DONOVAN (Gray Wolf Security, #1)(168)

“You sent the emails. You made it look like it was me. You wanted them to think that someone was blackmailing you so that when the truth came out, it would cast doubt on your part of things.”

“My part of what? You’re talking in circles, Jacob!”

“You stole the code that made your artificial pancreas possible.”

It was like he’d punched me in the center of my chest. I stepped back, unable to catch my breath for a moment.

“Then it was him,” Ruben said from where he’d come to stand in the doorway. “The emails, the threats. It was all him?”

Jacob nodded. “It was.”

Ruben rushed across the room and grabbed the front of my shirt, twisting it in his fist.

“Where is Adrienne? Where is my daughter?”

He shook me, forcing me back against the front of Jacob’s desk as Jacob himself disappeared out the door.

Shit!

What was I going to do now?





Chapter 34


Adrienne

“You don’t understand. You have to let me out!”

“Why?” I asked as I leaned against the door on the other side of which Rachel stood.

“If I don’t check in every hour, they’ll know something’s wrong.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

She was quiet for a long minute.

“I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on. What’s keeping me from taking the van and going back to the city? What’s keeping me from going to the police?”

“Don’t do that!” she said, the fear in her voice telling me more than her words did.

“Tell me why,” I repeated, speaking slowly.

“You’ll get a lot of good people in trouble.”

“Why shouldn’t I? You kidnapped me.”

She was quiet again, but I could hear her moving just on the other side of the door, could hear her brushing against the door itself. Finally, she made a noise like she was tapping her fingernails to the thin wood of the door.

“Let me out. Let me check in with them, and I’ll tell you everything.”

“You won’t try to run?”

“I won’t. I promise.”

Instinctively, I knew that her promise wasn’t worth much. But I also knew that I needed to know what was going on before I went back to Houston. I had no intention of going to the police, but I needed to know who was behind this whole mess. I needed to know who I could trust.

A part of me was afraid Lucien was more deeply involved in all of this than anyone knew.

I unlocked the door with the key she’d kept conveniently on a hook beside the door. She looked suitably abashed as she stepped out, her eyes moving curiously over the clothes I was wearing.

“I’m sorry about your wrists,” she said, almost flinching when she noted the bandages wrapped around my sore, raw wrists. “I wanted to use something a little less uncomfortable, but we were in a hurry.”

I gestured for her to take a seat at the breakfast bar in the center of the large kitchen. She brushed her hips as she sat as though she were wearing a long skirt or something. Always a proper young lady.

“How do you check in with your partners?”

She pointed to a drawer in a small cart against the far wall. “There’s a cellphone in there.”

I walked over and opened the indicated drawer. Sure enough, there was a small flip phone with a sticker that announced the name of one of the companies that specialized in throwaway cellphones. I grabbed it and handed it to her.

“No tricks.”

She nodded.

She opened the phone and drew up a text box, and sent a quick text that had only one letter. K.

“That tells them that everything’s okay and we can proceed.”

I took the phone from her and looked through other messages that had been sent on it. There weren’t many. Multiple messages with just that one letter. A couple of messages with one word messages. Here. Now. Yes. But there were no incoming messages.

“How do they contact you?”

“Calls mostly. They don’t want anything in text that can be traced back to us.”

“Smart.” I set the phone down and studied her face. “Who is ‘they’?”

She blushed. “You don’t understand. You think that we’re trying to steal something, but we’re really just trying to get something back.”

“And what’s that?”

Rachel’s eyes moved slowly over mine. “I’m sure Lucien told you what a loser I am. How I dropped out of college this past week, how I’m always doing all these stupid things and expecting everyone else to bail me out.”

I shrugged. He had told me something like that.

“That’s how Lucien sees me. But the truth is, I’m more than that.”

“Aren’t we all? What does that have to do with you kidnapping me?”

Rachel ran the fingers of both hands through her hair in a gesture that reminded me a lot of Jacob. She leaned back and crossed her legs as though we were just having a normal conversation. As though she hadn’t clocked me over the head and kept me tied up in the pantry of her parents’ beach house.

“I’m good with computers. My father runs an oil business. My mom helps him out there, running numbers for him. I think it started as a way for them to spend time together, but my mom proved to be really good at her job. So I spent the bulk of my childhood hanging out in boardrooms. When you do that, you pick up a lot, you know?”