Claimed: A For Her Novel Read online

  My blood runs cold. “Pop, what are you saying?”

  “There were two people. They came around the back of the house. Someone said the name Spencer. I didn’t get a good look at either of them because it all happened so fast. I don’t remember much else, but someone said the name Spencer, I’m sure of it.”

  “Do you think this has something to do with Jay?” I ask, and I see Paige looking over at me as I talk.

  “I think it might. I don’t know, Jordan, but I feel like it has to. Nothing was stolen from my house, they didn’t break in. It was like they wanted to create confusion.”

  I’m nodding as he speaks. It has to be related. Why would someone harm my dad? It wouldn’t be hard for the person who did this to find out Jay and I were together. She doesn’t have much of a family to reach out to. So going after her parents wouldn’t have gotten the kind of attention going after mine would. I rub my face, feeling like the fresh information has reenergized me.

  “Okay, Pop. Thanks for telling me. If you think of anything else let me know. But this is enough for me to do some digging right now.”

  “I love you, son. Go find our girl.”

  “I love you, too, Pop. And I promise, I will.”

  I hang up the phone and grip it tightly in my hand. I’ve never lied to my dad before, and I’m not about to start now. I will bring Jay home.

  Paige and Miles walk up to me.

  I get up off the floor and look to the both of them. “The name Spencer mean anything to you?”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Jay

  There’s a noise outside the door, and I tense when I hear shouting. My body is stiff from being on the cold concrete, but there’s no choice other than the filthy mattress. I’m aching and cold, but I’m not so far gone that I’m willing to crawl on it and pick up whatever diseases are lingering.

  I feel Summer wake up at the sounds. We’ve been huddled up in the corner, trying to stay warm, but there’s only so much we can do to prevent the chill from seeping in.

  “What’s going on?” she asks, looking at me with wide eyes.

  “I don’t know. Just stay calm.” I don’t want her to panic. I keep seeing it in her, so close to the edge.

  She’s like a skittish horse that’s been thrown into a crowded street. Anything could set her off, and I want to make sure she stays as calm as possible. I can handle whatever comes our way, but I can’t do that if I have to worry about her and how she’ll react.

  There’s more shouting, and then I hear a loud bang like a door slamming. Then our metal door is flung open, and the big guy in a suit from before looks at us.

  “Get up. It’s time to move.”

  I replay every CSI I’ve ever seen, and all of them are screaming at me that it’s not a good sign if you have to go to a second location.

  “Why?” I ask, not getting up.

  The big guy comes into the light, and I see he’s got blond hair and ice-blue eyes. They chill me right to the core, and I want to crawl farther back against the wall. My mouth has gotten me into trouble for most of my life, and right now I have to remind myself that it’s not the time to sass.

  He reaches inside his suit jacket, and when he pulls it out, there’s a gun in his hand. A big black gun that scares the shit out of me.

  “Is there going to be a problem?”

  Summer starts to shake, and I stand up, blocking his view of her. “There’s no problem. We’ll come,” I say, reaching behind me. Summer puts her hands in mine and gets up off the floor. “Please put the gun away. You’re scaring her.”

  He looks past me, and something flashes in his eyes. I don’t know what it is, but instead of putting the gun away, he holds it up and points it at Summer.

  “You come with me,” he says, and I step in front of her again.

  “I said we’d come together.” My voice is shaking now, my fear of being separated setting in.

  Just then there’s a noise behind him, and he glances back as Spencer walks in.

  “We’re all going together, Jay,” Spencer says, coming over to me. He wraps his sweaty hand around my upper arm and squeezes it so tight I know it’s going to bruise. He yanks me to his side and grabs my face. “You’re going to sit in the back seat with me. She can ride up front with Michael.”

  Michael grabs Summer’s arm in pretty much the same hold Spencer has me in. Only he holds the gun against her ribs and walks her ahead of me. I move my feet as fast as I can to keep up, but Spencer still has a hold of me. He grips my arm with one hand and moves his other hand from my face into my hair. The pain in the back of my skull is nothing compared to the panic I feel as we walk through the building and I lose sight of Summer.

  The place they brought us to has narrow hallways with lots of turns. I think for a moment about breaking free of Spencer’s hold, but I don’t even know if could get away before he would catch me. The place is set up like a maze.

  I decide to be calm and bide my time. There has to be a chance for escape. If he’s taking us to another location, we must be going outside. There has to be people. One chance is all I need, and I’ll make my move.

  Just as I have the thought, I hear a scream from up ahead. The sound of Summer’s fear races down my spine, and I cry out for her.

  “Summer!” I shout, and Spencer elbows me in the ribs. The pain makes me gasp for air, but he doesn’t stop pulling me by the hair.

  After a few more feet, we come to an open area in the building. There’s a Jeep parked in the middle of what looks like an airplane hangar.

  Summer is standing next to the Jeep, holding her face, while Michael stands in front of her, with his hand poised like he’s about to strike her again.

  When he hears us, he turns around and shrugs at Spencer. “This one doesn’t have to stay pretty.”

  Fear for my sister overwhelms me. I try to go to her, but Spencer grips my hair so tight I feel some of the strands leave my scalp.

  “Get in,” he orders, shoving me into the back seat, then climbing in after me.

  Instinctively I go to the far door to grab the handle. Only there isn’t one. There’s nothing on the inside to open the door. No locks, nothing.

  “Come sit in my lap, Jay. The road may get a little bumpy, and I want you right here.”

  I look back to see Spencer rubbing his cock, and I cling to the door, as far from him as possible. He gets an angry look on his face and grabs me by the arm, dragging me over to him.

  Just then, Summer is pushed into the front seat, and Michael walks around to the driver’s side. I watch Summer buckle up and glance back to me in the mirror above her seat. When he gets in, he shuts his door and inputs a code into a keypad on the dashboard. The long metal door in front of us opens up, and sunlight streams in. It’s at odds with what’s happening to us right now. How can the sun shine so bright when all of this is so dark and dirty? This is a nightmare; how can it happen during the day?

  When the Jeep begins to move, Spencer drags me onto his lap, and I can feel his stubby cock dig into my hip. I want to throw up on him so he pushes me away. But then I think he might get angrier and start hitting me again, and my face still throbs from before.

  Instead I sit as still as possible and watch Summer to make sure she’s okay. I see Michael reach over and put his hand on her thigh, holding it there and softly petting her. God, I don’t know which is worse, the silent unknown of what he might do to her or the perverted asshole who at least tells me what he’s going to do.

  “Oh, that’s it,” Spencer says as we drive down a rocky road.

  I feel bile rise in my throat, and though I don’t want to throw up, I might not have a choice.

  “I’ve been watching you for a long time, you know,” Spencer says, leaning close to me.

  I move as far away as I physically can with the grip he has on me. I don’t answer him,
fearing that the only thing that’s going to come out of my mouth is whatever food I had to eat sometime yesterday.

  “All you had to do was give me what I wanted. Just a little attention would have saved you from all this. Well, maybe not from everything.”

  I realize at this point I need to keep him talking. Maybe if he tells me what happened, I can figure out a way to get us out of this.

  “So if I had flirted with you, I wouldn’t be here?” I can’t look at his face when I ask the question. All I want to do is smack him.

  “No, sweet Jay. I wanted you to bend over that desk of yours and let me have my way. But you’re a stuck-up little bitch, aren’t you?” He reaches out and grabs my breast, squeezing it hard and then twisting.

  I cry out, and then I hear Summer shouting from the front seat.

  “Make him stop!”

  She looks to Michael with pleading eyes, but he just shrugs.

  “When I got asked to do a little work on the side to make some extra money, I never could have dreamed you’d be the icing on the cake.”

  I want to keep him talking, but the pain in my breast is throbbing almost as bad as my face, so I’m afraid that whatever question I ask is going to keep going this way.

  The Jeep turns down another road and we’re on a back highway lined with trees. I have no idea where we are. Headed to upstate New York maybe? They must have taken us out of the city when we were drugged, because none of this looks familiar to me.

  I catch Summer’s eyes in the mirror again, and I can see them narrow. She’s trying to tell me something, but I don’t know what. She glances down and then back up to me. She does it several times before I look down at her and notice her hand on her seat belt tighten. She’s giving me some sort of signal about buckling up.

  I nod imperceptibly, but she sees it and nods back at me before she stares out the window. I don’t know what she’s got planned, but I want to be ready.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” I say, and put my head in my hands.

  “We’re not pulling over, so you can just throw up back here,” Spencer says, shoving me off his lap. “Just don’t get it on me.”

  God, if I had known that was all it took I would have said that from the beginning.

  “We’re almost there,” Michael says from the front, and Summer looks back to me.

  I reach over, grabbing the belt and putting it on. If Spencer notices anything, he doesn’t say.

  Michael turns down a dirt road, overgrown with trees and shrubs. I can hardly see the driveway from the road, even in broad daylight. On one side is a steep drop-off into a ravine. On the other is a path that leads down to a small cabin. There’s a lake behind it, and if this were any other situation I would say how beautiful it was. But that cabin has the hair on the back of my neck standing up, and I know if we go in there, we’re not coming out.

  It’s then that I look up and catch Summer’s eyes again. She’s thinking the same thing. I tighten my hand on the seat belt just as she nods to me.

  It all happens in a split second, and though I see it coming, it still scares the shit out of me.

  Summer reaches over with both hands and yanks hard on the steering wheel. Michael is taken by surprise as the Jeep spins out of control to the right and goes off the edge of the ravine. I brace myself as the Jeep flips and my ears start ringing. I don’t know how many times we roll, but at one point the back door comes open and Spencer is ejected from the vehicle.

  Summer screams, and the sound of metal crunching and glass breaking has me more terrified than ever before.

  Suddenly the Jeep comes to a stop, and I gasp for air as both my hands are gripped tight around the roll bar. This type of vehicle was made to survive a fall like that, but not if you weren’t harnessed in.

  “Summer!” I shout, and she rolls her head back, moaning. I fumble with the buckle, ignoring all the pain I feel in my body, and reach for her. “Summer, talk to me.”

  “I’m okay,” she says, and then coughs.

  I look over at Michael, who is half hanging out of the Jeep. At some point he was almost thrown from the car, and he isn’t moving.

  “You okay?” Summer asks as she unbuckles.

  Adrenaline courses through my veins, making it hard to determine exactly what is hurt on me. There’s a pain in my left leg, but it doesn’t feel broken. I look down and see my left wrist is at a funny angle and it’s throbbing.

  “I think my wrist is broken.” I look around and up the ravine. “We need to get out of here.”

  Summer has to climb into the back with me because her door is crushed closed. When we wiggle out of the window on my side, we see that Michael is missing the top half of his body. I cringe at the sight, and Summer leans over and gags. I look around for the gun for half a second and then give up. There’s no telling where it ended up, and I don’t want to be next to the car in case it decides to blow up.

  “Should we check the cabin to see if there’s a phone?” Summer asks as we near the top.

  “I don’t know. Maybe? I’m scared to go in there,” I admit, but the pain in my wrist is getting stronger.

  “You’ve got a really nasty cut on your head. I don’t know how much blood you’ve lost,” Summer says as she rips off a sleeve of her shirt and holds it up to my scalp.

  I hold the cloth to my head with my good hand and walk slowly. It takes a while, but Summer helps me most of the way. Just as we get to the top, movement out of the corner of my eye catches my attention. I feel Summer grab ahold of me to steady my feet as Martin Stein steps off the porch and walks right up to us.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Jordan

  “And you’re sure that’s him?” I ask Miles as I scroll through security footage.

  “Yes,” he says through gritted teeth. “How the fuck did we not catch this before?”

  I pulled up the name Spencer on Jay’s computer and got a ton of hits for the same person. Then I went through the camera feed on the dates he was scheduled on her calendar. During one of his meetings with Miles, he excuses himself from the boardroom. But instead of going to the restroom, he goes over to Jay’s unattended desk and sticks something to it.

  “That camera is the size of a goddamn pencil eraser. No way she would have noticed it,” Ryan says from behind me, and he’s right. Paige went up and pulled it off of there and brought it down for us to see.

  My fist aches to punch the wall again, but I need my hands right now.

  One of the next meetings Spencer shows up in, he does the same thing. Only this time he goes over to one of our cameras and attaches something to it as well. It all happens so fast there’s no way we could have caught it in the feed. Not unless someone was staring directly at the screen all hours of the day.

  I think about all the times I sat at my desk and watched Jay. If she was in a meeting with Miles, I usually never checked back in. She was a stickler for time, so it wasn’t like she would get out of her meetings early. She was so regimented that I only checked on her when I knew her desk hours were listed on her schedule.

  “Fuck. How did I miss this?” I say, guilt washing over me.

  “We all did,” McCoy says. “He used a tracker bracket on our system. It allowed him to access our digital feed and get into the entire panel with one clip. These things are military grade. He would either have to know someone who had that security clearance or gotten it on the black market.”

  “I’m going with knowing someone who had access,” Paige says, and we turn to look at her. “Stein had contact with illegal weapons. I’m guessing Spencer was his in once he was no longer coming into work. He had to get his intel somehow. The only question I have is, why would Spencer go along with it? What did Stein have that Spencer wanted?”

  “Jay,” Miles says, and I grind my teeth.

  The video feed plays out with Spencer corn
ering Jay and then Miles interrupting them.

  “I knew something wasn’t right, but she didn’t say. Then she was out for a few days, and I forgot to bring it back up.” Miles shakes his head. “Jordan, I’m so sorry.”

  “There’s nothing we can do now but find the motherfucker,” I say, and dig into his files.

  I pull up everything I can on him and blast it across all the screens at my desk.

  “These are his properties. We’re looking for something close, possibly isolated, where he could have taken Jay and Summer.”

  “Are we sure it was a place he owned?” McCoy asks, and I nod.

  “Stein is definitely involved, and he’s been smart enough to slip us so far. There’s no way he would use something in his name. And Spencer seems to be blinded by his need for—”

  I stop myself, unable to finish the sentence. I can’t put my love’s name next to his. I’ll burn his world to the ground for even daring to look at her.

  “I think Spencer is dumb enough to use one of his houses as a location,” I say, clicking on his real-estate holding.

  “He invests in properties as a hobby. How are we going to find which one?” Paige asks.

  “Like I said, we’ve got to do this based on a process of deduction. Stein wants his files, and he wants our server clear. That’s the only way he can possibly make things right with the people he took the money from. I think it’s his only chance for survival. So he’s not taking Jay and Summer out of the country.” I toggle a few things, and I’m left with only a few properties.

  “Let’s assume he stays in-state if he’s willing to negotiate,” Ryan says, and I click a few more, clearing off all properties except those in New York.

  “He’s going to be close, but rural,” I say, and remove all the properties in the city.

  I code all the addresses left with a map of New York, and there are two red dots remaining. I lean forward and stare at them, pulling up the images on Osbourne satellites.

  The first is of a town house that’s in a cul-de-sac. It’s a family neighborhood, with sidewalks and a school right behind it. The second image shows an overgrowth of trees with a small cabin in the distance.