“Well get him to give me an exact location,” Heath demanded. He glanced to Luke. “Also get in contact with the man Rosie uses to cremate her bodies. He’ll have a job soon.”
Luke nodded once, getting up to do so.
It would’ve been funny, the prior police chief organizing a body disposal. The fact he did it semiregularly with his wife. It would’ve been had it not been for the dread that had settled in Keltan’s bones since he found out about the photo.
It only increased when the man on the other end of the phone spoke. “What the fuck do you mean, lost him?” he demanded.
“I don’t know, man,” Ron said. “I had him. Thought he was too fucking dumb to even notice he had a tail let alone lose one.”
This fucker had them all fooled. And Keltan hoped it wasn’t a fatal mistake. “Where did you lose him?” he demanded. The fact he lost Ron was big. He was one of the best. Ex Secret Service. It was no small feat to shake his tail.
“Beverly Hills,” Ron said. “But I just got signal in the tracker I installed. He’s nowhere near there.”
“Where is he?”
Keltan’s blood went cold the second he told him.
And it turned to fucking ice when he hung up and saw the message Lucy had sent him that he’d somehow missed.
Snow: I’ve thrown up three times. Yes, this is too much information but you put the baby in me and you don’t have to experience this first hand so you at least have to know what you’re doing to me. Plus you left before morning sex. That’s cruel and unusual punishment.
I’m at Polly’s. I think she got laid last night. Hopefully she’ll distract me from wanting to barf.
Get home quick so you can distract me with sex.
I promise I won’t barf.
Not until after.
Kisses
xxx
.
Keltan’s chair smashed against the wall with the force he’d pushed out of it.
Duke and Heath were on alert. But he didn’t even spare a second to talk to them. He was too busy running out the door. Because the place they had Craig’s signal was where his pregnant wife was.
Polly’s apartment.
Lucy
“I didn’t have my gun,” I said woodenly.
Keltan’s hand was on my belly, eyes on mine. Neither his eyes nor his hand had moved since I woke up in his arms on Polly’s floor.
The expression on his face was only slightly less dire than it had been then. Now we were in a hospital and both me and the baby had been cleared, the only injury the bruise I’d have on my face from the punch and the lump on the back of my head from where I’d hit the ground.
I didn’t even have a concussion.
I’d had much worse. But because I was pregnant everyone treated it like the end of the world. When really the end of the world was the fact the last time I’d seen my sister she was bleeding from the fucking head.
“What?” Keltan asked, obviously confused at my words.
I blinked against the pain in my head. It was manageable. The fear running through my veins was not. “I didn’t have my gun because you took it off me so I couldn’t shoot the man who made my sister bleed from the head and who has her now. A man that is obviously not afraid to hurt women. Pregnant women.”
Keltan flinched at this, but I didn’t have it in me to care. Or at least to show that I cared. All my caring was taken up for my sister.
I stared at my husband coldly. “Now, someone has to be really fucked up to hit a pregnant woman.”
Another flinch.
I continued. “But to hit a creature like Polly…” I trailed off, unable to get that image of her lying unconscious out of my mind, “that’s like shooting a fucking dove. Someone that does stuff like that is capable of a lot of things, Keltan.”
Now pregnancy had nothing to do with my sudden urge to vomit.
“Things that Polly should never even hear about let alone experience,” I choked out. “And he has her now, this monster with a stupid fucking name because I didn’t have my gun because you took it off me because apparently being pregnant makes me more volatile. When volatile was exactly what I needed to be to save my little sister. But I couldn’t. Because of you.”
“Lucy,” Keltan said softly, not even blinking at the cruel misplaced blame I was hurling at his feet. His hand moved up to lightly cup my bruised face. “We’re gonna find her. We’re gonna kill him. I’m gonna kill him with my bare fuckin’ hands for layin’ a hand on my family. Riskin’ my whole fucking world.”
He paused abruptly, his eyes going to the heartbeat monitor as if he needed to make sure it was real, that the baby was okay before he kept going.