“He’ll pay.” Muffled voices.
“How can you be sure?”
“He hired those guards for her. Trust me. He’ll pay to get her back.”
Todd.
But how many more?
“Which one?” the other chuckled softly.
“We can probably charge double.”
“You don’t want to keep the kid?”
“Not if she’s worth cash.”
I heard Elliott suck in her breath. My hands itched to hold her, to get her the fuck away from those monsters.
“I’ll find you, Elliott,” I promised her, even though she couldn’t hear me.
Then the phone died.
The elevator chimed.
“Give it to me,” Lukas ordered, and I did.
He headed over to where I had an extra charger in the kitchen.
Two suits walked in.
The first was an older man who looked like he had one foot in retirement, and the other was a blonde woman with her hair in a tight braid.
“Mr. Porter?” she asked.
“You guys got here fast,” I said, offering my hand to shake, which they both did.
“I’m Agent Daniels, and this is Agent Armstrong. Of course, when someone with such a...high profile calls, we make certain to move quickly,” she said.
“Money talks, right?” I asked with a grimace.
“Have you been asked for money?” she asked.
“Looks like he’s going to be,” Paulson said, lifting the note that had been left on the entry table with a pair of tweezers.
A moment later, Agent Daniels had it bagged.
“That’s not Shea’s handwriting,” I told her.
“There’s a phone number on the back,” she remarked. “Get the equipment set up,” she ordered Agent Armstrong.
“I have a tracker on Elliott,” I told her. “Shea’s phone is dead, but give it a few minutes, and it will come online.”
“A tracker?”
“How much of the history do you know?” I asked.
“Only what her security filled us in on. Domestic abuse? Stalking?”
“Pretty much.”
We moved toward the living room, and Agent Daniels’s eyebrows shot up at the group of guys.
They all scattered from the couch, and she took a seat, taking over my coffee table as binders and a box appeared with Armstrong.
“You did the right thing calling us,” she said. “Not trying to go it alone.”
“Look, I’m a big guy. Pretty skilled with my hands, too. But I’m a hockey player, not Liam Neeson. Do we look like the cast of an action movie?” I motioned to the guys.
“Speak for yourself,” Lukas muttered.
“I just want my girls back,” I told Agent Daniels.
“Then let’s get you your girls back.”
I filled them in on the rest of the story, including the fight we’d had. I didn’t care how it looked. They needed all the information. Agent Daniels tilted her head when I told her I’d walked out last night and why, but hadn’t commented.
“It’s back,” Lukas said from the kitchen.
I jumped from the couch, nearly running for the phone.
As I turned it on, the screen flickered. “No, don’t you fucking dare,” I warned it. I quickly entered the security code and fired up the tracker app.
The screen flickered again, going fully black for a few moments before coming back.
“Lay it flat,” Agent Daniels ordered, and I did so, putting it on the kitchen counter, still plugged in.
The app opened, and I hit the “listen in” button, then watched as the map started to zero in on their location.
The screen failed, going entirely black.
“Shit,” Agent Daniels muttered.
I could hear Elliott lightly humming to herself, but nothing else.
“We’re all set up,” Agent Armstrong called out from the living room.
“You monitor this,” Agent Daniels said to another suit who had to have arrived while we were in the living room.
“I’m not leaving this phone,” I told her as she ushered me to the living room.
“Mr. Porter, I need you to call your wife’s kidnappers. If they hear your daughter in the background, they’ll search her until they find that tracker, and right now that’s the only link to her you have.”
I was hung up on one fact that wouldn’t let go.
“Shea isn’t my wife.” But God, I wished she was. I wanted that connection, even if it was only vows and a last name. What was the point of waiting when you already knew? What if I was too late?
“I’m sorry I misspoke,” Agent Daniels apologized. “Now, I need you with me. I need you to walk away from this phone into the living room and make this call with me. Can you do that?”
“We’ll stay with the phone,” Connor said, Noble nodding with him. Somehow that made me feel better than just knowing the other suit was there.
I nodded my thanks to them.
“I can,” I assured her. Every step away from Shea’s phone was torture.
“Okay, call this number,” Agent Armstrong said, pointing to the digits they’d left on the back of the note. “Biggest things you want—” he took out a laminated sheet.
Holy shit, they had laminated kidnapping sheets.
“You want proof of life. You won’t get it instantly, but ask.”
“They don’t know that you have the tracker,” Agent Daniels reminded me.
“Second, you want their demands,” Agent Armstrong added. He walked me through everything I was supposed to ask, then made me repeat it.
By the time they handed me a phone that had been cloned to my number, I was ready to crawl out of my skin.
I dialed the number.
It rang twice.
“We have what you want,” the voice answered. The guy wasn’t even disguising his voice.
Agent Armstrong nodded at me, having checked his machinery.
“I’m well aware. I want to talk to them.”
He cackled like a deranged witch. “Not going to happen.”
“Can you at least tell me if they’re okay?” My voice tensed.
“Girl is fine. Woman is still napping.”
“She’s been unconscious since this morning? I’ve seen the security footage. I know you hit her.” I barely contained my rage.
Lukas put a hand on my shoulder, grounding me.
“We gave her a little something extra to help her relax. She’s a feisty one. My guess is she’ll be out until morning.”
Fuck me, they’d drugged her.
I put the phone against my forehead for a second as my throat worked, trying to breathe through it. Elliott was alone with her. Abandoned. Probably scared to death.
“You there?” he asked.
“I am,” I answered.
“Good. Now, first. No cops,” he demanded.
I looked Agent Daniels square in the eye. “I won’t call a single police officer.”
God bless her, she smiled.
“You’d better not!”
“What do you want for them? I’m assuming you didn’t want me to call just for fun.” I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees.
“A million.”
“Done,” I answered without even looking at Agent Daniels.
The man breathed heavily into the phone for a moment before responding.
“A piece.”
Two million dollars.
They either had no idea what I was worth, no idea what they were doing, or both.
“Did you hear me?” he asked.
“I did. I’ll pay it. Do you take checks?”
“What? No. Cash only. Unmarked, nonsequential hundred-dollar bills.”
How original.
“I can’t get that kind of cash until tomorrow,” I told him, my stomach rebelling at the thought of leaving my girls alone with them overnight.
“Sure you can.”
“No, I can’t. The banks aren’t
exactly open seeing as it’s eight pm on a Friday night, and I’ll have to liquefy some assets.”
I had a few hundred thousand in cash in the safe, but nothing close to two million. I’d have to empty every account I had in Seattle to get that much cash, and I honestly didn’t know if I had that much liquid.