Page 108 of Ruthless Possession
Not impulsively. Not desperately. He escaped from a prison transport, acquired a vehicle, located Trixie, drugged her, took her phone, drove to this restaurant, and waited in a loading area with a gun while we celebrated inside.
He planned us. He planned our celebration. He knew about the adoption.
The thought lands and stays.
I stand up. Carter is beside me, his face the color of the concrete, his eyes fixed on the tire marks like he can follow them by sheer force of will.
"Trixie," he says. It's not a question.
"He used her to get Morgan out here." I watch his face as the full weight of it reaches him. "She never made it to her shift."
The muscle in his jaw goes rigid. His hands, hanging at his sides, curl slowly into fists.
We go back inside.
The private room has transformed in the three minutes we were gone. The celebration is over. The table is covered in phones and maps. My father has his arm around my mother, who is pressing her fingers to her mouth. Greyson is in the corner with two other club members, his voice low and rapid. Charlie is in the far corner with Sydney, her face small and pale, Princess Sparklehoof pressed against her chest like a shield.
She looks at me when I come through the door.
I hold her gaze for one second. I try to make my face say we're handling it instead of what I'm actually feeling, which is a cold, grinding terror that I haven't felt since the worst nights overseas, the nights when the mission went sideways and the people you were responsible for were somewhere you couldn't reach them.
Then I look away, because I can't afford to feel it yet.
Trenton is already at the table, spreading a map. The manager brought it from the office without being asked. Someone has marked the restaurant's location in red.
"He's heading northeast," Trenton says when I reach him. His finger traces a route on the map. The old highway, the one that cuts through farmland and forest before splitting into a dozen smaller roads that feed into the mountains. "That's where the transport van was ambushed. He had help getting out. He'll have help out there."
I look at the route. I think about the cabin. The quarry. The way Harris moved through that terrain like he'd been born in it, like he'd been planning his exits for months.
"He's not improvising," I say.
"No." Trenton's finger stops on a stretch of highway, where the road curves away from town and the last streetlight marks the edge of the city limits. "He's been planning this since the moment they put him in a cell."
God help Harris when I find him.
Isaac is pale as a ghost sitting in a chair like he is in total shock. Then he sits up straight before pointing at us. "She is wearing the earrings you got her after you came home from a visit."
The grin could split my face at the realization, and Trenton does the same thing.
We make a call to Techy.
chapter nineteen
Morgan
The highway narrows. The trees close in on either side, their bare branches scraping against the darkening sky. Evan hasn't spoken in twelve minutes. The gun hasn't moved from his lap. The only sounds are the engine and Trixie's breathing in the back and the hammering of my heart in my own ears.
Then he turns.
Not onto another road as the highway is straight here, and there are no exits for another three miles according to the last sign I saw. He turns off the highway entirely, the car lurching onto a dirt track that I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been looking directly at it. The sedan bounces hard over the uneven ground, the undercarriage scraping.
"Where are we going?" My voice comes out steadier than I expected. A small, distant part of my brain notices with pride before the rest of me overrides it with pure, screaming terror.
Evan doesn't answer. His eyes are fixed on the path ahead, and the gun in his lap shifts slightly as the car rocks, the barrel catching the dim light from the dashboard.
The dirt track cuts through a field, brown and dead, stretching out on both sides like something abandoned. Then the trees close in again, thicker here, the branches meeting overhead so that the headlights carve a tunnel through the darkness. I lose count of the turns. Left, right, left again, each one taking us deeper into nowhere, each one erasing another layer of civilization.
Trixie makes a sound in the back, not a moan this time, but a word. Muffled, distorted by whatever drug is still in her system, but recognizable.
