Chapter 18

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

February 3 rd

10:29 A.M.

No.

This was wrong.

She was wrong.

Cassie glanced at Luis' name on her phone as it rang for the second time. He was calling her. Calling her . Not Violet. Not anyone else.

Her.

For her, he'd revealed his deepest, darkest insecurities. Gone further than that. He'd confronted them. For a man who had always felt like he was stupid and been treated like he was too dumb to learn by his parents, his teachers, and his peers, being with a woman like her with an IQ off the charts could have been his worst nightmare.

He could have been forcing himself to wake up every day for the rest of his life with the reminder of the worst years of his life staring right back at him.

If he let it.

But he hadn't let it.

He'd confronted those insecurities, banished them.

It wasn't like either of them expected that there would never be times when he wouldn't still be reminded of those years before he was diagnosed with dyslexia. There would be. There would no doubt be moments where her intelligence couldn't help but be shoved in his face even if she didn't do that on purpose, and he was prepared to take that risk.

Because being with her was worth it to him.

Didn't she owe him the same?

Lack of experience and her own perceived self-image were what had her doubting him right now. Letting her believe Violet and the words she was spewing. Words the other women knew would make her feel insecure, and it was working.

Well, it had been working.

But not anymore.

With more determination than she realized she had, Cassie mentally gathered every single doubt she had and tossed them into a bag. Then she tossed that bag right out the window.

It had no place in her mind or in her relationship with Luis.

The phone in her hand dinged to tell her she had a voicemail and she smiled. She should have called out to Luis, told him that she'd seen Violet and wanted to confront the woman, but once again, she'd let her doubts and insecurities get the best of her.

"Did he tell you?" she asked, looking up to meet Violet's smug smile. The other woman thought she'd won and pushed the competition out of the way.

Too bad for her it was the opposite.

"Tell me what?" Violet demanded, tossing her long mane of golden blonde hair over her shoulder.

"About his past?" Cassie asked even though she already knew the answer. Luis hadn't told her, hadn't told any of the women he'd been with. She didn't even think his teammates knew the extent of what he'd suffered as a child, and they were the people he was closest to.

The other woman's smile faltered. "That doesn't prove anything. He keeps coming back to me," Violet taunted like she fully believed that it would happen again.

A couple of days ago Cassie would have agreed.

Would have believed there was no way a playboy like Luis would ever be able to settle for a woman like her who had never even had an orgasm before in her entire life.

Something had changed though.

Shifted inside her.

A newfound confidence.

Luis hadn't just had sex with her, he'd shared his heart with her, and that made her different than the other women he'd been with. They were just for fun, for pleasure, to pass away the time and deal with his physical needs, but with her, he wanted to build a future.

"He won't be going back to you again," Cassie said, straightening her back and looking the other woman in the eye. Just because she'd only lost her virginity the night before didn't mean she had anything to be ashamed of. So what if she'd waited until she was twenty-three and met a man she actually really liked and wanted to be with for the rest of her life? That didn't mean there was anything wrong with her.

"Want to bet?" Violet sneered.

"I don't make bets, but if you're asking if I'm certain then the answer is yes. You can't give him what he really wants," Cassie said. Not to be mean, just because it was the truth. If Violet was what Luis really wanted, he would have stayed with her. Like Violet said, he kept going back to her, but he also kept leaving. Because Violet wasn't his safe place. She was.

"How dare you," Violet fumed, storming across the room. "I'm every man's dream."

"In bed maybe," Cassie said softly, not wanting to cause Violet pain, but the woman didn't seem to be getting it. How many times did she need to be rejected before she finally understood that Luis didn't want a future with her? "But, Violet, you're worth more than that. If you want a relationship, you have to see yourself as being more than just a sexy body. You are more."

Her words didn't seem to have any effect on the woman, and from the way she lifted her hand, Cassie was sure Violet was about to slap her.

Already she was bracing for the blow when the door opened.

Half expecting it to be Luis having tracked her down, Cassie was moving toward the door before she even realized what she was doing.

She stopped in her tracks, though, when she saw that it wasn't Luis who had entered the room, but two men dressed in hospital scrubs. Both were wearing masks and the kind of caps that usually doctors and nurses wore in surgery. That left little of their faces visible and while she had no idea why, Cassie got a cold shiver.

Something felt off.

Intending to edge around the men, allowing the distraction to get her away from Violet, she was completely unprepared for what was about to happen.

One second Violet was shooting daggers at her from the angriest set of eyes she'd ever seen, and the next, one of the men was standing behind her, dragging the blade of a knife across Violet's neck.

Immediately, a line of red bubbled to the surface.

The line quickly became a flood as blood poured from what Cassie already knew was a fatal wound.

Seemed to take Violet a little longer to come to that conclusion.

Making a gurgling sound, Violet's hands moved clumsily to the wound, pressing against it in a vain attempt to staunch the flow of blood.

Eyes that had just a moment ago been full of hatred now pleaded for help, and Cassie realized that she was standing frozen in shock instead of doing something.

Even though the other man still stood by the door, blocking her exit, she darted toward it bringing up the missed call on her phone's lock screen so she could call Luis back. As she did so, her mouth opened, and all the terror she hadn't even allowed herself to feel yet because she was still in shock, surged to the surface, needing an outlet so it didn't consume her.

Before the sound could escape into a scream, alerting Luis and anyone else nearby that something was wrong, a powerful surge of electricity suddenly hit her body.

Losing complete control of herself, Cassie hit the floor hard. If pain wasn't shooting through her, she would have cried out, but instead, her entire body seemed to be locked tight as the taser delivered the disabling shock.

As she lay there, struggling to breathe as pain never stopped coursing through her, she heard the rumble of voices above her. The two men must be talking, or maybe it was help?

No.

Of course it wasn't.

Hands lifted her, settling her on something relatively soft. She felt the flutter of material over her body as she was covered with something, probably a blanket or sheet.

"Give her the shot," one of the men said, his voice echoing oddly as though she was hearing him through a long underwater tunnel. "Don't want her regaining her senses and calling out to someone."

Something pricked the skin of her upper arm, and almost immediately, Cassie got this heavy feeling. Whatever drug had been administered didn't knock her out, not completely anyway. It just locked her in a kind of mental quicksand. The more she tried to fight her way out of it, the less it seemed to work and the more stuck she found herself.

She had to get off the bed, she knew that.

Had to get to Luis.

But when she tried to move, she found her limbs completely uncooperative.

Unable to move, unable to talk, although she tried screaming until her brain flinched from the sound that only echoed inside her head and never made it out into the real world, she had no choice but to lie there as the men wheeled her along.

Aware of people around them even though all she could see was fuzzy shapes, like they were draped in fog, it was when she heard the voice of the man she was falling in love with that reality finally hit hard.

"Last I saw her was right over there," Luis said, his voice so close she could almost feel it washing over her in a warm caress.

Trying with everything she had, Cassie did her best to force out words, to reach out to touch him, something, anything, but nothing worked.

She was being kidnapped, taken right past a man who could kill both of her abductors before they could blink, and there was absolutely nothing she could do to stop it from happening.

February 3 rd

10:36 A.M.

"Last I saw here was right over there," Luis said as he guided Rocco and his team down the corridor.

While most of the people seemed to have left already, there were still dozens about. Not just parents and their kids, but doctors and nurses, too. In fact, they walked past a patient being wheeled along on a gurney.

They stopped right at the spot where he remembered discussing with Cassie that her doing her best was all anyone could ask of her. Remembered wishing he could force reassurance into her mind so she stopped blaming herself for things that were outside of her control.

He remembered noticing how the hallway had suddenly got much busier, and that instead of pausing to discuss it was Cassie, he assumed she had noticed it, too, and they'd both taken off up the hall, searching for answers.

But maybe she hadn't noticed it.

Maybe he'd just run off and left her behind.

If that was the case, though, then where was she?

The corridor had been busy, but it wasn't so packed with people that she would have lost sight of him.

Why hadn't she followed him?

What had happened to her?

How had she just seemed to completely disappear in a matter of minutes?

"Okay, we start from here and work our way up to where you were when you realized she was gone," Rocco said, his voice so calm and controlled that Luis wished he could borrow just a little piece of that confidence. Just enough to keep him from completely losing it.

"We should split up," Ace added. "The corridor splits off in two directions just a few rooms down from here. We know she didn't get past you because you would have seen her, so whatever caught her attention happened somewhere between here and there."

Those words might have been reassuring if there weren't so many rooms, and a number of exits, that could mean she was already on a different floor. Or hell, even mean that she was no longer in the building.

"Phantom and Rex, you guys take the hall to the left. Bubba and Gumby, you guys go to the right. Ace, Luis, and I will start here and work our way up straight to where we know Cassie never went," Rocco gave out the instructions.

As badly as Luis wanted to be in control of this, it was his woman missing after all, there was another part of him that was grateful to the SEAL team leader for taking over. Because the truth was, he didn't have it in him to do much more than try to keep his panic at bay right now.

As the other guys took off, he turned to the first room on his right. They were going to have to open every door, search every room, and pray each time that Cassie had disappeared behind that particular door.

She hadn't called him back.

That worried him more than anything else. Cassie wasn't a mean or vindictive person, even if she was angry with him for some reason—and he could think of zero reason why she would be—there was no way she would just leave him to worry.

The only reason that made sense as to why she hadn't returned his calls was because she couldn't.

But what had happened that had made it impossible?

Was she really so caught up in some clue she had found that she hadn't even heard her phone ring?

He'd watched her work, spent hours sitting by her side as she poured through information, listened to that video over and over, and read the transcript until her eyes were red and puffy and she couldn't stop rubbing at them. None of those times had she been so completely locked inside her head that she was no longer capable of hearing anything from the outside world.

Sure, sometimes he had to call her name more than once, but two phone calls when her phone was in her purse, there was no way she could miss that.

He, Rocco, and Ace cleared one room, and then another, then a third.

It wasn't until his hand was on the doorknob for the fourth room that it hit him.

The metallic stench of blood.

A lot of blood.

Years of training flew from his mind as he shoved the door open and ran into the room with no other focus than finding who was bleeding so badly he could smell it from the other side of the door.

Thankfully, Rocco and Ace managed to hold onto their training because if an assailant was in the room, he would have given them ample opportunity to attack.

As it turned out there wasn't.

All there was was a single body lying on the floor.

Dropping to his knees at its side, so afraid it could be Cassie that he was unable to take in anything other than the growing puddle of blood surrounding it, Luis couldn't process clothing or hair color. Missed that the body wasn't wearing light blue jeans and a pink sweater, the outfit Cassie had thrown on this morning after he ate her out in the shower. Missed that the tangled hair framing a pale face like a halo was blonde and not chocolate brown.

Missed that the lifeless eyes staring up at the ceiling were blue and not brown.

It wasn't until a hand rested on his shoulder and softly spoke the only words that mattered that he could see anything but all the blood.

"It's not her, Luis. It's not Cassie," Rocco said, the hand on his shoulder squeezing just hard enough to hurt.

The small jolt was enough to kickstart his brain again and he skimmed his gaze over the body, quickly realizing who it was.

"It's Violet," he announced.

"Who's Violet?" Ace asked.

"She's a woman who I've seen off and on for the last decade," he said voice hollow. It all made sense now. Why Cassie had disappeared and why she hadn't answered his calls. She'd seen Violet, who he was sure was only too happy to taunt Cassie.

But surely his princess had to know that anything Violet said was just lies intended to make Cassie feel insecure so Violet could have a better shot at getting what she wanted. Which seemed to be him, although he had no idea why she was suddenly so invested in getting back together with him when they'd never even really been together.

Over the last decade, they'd probably hooked up over a dozen times. Usually, it would last for a couple of weeks. They'd catch up when he was in the country, hang out, go to bars, drink and eat, talk and laugh, have sex, then they'd both get bored and move on. Circling back around only when they were both unattached and in the mood for hot sex with no commitments in sight.

What made Violet change her mind?

And what did that have to do with Cassie?

"Why would someone slit the throat of a woman you used to date?" Ace asked.

Shoving to his feet, he shot both men a deadly glare. They better not be insinuating what it sounded like they were insinuating. "Cassie wouldn't hurt her," he snarled. If they so much as uttered a single word that implied Cassie was capable of an act of jealousy like this, he would rip them limb from limb.

"Whoa, man." Ace held up his hands palms out. "Wasn't thinking that at all. Cassie wouldn't hurt a fly. Sweetest woman out there, after Piper and my girls of course. But the facts are, an ex of yours is lying dead in a hospital and your woman is missing."

"We don't even know for sure that Cassie knew Violet was here," he said even though he already knew that wasn't true. Cassie had been in this room, he knew it, could feel it.

"Her phone," Rocco announced, moving over to scoop up a phone that had been lying on the floor behind the door.

Taking the phone, he quickly confirmed it was indeed Cassie's and not Violet's. She'd changed the image on the lock screen. It used to be a picture of her standing beneath the northern lights. Now it was a picture of the two of them together. Taken less than twenty-four hours ago on their first date. She'd insisted on a selfie while they were on the dance floor, and after trying to get one where they both fitted properly in the frame given he was a foot taller than her, he'd eventually hooked an arm around her waist and lifted her feet off the floor. Giggling, she'd turned to look at him and he'd snapped a picture.

Now this image of her gazing adoringly at him and him grinning at the camera might be all he had left of his genius princess who had somehow managed to sneak into a heart he had been determined to keep everyone out of.

Cassie had been in here and now she was gone, but her phone was left behind.

His stomach dropped as things quickly clicked into place with crystal clear clarity.

"The girl on the gurney," he mumbled, horror almost taking him to his knees. "The two orderlies with the gurney we passed just before we split up. They were coming from this room. They took Cassie."

Snuck her out of here literally right beneath his nose.

His woman had been abducted and he'd done nothing to stop it from happening.