Up in Smoke (Crossing the Line, #2)(80)

Gone. I let my guard down and now she’s gone.

Fear tearing at his insides, he turned and lunged at Derek, grabbing him by the shoulders. “How? How did you know she was gone?” His voice cracked. “Where is she?”

Derek pried Connor’s hands off, but there was a hint of empathy in his eyes. “We’ve been following Luther’s car since yesterday. He ditched it in a lot. Best we can tell, he picked up a different vehicle.” He checked his phone and cursed. “We don’t know for sure he took her. It’s just a hunch. You know her, she likes to take off once in a while.” Even as Derek said the words meant to calm him, his eyes were grave. He knew what the ditched cell phone and knife meant.

“No,” Connor felt the need to reiterate. He swiped a hand through his hair, denial over the entire situation coursing through him like bolts of electricity. “No, she wouldn’t have left like this. She doesn’t need to. Not anymore. He has her. Jesus, he f*cking has her.”

Connor shot toward the exit, intending to drive like a bat out of hell to the bastard’s house. If she wasn’t there, he’d turn over every block in the city until he found her.

Derek stepped into his path. “Look, you’re not going to help her by flying off the handle. I’ve got a guy at the lot questioning the owner. We’ll find out what he’s driving.”

Connor had lost the ability to reason. All he could think of was Erin, scared and alone. Wondering why he hadn’t come to check on her sooner. God. Before he could bypass the captain and leave the bathroom, Derek’s cell phone rang. He answered it without delay. “Captain Tyler.” He listened for a moment before his gaze locked with Connor. “White panel van. License plate number?” He nodded once. “Put out a BOLO on the vehicle. Do it now.”



It was the laughing that snapped her out of it. Luther’s high-pitched chuckle coming from the front of the van. Erin had no idea how long she’d been lying there, caged on the floor, listening to her thoughts deteriorate into a vacuum of noise. Her fingers were curled around the thin metal crisscrosses, but she hadn’t made the futile attempt to shake them, nor could she work up the wherewithal to scream. One thought went round and round in her head, sounding like it was being spoken inside a cave.

She’d done the right thing. She’d let him live. And she still didn’t get to win.

“Fair” had never been an active word in her vocabulary, because the concept had never really existed for her. But right now, as the van took her farther and farther from the life she’d only just managed to get a foothold in, she wanted to shout and rail at the unfairness of it. Unfair. Unfair. She’d regressed back to the child in the closet, screaming for a mother who would never come. A savior who would never save her.

Connor.

His name whispered through her mind like fog.

The maelstrom of noise eased a little…receding like a wave. She pressed her open mouth against the back of her hand and sobbed. He’d told her he was proud of her, but he wouldn’t be proud if he could see her now. Curled up like a weeping baby, lamenting the past. Maybe she had never been that girl he was proud of. Maybe she’d only been pretending.

No. No. Fuck that.

She wouldn’t give up, and neither would he. If she didn’t believe in him, then she’d been lying all along, and that trust she’d claimed to have had never existed. But not just in him. In herself. She would fight and bargain and scrape her way out of this and back to him. She loved him too much to give up.

The van stopped and she forced her breathing to even out. In, out. In, out. Her stepfather knew what small spaces did to her, hence the cage. Hence his ploy that long-ago afternoon in the prison to send her to solitary. He wouldn’t expect her to be lucid, let alone ready to rumble.

Think.

With renewed determination, she reached out and examined the lock with her fingertips, unable to see in the nonexistent light. No go. She fumbled through her pocket until she found her ever-present matches, striking one and breathing deeply as it flared like a beacon in the dark. Focus. Okay, standard lock. Not a padlock and nothing fancy enough to keep her from picking it, if she only had something to use. Normally, she kept a bobby pin handy for occasions like this, but with her newfound confidence in herself, she’d grown complacent. Dammit. She tried to remember what she’d seen upon entering the van, but nothing came to mind except for the cage.

No…there had been rack against the wall. Had there been tools? Something. There had to be something. Erin crammed herself as far as she could into the corner of the small cage and rammed her body against the other side, hoping to scoot it toward the rack. It didn’t budge.

So she did it again.

And again.

“Come on, come on.”



Connor’s stomach lurched violently as Derek took a sharp turn off of Lake Shore Drive toward the water. Diversey Harbor, the sign said. Police personnel fanned the expressway about a mile behind them, but he and Derek were closing in on the van. An off-duty cop had spotted the van seconds after the BOLO had gone out and followed. The cop’s voice buzzed though the radio on Derek’s dashboard, steadily updating them on the van’s progress toward the harbor.

A throbbing had started behind his eyes, matching his wild pulse. If he let himself picture the scenario in which Erin’s stepfather required a body of water, he wouldn’t hold it together, so he closed his eyes and tried like hell to breathe. Told himself that as soon as this car stopped, he would find her and hold her. Tell her how sorry he was for letting this happen. He had to believe he’d be given that chance.