My knees grew weak. “No,” I breathed. “She’s not dead. She’s not!” My heart was still beating. As long as it still beat in my chest, then so did hers.
“She?” one of the other first responders spoke up. “There were two people in there. Both of them are men from what is left of them.”
For all of two seconds, relief hit me, but then I realized that couldn’t be right. “There should have been three females in the back,” I told them.
The man who had spoken shook his head. “I went in through the top myself. Whoever was in the front is now in the back. Two men in suits. There was no sign of any women.”
“Not even a purse? Phone?” I didn’t know if I was relieved they weren’t in there or terrified. If they weren’t in the limo, then someone must have taken them.
“Nothing,” the man said with a regretful shake of his head.
Running feet drew everyone’s attention. I jerked out of the two men’s hold and turned to find Zio, Pop, and Garret running right toward us.
“What…?” Garret took in the wreckage, and his face paled. “No! Lis! Nova! Ciana!” He roared their names, but before he could even attempt to get to the car, the same two responders who had held me back grabbed him. “Lis!”
“They aren’t in there,” I told him.
He kept struggling, trying to fight his way free. I got in front of him and grasped his shoulders. “Garret, listen to me. They already searched the wreckage. The girls weren’t in there.”
He slumped in their hold. “Th-they aren’t?”
“No. Now calm your ass down so we can find them.” I nodded for the two men to release him, and after a brief hesitation, they let him go. Keeping one hand on his shoulder, I walked with him over to where Pop and Zio were talking in hushed tones to the older man.
“From the looks of it, the tank over there was set up for them to ram into so they could be ambushed. There are two sets of skids over there.” The man pointed to the tire tracks on the asphalt. “I can’t tell you which way they went without looking at the street cameras.”
“Thank you.” Pop shook the man’s hand while Zio pulled out his phone, already speaking to Desi. The computer expert could hack the cameras and find out everything we needed to know before we could even try to get the transportation department to answer their phone.
“Track their phones,” Garret said. “Ciana’s. Nova’s… Fuck, why didn’t I put a tracker on Lis? Why? Stupid motherfucker.” He thrust his hands into his hair, pulling at the roots. “Ryan, find my sister. Nova wouldn’t leave Lis. Where one is, the other will be. Right?”
“Desi said both Ciana’s and Nova’s phones are off,” Zio informed us, pocketing his phone. “But Ciana has been acting off ever since she got home from that fucking vacation, so I had him put trackers in all of her shoes while she was at work one day. He’s got a read on her location, and they are headed north. But from the speed the tracker is going, he suspects she’s possibly on a helicopter.”
“Let’s go. There’s no time to waste. If they are in the air, they will already have a huge lead on us,” Pop said before either Garret or I could voice the command. He caught my wild gaze. “We’ll get them back, boys. Just keep your heads.”
* * *
We had two jets bu
t no helicopter of our own. I was going to have to fix that as soon as I got Nova back. Until then, a few phone calls got me what we needed, and we were in the air. While we were in flight, Desi sent Zio all the video footage of the accident he could get, and he and I watched it as we flew closer and closer to the Canadian border.
Not five minutes after the limo and SUV left Medusa’s, the SUV was taken out. The carnage left between it and where I found the destroyed limo was like watching some stupid action movie. Only, this was reality, and at the end of the scene, the reason I got out of bed every morning was pulled out of the top of the limo, looking lifeless.
A guy in a ski mask climbed in and handed Nova to his partner. He tossed her unconscious body over his shoulder like she was nothing more than a rag doll, while the guy extracted Cali next. But instead of taking Ciana, they left her behind just as another military-grade vehicle slammed on its brakes at the front of the wreckage.
The guy made a run for it, as if he were scared of who was in the new vehicle, Cali’s body flopping as he ran with her over his shoulder.
Whoever the newcomers were, they waited until the other men left with Cali and Nova before three men got out. Unlike the other two, these men didn’t bother trying to cover their faces, but I didn’t recognize a single one of them. They climbed in through the top, and moments later, Ciana was carefully lifted out of the top of the limo.
“Maybe they took Nova and Cali to different locations,” I mused aloud, but even as the words left me, the new vehicle drove off in the same direction as the other had.
Zio’s fingers clenched around his phone so hard the screen began to crack around the edges. “Maybe,” he muttered, his eyes glued to the final footage of his daughter being taken away.
“Anya is in the air with Dante and Adrian,” Pop said into our headsets from where he was sitting with the pilot. “They will only be about five minutes behind us at this rate.”
“Bennie and Vito are at home?” Zio asked, his voice tight with emotion.
“Yeah, fratello,” Pop said with a nod. “Zariah is locked up tight with Scarlett, and Zayne is on his way back from Chicago as we speak. We will have all of your babies home by the end of the night.”
Zio clenched his eyes closed. “Christ, I hope so.”