither one of us knew it at the time. Brynne had seen Simba before she’d ever met me. We had started with Simba. And we would end with Simba as well. How fitting.
The situation made absolutely no sense, though. My emotional side wanted to give up, but my pragmatic side still fought for reason in what was a colossal clusterfuck. Last night had been bad, sure, but worthy of a breakup? Hardly. Brynne was not cruel. If anything, she was softer-hearted than most people. And she was very honest. If she wanted out, she would have told me in person, never in something so impersonal as a text message. The text was not her style at all. She also told me she’d never give me another “Waterloo.” True, she hadn’t actually written the word in her text, but she promised she would never take off and leave like that ever again.
Len didn’t even know Brynne was gone from the flat. He told me he let the bloke from Fountaine’s into my office to service the tank at four o’clock as scheduled. At about five-thirty, Brynne texted him and asked him to run down to Hot Java and get her the special masala chai she liked to have now that she was pregnant. Len left for the coffee shop, but while he was queued up she rang him and told him not to bother with the tea, since I was on my way home and had already picked something up for her. Len told us that when he returned to the flat, the bloke from Fountaine’s appeared to have finished the job and let himself out. He could hear the water running in the bathroom and assumed Brynne was in having a shower.
I got ahold of Annabelle, and she relayed an account of a perfectly normal Brynne excited to look at some wedding-favor samples that had arrived. I found her wedding veil folded carefully in a bag. That didn’t make sense to me. Why would she be excited to look at wedding favors if she was leaving me? Why did she have her veil out? I’d even found her periwinkle dress laid out on the bed as if she was choosing what to wear for dinner. Why would she lay out clothing for a date if she was planning to leave? The part about how she wasn’t going to have my baby was all wrong too. Brynne wanted it. She wouldn’t get rid of our child. She already loved our baby as a mother does. I knew this in my heart, no matter what her text said.
The other thing that got me really suspicious was that the security cam at the door had glitched out during the time Len was down at the coffee shop. During the same window of time in which Brynne had to have exited the flat, and when the aquarium service had supposedly let themselves out. Those kind of coincidences just didn’t occur in real life. They only happened on television.
I rang up Fountaine’s and asked who they had sent out to do the service call on Simba’s tank.
Their reply turned the blood in my veins to ice, stopped it dead on its way to my heart.
“Mr. Blackstone rang us this morning to reschedule his service, sir.”
That is when I knew that the person who’d sent the photos of Brynne and me in front of Fountaine’s had been in the fucking shop. He had followed us around London and stood there in the shop and listened to me make the servicing appointment. I had given them the time, and the place, so he could take my girl from her own home, in broad daylight, right under my fucking nose.
Goddamn me to motherfucking hell . . .
♥
A bell rang. The deep, sonorous clang of a bell tower, somewhere in London, was making its scheduled performance. I counted seven rings before I opened my eyes, finding myself waking in a strange room and praying it was from a nightmare.
It wasn’t.
My head was fuzzy from not one but two blackouts. The first time had not been a complete job—just enough for my captor to get my attention and tell me what I had to do.
He’d made me do terrible, cruel things to people I care about—to people I love. But I’d done those things hoping and praying it might save their lives. My captor was no stranger to me. I had known him for many years, and in every sense of the word. He was no stranger to murder either. He had murdered people to get to where he was now. I had no reason to believe he wouldn’t murder me as well. I had nothing more to lose.
“My pretty awakens,” he whispered from beside me, his hands moving over my body purposefully, his breath at my neck.
“No . . . please don’t do this, Karl. Please . . .” I begged him, trying to push him back with my hands.
“But why not? We’ve fucked lots of times in the past. You loved it back then. I know I did,” he crooned, “and I was just a kid before. I know what I’m doing now.” He slid his hand up my top and over a breast and squeezed. He slathered his mouth over my neck and tried to kiss me, but I curled my lips and turned my head.
He gripped my chin roughly and pinched, turning me back to him. “Don’t think you can play hard to get with me, Brynne,” he said in a cruel voice, before he slammed his mouth over mine, his tongue pressing in and trying to invade me.
“Karl, I’m pregnant—no, please—stop, please!” I begged between gasps for air.
“Ugh . . . that bastard’s spawn growing inside you is not the nicest thought, my dear, especially when I’m trying to fuck you. You really know how to cock block, you know,” he complained, “but fine, have it your way. I can wait.”
Karl heaved himself off me and leaned on the wall, his eyes roving over my body with lust. He adjusted himself at the crotch and sneered at me.
“Are—are you going to kill me?” I tried not to think about his motives and what would happen if he succeeded. I fought to stay calm and not run. I needed Karl to trust me a little for what I hoped I could manage to do. Not running from him would be the first step.
“I don’t know yet. Maybe I will and maybe I won’t.” He grinned evilly. “If you decide you want to fuck sooner rather than later, let me know. That just might work in your favor, babe.”
I tried to ignore his comment. “Did Senator Oakley hire you to kill me?” My heart was thumping so hard it hurt under my ribs.
He tipped his head back at the wall and laughed. “The senator is a sock monkey who couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag if the thing was torn in half. Um . . . no, my dear, Senator Oakley didn’t hire me.”
“Then why? Why do this, Karl? You were always so . . . nice to me.”
“Fuck you to hell and back, you little slut. In seven years you’ve never known anything about me,” he snapped, looking half insane. Make that wholly insane. “I’m not the nice guy you remember from high school,” he told me smugly, grinning now as he talked, his demeanor completely changing from crazy to cheerful in a matter of seconds.
“So tell me what changed you, Karl. How come you’re not the nice guy I remember?” I asked the question and then stayed quiet. I studied my surroundings the best I could, and tried not to think about Ethan, or what he was doing at that moment. Had he figured out my text message yet? Or was he still reeling from the pain of the words, and believing I no longer loved him.
As if that could ever happen!
If Ethan had decoded my hidden message, would I ever have opportunity to act on the only clue I could think to give him at the time?
Karl started talking; rambling, really. Going off on a rant about how he’d killed Eric Montrose and made it look like a bar fight. I barely listened. I was trying to find a way to get to his phone, and knew what I’d do with it the moment I did. I would only need one. One moment of time. I could do it in one small minute if the opportunity arose.
“Nobody else had to die, you know, after Montrose,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s your fault that more people had to die. I’m not loving the killing part here, Brynne. It’s very distasteful to me.” He frowned and looked over my body again, no doubt thinking about something to pass the time alone in this bedroom he’d locked me in.
“Karl, no . . . you’re not like them. You wouldn’t have done what those boys did to me at that party.”
He narrowed his eyes a fraction and said, “You’re right. They were pigs to do that to you. Raping a girl who is out cold is not my style.” He got off the bed and went to the window and looked at the darkening sky. “You’ll come around in time and be begging me for it eventually.”
Umm . . . no I won’t, you maniacal motherfucker.
“What do you mean about nobody else had to die after Montrose?”
He turned and looked at me like I was an idiot. “I was here—in London. I had everything planned out. We would meet again and start back up right where we left off all those years ago. We’d make a pact to bring Oakley down with the story of that sex video his piece-of-shit son made,” he explained as if he were speaking to a small child. “Then sell out to Oakley’s team, or if he wasn’t interested, then the other side’s team, and go off to live a happy life somewhere nice and quiet.”
“So what happened to change your mind?” I asked in a soft voice.
“Your fucking boyfriend happened!” he snarled. “Out of all the guys you could have hooked up with, you had to pick security with connections to the fucking royal family and British military intelligence! Thanks for that, Brynne. Nice one!”
“But I didn’t find him, he found me. My dad hired Ethan to protect me from . . .” The instant the words left my lips, the fog began to dissipate and the truth of my father’s passing became revealed to me.
“I know,” Karl said simply, his dark eyes showing just how deep his madness was rooted.
“You murdered my father, didn’t you?” I grappled with my hold on any shred of rational thought and action.
I lost.
♠
“Where is she?! WHERE IN THE FUCK IS SHE?!” I yelled to no one in particular. I had Ivan, Neil, Len, and my dad all standing around looking to me for guidance. I didn’t know where to begin, though. It took everything I had not to fall apart and turn to quivering mush in fear and desperation.
“Son, look at this. I think Brynne left you a hidden message in this text.” Dad was holding my mobile and studying it.
“What? Tell me!!” I grabbed my phone from out of his hands and read it again.
“The capitalization,” Dad said over my shoulder, “it’s only certain words excepting the I’s. Look at the others.”
The words: Ethan, My, Old, Phone, Get, It, were the only ones with capital letters . . . except for the I’s. Dad was right. I couldn’t believe it. My girl had successfully delivered a message to me in code under duress of kidnapping. I closed my eyes and prayed for another miracle.
“And other words that should be capital are left lowercase, like your name—”
“Yeah, Dad, I get it!” I cut him off and ran for my desk drawer, fumbling around until I located her original mobile phone. I plugged it in with the charger and turned it on. The wait was torture while it powered up.
There was nothing new on it. My excitement plummeted, but now there was some hope, at least. Some small odds for me to bet on. A layer I could start peeling back to guess at the cards held underneath. I understood those kind of odds. A message meant hope. A message meant she was alive. And if I had to bet on Brynne, I was confident she would fight to her last breath to win. My girl was like that, and there was nobody I had more faith in right now than her.
“She sent me a coded message,” I said again, to no one in particular, still in amazement at her quick thinking during a terrible situation.
I raised the volume settings and left her precious mobile plugged in on my office desk. I sat down and watched its light flash normally. I had to. My girl was going to ring me on it and tell me where she was, so I could go to her and bring her back. Come on, baby . . .
What felt like aeons of time passed painfully slow. I recalled later that I never once desired a smoke while I waited for my girl to message me from wherever she was. I didn’t think about having one, or imagine the taste, or even feel the sting of nicotine deprivation. None of it. I’d never touch another ciggie in my life if doing so would bring Brynne safely back to me. Not much of a vow, I know. Pathetic, really. But it was all I had to wager with.
I prayed to my angel for another miracle, and hoped she would hear me for the second time in my life. Mum, I need your help again . . .
Then the picture came through in a media message with the most wonderful sounding blip I’d ever heard. I opened the message and stared, my eyes absorbing what she’d just sent.
Brynne was playing her hand in a kill-game situation, and had just upped the ante by betting huge stakes that could go either way. I loved her so much for doing it, I thought my heart could burst right on the spot. My girl played her cards with the instincts of an experienced ace. Of course she does, she’s my girl.
“Dad?” I held the mobile out to him with a shaking hand. “Where is that bell tower? You must know where it is; take me there right now. Brynne can see it from where she just took that photo.”
