35. Elijah

Grady Holt was on the move.

He and Senator Wallace were currently at a pancake breakfast at a community center in Manhattan. The state senate had gone on recess a few days before, so it wasn't hard to follow the senator's social media pages to see the campaign events she was scheduled to attend. But this was the first one where Grady appeared, flanking her right side while she greeted attendees on the steps outside the building. She then gave a short speech to the press and had what appeared to be a terse meeting with a few of her advisers.

It was probably wishful thinking on my part that Grady didn't look quite right. His suit was wrinkled. There were heavy bags under his eyes, and the fingers of his left hand fidgeted when they weren't tapping away on his phone.

I watched all of this from a café across the street, wearing dark sweats and a hat pulled low, hiding my face behind one of Nora Jackson's books. Grady spoke briefly with the senator and then peeled away from her entourage, heading toward the parking garage one block away. I threw cash on the table for my coffee, collected my book, and then followed him.

Based on my conversation with Nora the day before, I wasn't wholly surprised when I plugged in that flash drive and found what appeared to be years of blackmail evidence on Rosamund Wallace. I was surprised at the sheer depth of it, at how much leverage Lincoln had on a woman who'd described him as "always having her back."

The flash drive held evidence from a journalist threatening to expose the Wallace mayoral campaign for election fraud. Their sources claimed that Rosamund, then a newbie city council member, had paid for her political colleagues to endorse her. Had even paid off staff at the local Cape Avalon paper to write favorable opinion pieces about her campaign. Local business owners who had been waffling on their endorsements suddenly came through in grand, public fashion…but only after sizable gifts appeared in their bank accounts.

All the last-minute support allowed her to eke out a win against the more popular grassroots candidate.

If Lincoln was leveraging this information he had over her to fast-track his projects while bypassing the red tape, then the friendship that existed between him and Rosamund was an uneasy détente at best. She knew Lincoln was using blackmail to drive up his company's profits…because Rosamund was the person being blackmailed.

Neither could expose the other without exposing themself.

What I didn't understand was why they thought Luke would have this flash drive full of incriminating evidence when it was all clearly orchestrated by Lincoln himself. But maybe they weren't aware of the strained father-son dynamic. Or maybe they were just plain desperate. Their reason for coming so hard for Luke now certainly made sense. The senator was savvy and ambitious and well-liked. She was rapidly climbing the political ladder, and a secret like this could end her career for good. Not to mention it was all very illegal.

As soon as I'd read through the information, I did the exact opposite of what Foster had instructed me to do. I drove right to the police station, leaving them copies of everything on the flash drive and imploring them to focus on the senator's team as the potential kidnappers. Then I'd spent the night researching, learning everything I could about Rosamund's life and the people she surrounded herself with.

My options were throwing myself into learning all that I could about this woman in a single evening. Or spending that same evening haunted by the memory of Luke whispering I like you so much it scares me before tracing the scars on my cheek with an intoxicating reverence.

Which was how, sometime around midnight, I'd landed on Grady as my target. There was an amateurish violence to the threats Luke had received that didn't feel like the work of a polished political official obsessed with maintaining her reputation. But she'd have given the task to someone she trusted implicitly.

Like the chief of staff who'd been by her side since he was just a college intern…and she was a newly elected city council member.

Now I sat low in my own parked car, grateful for the tinted windows, waiting for Grady to exit the parking garage. When he did, I kept as many vehicles between us as possible as we left Manhattan, drove through Queens, then hopped on Sunrise Highway heading toward the Hamptons.

Traffic kept our cars gridlocked, so by the time we were veering off Hill Street in the village of Southampton, my hands were clammy where they gripped the steering wheel. Grady finally pulled into a grimy Motel 6, and I forced myself to keep driving, hoping it would throw off any suspicion if he'd noticed me.

With every muscle taut, I drove a few blocks away, parked, then walked back to the motel with every nerve ending on hyper alert. I was tempted to storm the building and tear every door off its hinges but knew I needed some kind of plan. I stopped and made a hasty call to the police officer I'd spoken to last night, letting him know my location and what I was expecting to find. Midway through the officer instructing me to stay put in my car and out of harm's way, I hung up, then tossed a bag over my shoulders with supplies I hoped I wouldn't need.

When I was within eyesight of the parking lot, I took a right turn, keeping to the shaded parts of the sidewalk, then ducking behind the back entrance. Creeping low, light on my feet, I rounded the side of the motel and crouched behind the ice machines. The lot was empty except for two cars, the surrounding streets so quiet they were practically deserted.

I could just make out Grady, talking to a tall, broad man smoking a cigarette. Bile rose in my throat at the thought of Luke somewhere inside one of those rooms, at the mercy of those people, hurt and hungry and alone.

Grady left, striding toward a room I couldn't see from my vantage point. The man still smoked, messing around on his phone as he took long drags on his cigarette. When I felt like enough time had passed, I moved as quickly and quietly as I could, behind a short row of bushes, until I was close. I carefully, silently, retrieved the Taser from my bag. Then I was on my feet, wrapping an arm around the man's neck and pressing the device to the hollow of his throat.

"Don't say a fucking word," I hissed. I felt him go rigid and prepare to fight back. "And don't move. I'm guessing you know as well as I do what will happen if I activate this thing."

He grunted, looking furious.

"Now, which room did Grady Holt walk into?"

When he didn't answer, I wrenched his arms behind his back and pushed him forward, with the Taser now lodged against his nape.

"Tell me, or you're getting fifty thousand volts to the back of your goddamn skull," I said, seething.

The man released an angry breath. "Five."

I kicked him toward the door with my heart jackhammering in my chest. The room key was sticking out of his back pocket. I retrieved it with the hand holding the Taser, then shoved open the door and pushed my poorly-bound captive into the dim room.

But my plan fell apart as soon as I stepped inside and saw the bathroom door cracked open. Grady was crouched on the floor, speaking to someone in a voice dripping with condescension. And there were Luke's bare feet, the bunched material of the borrowed sweatpants he'd been wearing the morning he was taken.

You'd have me though, right? I'm not nothing.

My grip loosened with shock, dropping the Taser, and the man took advantage, darting back out the door in a full sprint. But I hardly noticed, every cell in my body flaring to life as I realized Luke was right there. Grady's gaze flew to a scratched-up coffee table, where a tiny circle of handcuff keys lay in the center. We both made a break for them at the same time.

And I was faster.

I snatched up the keys with one hand—with the other, I grabbed a fistful of Grady's shirt and hauled him back into the bathroom, slamming him up against the first wall we came to. It was too dangerous to look, too dangerous to look, too dangerous to look…

I turned my head and saw Luke, sitting on the floor with his hands cuffed to a sink pipe. He'd been gone for two and a half days at this point, less than sixty hours, and yet I stared at him like we'd spent decades apart. There was stubble on his cheeks, bruising around his lips, a hollow exhaustion in the lines around his eyes, which were wide with surprise.

"Elijah?"he asked hoarsely.

Before I could respond, Grady started to flail against me. One look at the clammy cowardice on his face had a fiery rage rising in me like a swarm of bees.

"You're the bodyguard, right?" he sputtered, seconds before I lodged my forearm against his throat, pinning him. "It's not," he wheezed, "not what it looks like."

I dipped my head until he could see the extent of my fury. "You kidnapped the man I love and chained him to a fucking sink."

His nails bit into my arm. "Just give me what I want, okay? Give me the drive and I'll pretend"—I pressed harder and he winced in pain—"I'll swear this never happened."

"Who put those bruises on his mouth?"

"Oh, stop being so pathetic, both of you," Grady spat out. His feet kicked at my shins as he struggled, but the movement barely registered. "You think any of this matters?You think having a little boyfriend matters in the end?—"

I released my hold on his throat and punched him square in the face. He dropped to the tile, blood spurting from his nose, as the motel door burst open and police officers filled the small space. In the chaos, I forced my way to Luke and dropped to a crouch in front of him, reaching for his cuffs with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. The whole ordeal was made harder by the fact that I couldn't wrench my gaze away from his.

Wanted to stare forever at the person I feared I'd never see again.

I dropped the keys. Cursed. Picked them up and tried again, with even less luck.

"My handsome shield," Luke whispered, eyes filled with tears. "You rescued me."

I swallowed past the lump in my throat. "Anything for you, my liege."

"Elijah," he started, as I finally got the key in the lock. "Elijah, I'm so sorry. About our argument, what I said, I'm such an asshole."

My gaze snapped back to Luke. "Don't you dare say that. I'm the asshole."

"No, that's ridiculous. We can't both be?—"

The cuffs fell open and clattered to the floor. And then I was pulling him toward me, wrapping my arms around his body. He hugged me back so tightly the air was knocked from my lungs, not that I could even conceive of breathing.

My only concern was Luke, with his face buried against my neck, his trembling shoulders, my hand cupping the back of his head. After a minute or ten or a hundred, he turned and kissed me. Bruised and probably sore, right there in the bathroom, surrounded by strangers and his kidnappers. The world around us vanished, like it always did, and I kissed him back with every bit of yearning I'd once locked away.

When we finally parted, he was wearing the same lopsided grin from the day we met.

"You're not nothing, Luke," I whispered. "You're everything."