Defending Morgan (Mountain Mercenaries #3)(25)
“Sarah Ellsworth and her boyfriend, Thomas Huntington. Karen Garver and her boyfriend, Lance Buswell. And my boyfriend at the time, Lane Buswell. We were at a dance club downtown called Harlem Nights.”
“So Lance and Lane are brothers?” Black asked.
Morgan nodded. “Yeah, Lance is four years younger than Lane, but they’re still pretty close.”
“What do they do for a living?” Meat asked.
“Um . . . Lane is a mortgage broker, and his brother works with some sort of construction company, I think. I don’t remember the name, sorry.”
“No worries. I can find it,” Meat reassured her. “And their girlfriends? What can you tell us about the girls?”
“Karen is my age and owns her own boutique store. She sells environmentally friendly specialty foods and cosmetics and candles and stuff. She was one of my first customers when I started selling my bees’ honey. We’ve been friends for a few years, and I was the one who introduced her to Lance. Sarah is a few years younger than me. I met her one night when me and Lane were out. She was a bartender at the bar and we hit it off. Her boyfriend, Thomas, I don’t know as well. They recently started dating, and if I’m being honest, he was always pretty standoffish. He never acted like he enjoyed hanging out with us. Like we were beneath him or something.” Morgan shrugged. “But I can’t imagine any of them wanting to hurt me.”
“Sometimes the last person you think might have it out for you is the one who hates you the most,” Rex said without any emotion in his tone. “So what happened that night? How’d they get you?”
“So, as I said, we were at Harlem Nights. It was a Thursday, and we figured it would be less crowded since it wasn’t the weekend, but we were wrong. The place was packed. We could barely move. We managed to get a small table in a back corner, but the music was so loud, I had the worst headache. I wanted to leave early, but the others were having a good time. I didn’t want to be a party pooper, so I told them to stay, and I’d catch up with them some other time.”
“Your boyfriend let you leave by yourself?” Arrow asked, feeling extremely pissed off. He was even more upset when Morgan looked surprised by his question.
“Of course. We arrived in separate cars.”
“Please tell me he at least walked you to your car,” Arrow asked.
Morgan shook her head. “He offered, but I told him to stay and enjoy himself.”
“Asshole,” someone on the other end of the phone said.
“Go on,” Black suggested. “Ignore the comments from the peanut gallery.”
“It wasn’t his fault,” Morgan said, defending Lane. “We’d been growing apart, and by that time, we were pretty much just friends, even though we hadn’t officially broken up. I had a feeling he had his eye on one of the servers in the nightclub, and I think he was just as relieved as I was when I left. Anyway, so I headed out of the club and made my way to my car. I had parked in a public garage not too far from the bar. There were several people around, and I didn’t notice anyone that made me feel nervous about walking by myself. I got to my car and had my keys in my hand. I clicked open the locks and sat down. That’s . . . that’s the last thing I remember. Someone either rushed me from the side or they were inside my car in the back, and as soon as I sat down, they did something to knock me out.”
Arrow felt her hand begin to shake, so he picked it up and sandwiched it between his own. He held on tightly and was rewarded with a small smile before she continued talking.
“I was in and out of it for a while. I have no idea how long. I thought I was dreaming. I remember voices around me and people arguing, but not who or what they were saying. My kidnapper must’ve kept me completely knocked out, because when I finally woke up, I was sweating my ass off in the back of a moving vehicle. I think it was one of those moving vans. It was pitch-dark, and I was in a cage of some sort. I have no idea how long we traveled, but when the door was finally opened, a man wearing a police uniform came toward me. I begged him to help me, but he didn’t say a word—he just lifted a gun and shot me.”
Arrow jolted, and Ball asked what had been on the tip of his tongue. “What the fuck? Shot you?”
“With a dart gun of some sort,” Morgan told them quickly. “I pulled it out as fast as I could, but it was too late. Whatever drug was in it worked fast, and I was once again knocked out. Anyway, this happened several times. I was kept in that cage for what I estimated to be days. I wasn’t even allowed out to use the bathroom.”
Her eyes dropped to her lap, and once again, Arrow felt the urge to go back to the house where they’d found Nina and Morgan and kill everyone.
“They treated me worse than a dog,” she continued. “I was allowed one bottle of water a day, and only occasionally did they bother to feed me. At some point, I must’ve been loaded onto a plane, but by then, I was so out of it and so depressed that I didn’t pay much attention. I was brought here to Santo Domingo . . . and eventually, you guys showed up.”
Arrow frowned. There was a lot she was leaving out . . . like a year’s worth of details. And as much as he didn’t want her to have to relive it, they needed to know everything. Not only to help figure out who might’ve been behind her kidnapping, but to emotionally help her as well.