My captor was alternately checking his phone and looking out the window. Was he expecting Tom to simply swoop in and save me? He and I weren’t at that level.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
Elvis turned his attention to me distractedly, then he shook his head. “My name’s not important.”
“Well, if you want me to continue calling you Elvis.”
For the first time since I’d met this man, which was all of three hours, he burst out laughing. Like real laughter. And as if the sound was foreign to his ears, he caught himself. He cleared his throat, but his mouth twitched. “Let me guess, it’s the hair.”
I shrugged. “Could it be anything else? But it does suit the shape of your face.” This man could only be from Vegas. Maybe he moonlighted as an Elvis impersonator. Or, shit, maybe that was his cover?
“You can call me Blaze.”
“Is your name really Blaze?”
His face slowly lost its laugh lines. “As I said, it doesn’t matter, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t think of me as Elvis in your head.”
“What do you have against the King?”
“I’m not doing this with you,” he muttered, switching his gaze back to the phone.
But, of course, I held on to my advantage. Revealing a name, even when it was false, meant that I might have gotten a bit under that tough exterior. I pushed through the tenderness of my throat, my voice still raspy. “So, do you have family?”
He cast me an irritated glance. “Men like me don’t have families.”
What, assassins? Mercenaries? Clean-up crew for the mob? But the mob was all about family.
“What do you mean ‘men like you’?”
“You ask too many questions,” he snapped.
“Just curious.”
“Do I look like a family man to you? You think I’m anything like your husband.”
Levi is a hundred times the man you are.
“My children,” I said. “Seeing their faces greeting me after a hard day of work is like a stress relief. Makes all the hard work worth it.” Maybe I was pushing it, so I added, “But I’ll admit, sometimes I come home exhausted, and all I want to do is crawl into bed and ship my kids off to my grandparents.”
His mouth quirked into a smile and I thought I was making progress, but his next words chilled me. “You think I don’t know what you are doing?”
That was when I realized his eyes were still deader than dead.
I cast him an innocent look. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’re trying to humanize yourself so I won’t hurt you further. Ahh … Miss James, that won’t work. You want to know about men like me? Our empathy was beaten out of us a long time ago. We will only destroy the people we love and that includes children.” His eyes lost focus for an instant before all traces of his smile disappeared. “But I won’t bore you with the details. So, are we done here?”
I decided the best option was to shut up. He was a trained professional, not a man driven by his emotions to take me hostage. Not a casual mob leg-breaker who went home to a wife and children after collecting on a gambling debt. Blaze was a real-deal assassin. The ones who did business on the Dark Web and whose fees were astronomical.
His phone beeped. He speared me a warning look not to move and went to a different room. I heard his hushed voice. He didn’t seem pleased.
When he returned, his face was more unreadable than ever. “Get up.”
I struggled to my feet. “Did Tom respond?”
“No. Your disappearance has become bigger news than my employer was willing to undertake.”
“What do you mean?”
An eyebrow rose. “I’ll drop you off at your house.”
I wasn’t even surprised he knew where I lived.
But my self-preservation was screaming not to trust him. My mind was trying to reason with myself that it would be messy to kill me. But was that the plan all along? Blaze didn’t bother to hide his face from me unless it was deliberate.
He could easily shoot me from across the room if I refused to comply.
All these thoughts trampled through my head as I made my way toward him. And when I was within reach, he made a grand gesture of letting me walk first.
He didn’t seem like a man who would shoot me from behind.
“We’re taking another car. It’s parked in the back.”
The back was darker.
“I’ll have you know,” my voice was strangled. “I’m not having good feelings about this.”
“Fair enough.” Our footsteps crunched on gravel. My sense of foreboding escalated when I saw a clearing surrounded by woods. It was too dark. Too menacing. Too easy for him to kill me and bury my body.
The edge of the clearing revealed an outline of a car.
Blaze slowed his steps, falling back.
I turned.
Levi
“What do you mean it ended?”
Bristow made me take the exit to Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I probably shouldn’t have been the one driving, because I was close to losing my fucking mind, but my partner was better liaising with Nadia, the LAPD crime analyst. They were able to track two vehicles exiting Howard Studios at around the time the abduction happened.
Kelso and Gabby were following one; we tracked the other and ended up at the foot of Hollywood Hills.
“No traffic cams,” Bristow replied.
I pulled into the parking lot of a burger joint while he figured out where to direct me next. Kelly’s phone yielded nothing useful. There was a text from an unknown number that said: “There’s something you need to know. Meet me at the gate.” Everyone agreed it sounded bogus and planted to make it look like it came from Roth.
As much as I hated the man, I didn’t think he’d take Kelly away from the kids without letting them know where she was. We also questioned the security at the studio, but the SFX department was in a separate building apart from where the studio had the sets. The gate had been rigged, and the lever was up, allowing whoever took Kelly to stroll right in.
I cursed and pounded the steering wheel. “What the fuck do we do now?”
Bristow gave me the side eye. He knew better than to tell me to chill. I was frothing at the mouth and ready to burn the entire city of Los Angeles down to find my wife. Whoever thought it was a good idea to abduct her had taken the wrong woman. Because I would make it my damned mission that my face was the last thing those fuckers would see on this planet.
Right before I blew their brains out.
Stewing in my rage and thirsty for retribution, I almost failed to notice the message that popped up on my phone.
“What the fuck?” I grabbed the device and showed Bristow the screen. “An address.”
The property was on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, just past Mulholland Drive. Kelso and Gabby were en route because their lead ended up nowhere when they found an abandoned vehicle in a shopping center parking lot. But we weren’t waiting for backup. Bristow had deployed a drone and scoped out the property.
There was only one heat signature in the house and none around the perimeter that would indicate a hostile lying in wait. I turned into the property and pulled to a stop right in front of the house. I just cleared my seatbelt while shoving open the door when Kelly stepped out of the house.
Relief hit me hard.
Words choked up my throat and my feet knew only one direction to move. I had her in my arms and I held onto her like she was my lifeline.
When she cried out, I immediately dropped my arms and stepped back, castigating myself for not checking her for injuries.
I blinked. My eyes not trusting what it was seeing. Kelly was lit from behind, and I stepped aside to let the headlights illuminate her face.
The crushing weight on my chest made it difficult to breathe or speak. The relief at seeing my wife alive was quickly replaced with thermonuclear-level fury fueled by her battered condition.
Somewhere I heard another vehicle arrive and doors slam.
“Kelly?” My fucking hand was shaking as I brushed the back of it gently down her face. My heart roared in anguish when tears brimmed her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.
“Is it okay to h—”
She dove into me and cut off my words. My arms came around her again, gingerly this time as though I was about to cradle a newborn. Without being sure of the extent of her injuries, I was lost on how to hold her. Her heartbreaking sobs ripped through my soul.
“I thought … I thought,” she hiccupped between sobs. “I wouldn’t see you or the girls again.”
“Fuck, Kelly.” It was a struggle to keep my voice level, to relax the tension in my body so it wouldn’t transfer to her. “Who did this to you?”
My eyes met Gabby’s over my wife’s shoulder. I gave a brief acknowledgment, glad to know the detectives had arrived and another woman was present just in case the unspeakable had happened to my wife. My mind drew a blank, refusing to consider such a scenario.
“I don’t know,” she gulped, and looked up into my eyes. “A man called Blaze. He spoke Russian to someone on the phone.”
“You getting this?” Gabby asked her partner.
“Where’s this Blaze now?” Kelso asked.
Kelly’s eyes dropped to the ground. The detectives and I exchanged glances.
“Who sent the address, Kelly?” Gabby asked.
Kelso looked up from typing information. “Would you be able to describe him to a sketch artist?”
“Can we save the questions for later?” I snapped.
“Every second counts if we’re going to catch this bastard,” the detective shot back. “Did he just let you go?”
Kelly stared at my chest and shook her head.
“She’s in shock, you morons,” Bristow cut in. He’d done additional checks around the property. “House and perimeter are clear.” He addressed Kelly. “I want to look you over. Make sure everything is fine. Unless you want to go to the hospital.”
“I don’t want to go to the hospital.”
“Babe,” I gently pulled back and stared at her. It was hard not to react to the giant bruise on her face and its swelling, but the marks around her neck were pushing me off the ledge of my control. Someone choked her. Someone grabbed her around her neck and fucking choked her. “We need to have you looked over.”
“I wasn’t raped.”
I carefully folded her in my arms again and rested my chin on her head. I was a Navy SEAL, had been a ruthless mercenary, but if a man had brutalized my wife, there was no way that wouldn’t bring me to my knees. And there was no fucking way I wasn’t tearing that fucker apart with my bare hands.
For my wife, I’d be a stone-cold killer.
“Let’s move inside and have Bristow look you over,” I said.
I watched my wife for signs of distress as we entered the house and settled in its sunken living room. She was limping and I had to beat back a roar every time she winced.
“I’m really okay,” she said in an ultra-soft voice as if a squeak from her would send me into a rage. She was not wrong. I was a hair-trigger away, but it wasn’t directed at anyone at the moment. I didn’t know if that made it worse. But this wasn’t about me. This was about trying to get my wife to talk.
“Babe,” I tried again. “Can you tell us what happened?”
“Blaze took me from the studio. He threatened me.” She told us how he tied her up and dumped her into the trunk of the car and took her here.
Bristow returned with his medical kit and I reluctantly vacated my place in front of her. The fucker hit her twice, pinned her with his knee, and choked her.
Someone needs to die.
“So he sent a picture to a chat room,” Kelso repeated what Kelly had told us. “Is this about Tom Roth?”
She nodded.
“Kelly, does that mean Roth is not missing?” Gabby asked.
Her mouth pressed into a straight line before she looked at me. “He was the one who saved me.”
What the fuck?
