Chapter 30

Beckett grunted as she was tossed into the back of the van, Ryan unceremoniously shoved in after her. Jason duct-taped her hands and feet, then yanked her around until she was sitting between Ryan’s legs, her head slammed into his chest. He ripped off more tape, securing Ryan’s hands and feet so they wrapped around her, holding her down.

Ryan bent and pressed his lips to her ear. “Don’t talk. I’m going to memorize the route so we know where we are when we stop. Do you still have your phone?”

She nodded. “It’s in my pocket.”

“Try to wiggle around and get it. Don’t worry about hurting me, just don’t say a word once we start moving. I’ll need to concentrate.”

The doors slammed, indicating the two men had gotten in the front. The engine hummed to life, and the van pulled out of the alley. Beckett cast a glance toward the front of the van as if expecting they could see through the metal wall. Biting her lip, she tried to move her bound wrists toward her pocket, but found she couldn’t maneuver. Pushing up with her feet, she stood within the trap of Ryan’s limbs, pressing her back into the van to stretch her body out enough to wriggle a finger into her pocket.

It took several tries before she managed to hook a finger around the phone and began pulling it out. As she pulled it free, the van took a corner at high speed and she was thrown down on top of Ryan, the phone skittering away from her grasp. Near tears, she sat down, stretching out with her legs and trying to scrape the phone toward herself, but unable to reach it.

Wiggling downward, Beckett slid her head beneath Ryan’s arms and continued wiggling down until she was free of his legs. Laying on her side, she kicked herself to the side and grabbed the phone, pushing up with her knees and elbows. Ryan lifted his legs, and she crawled back under them, returning to the position she’d been in when their captors had closed the door.

“Don’t dial.” Ryan’s voice was tense. “Send a text to Caleb. Tell him we’re on the backroad heading into the national forest. He’ll know where that is.”

Beckett struggled to unlock the phone and open the texting app. By the time she got the first text typed out and hit send, the van had made three more turns and the road had turned from pavement to gravel. The response to her text came through in seconds, the phone vibrating gently in her hand.

—We know. Following the van. Don’t worry, we got this. Jax went for Dad’s rifle. Murphy and I are tailing you.—

Ryan read the text and shook his head, a rueful smile on his lips. “You will never cease to amaze me. I didn’t think there was any way in hell you told them you were coming to meet me, and I figured it even less likely they’d allow it. Tell him we just turned on Castle Rock road.”

“Are you sure?”

“Tell him.”

Three turns later, Ryan spoke again. “Tell them we took a left on Trout Run. There’s a summer resort about four miles up here. The cabins will be empty this time of year, and the caretaker stays at the main lodge. We’re going to one of them.”

Beckett barely had time to send the text before the van ground to a halt. Moving as quickly as she could, she twisted to delete the texts so there was no evidence of the conversation with Caleb before turning the phone off and putting it back into her pocket. When she couldn’t get the phone in her own pocket, she managed to turn, shimmying down and tucking it in Ryan’s front pants pocket. Unable to get turned around before the van doors opened, she pressed her face into his chest, bit down on her tongue hard enough she tasted blood and tears sprang to her eyes, and she cried as convincingly as she could.

“Aww. How sweet.” Jason climbed into the back of the van and grabbed Beckett by the feet, dragging her out of the van and dumping her on the ground.

Raul leaned down and hauled her up, scruffing the back of her neck to keep her from running. “A pleasure to see you again, Mrs. McKenzie. Hopefully this time you will be feeling more helpful than before.”

Jason came out of the van with Ryan at gunpoint. “We’re all going to go into the cabin right there and have us a nice talk. If either of you screams, makes a run for it, or does anything stupid, I’ll shoot you. Understood?”

Beckett nodded. “I won’t do anything.”

She went willingly into the cabin, her heart pounding painfully in her chest. She and Ryan were shoved down onto the floor in the living room. Raul sat on the couch facing them, and Jason dropped into a chair at the table, pivoting to face them.

“You have two choices. You can either tell me where my money and drugs are, or you can die.” Raul gestured to them both with the gun. “I do not play games. I do not torture. You live or you die. But the only way you leave alive is if you cooperate. Mr. McKenzie, you worked with my family a long time. You stabbed us in the back. You die anyway. Your choice is a quick death or a slow, painful one. If your wife does not know, she is of no use to me, and I will shoot her now. Perhaps that will be incentive for you to talk.”

“The drugs are in my couch at home. They’re sewn into the lining on the bottom. The money is in my storage unit. It’s one-thirteen at Brick’s Storage Lockers in Trenton. The key to the locker is in my bedroom upstairs, and the combination on the keypad is fourteen-twenty-seven.” Beckett blurted out the information as convincingly as she could, praying the two men bought her panic as genuine.

Raul looked at Jason. “I will take the van and collect what is ours. Once I have it, I will call you. Shoot Mr. McKenzie and leave his wife here. She’ll either find her own way out, or she’ll die.” He stood and stared down at them. “If you’ve lied to me, your day will become most unpleasant.”

Ryan waited until Raul was gone and Jason had ventured into the bathroom. His voice low, he leaned in and pressed his lips to her ear. “What the hell was that?”

“Buying us some time. The cops are on their way, and so are your brothers.”

“It’ll take the cops an hour or better to get here if Murph and Caleb have even called them. It’s the middle of the night, and they’re going to have to call in the feds. This is an entire operation that’s going to have to take place in the middle of fucking nowhere, Beckett. When they find out you lied, they’re going to come in here and kill one of us. Unless one of my brothers is willing to shoot this fucker, we’re about to be in a world of hurt.”

Beckett looked up at him with eyes hot with anger and her jaw set stubbornly. “You don’t know them as well as you think you do. They’ll shoot him. If it’s Jax, I’d say there’s a good chance he even enjoys it.”

Jason strode back into the room, drying his hands. He wandered into the bedroom, checked the window to make sure it was locked, then upended the bed and moved the frame in front of it. Returning to the main room, he dragged Beckett, then Ryan into the bedroom.

“You two stay in here and be good. I don’t want to look at you.”

Ryan cleared his throat. “You know Raul is going to kill you as soon as you’re not of use anymore. You know too much. Cut us loose, and I’ll take you with me when I run.”

Beckett’s eyes widened and she threw her head back, hitting Ryan in the jaw. “You bastard! You’d leave me here for the cartel and run off with this asshole? You’d make your children orphans?”

Ryan looked at her coldly. “You’re screwing my brother. Murphy would take the kids. Besides, it’s not like they’re really mine. I’ve never even met the one.” He sneered. “Come on, babe, don’t tell me you ever really thought I loved you. You were a means to an end, and now you’re going to be again. They call it collateral damage.”

Jason leaned against the door and crossed his arms. “You got me involved in this, and then you set me up to take the fall when things got too hot for you. You left me to rot in prison. If you think I’d ever trust you after that, you’re the one who’s delusional, not me.” Grinning, he patted the gun on his hip. “I’m no fool. I know what Raul plans to do. Only one person’s coming out of here tonight, and I’m damned determined it’s going to be me.”

When the door was closed and the television turned on, Beckett looked at Ryan. “What the hell was that?”

“Strategy.” Ryan flexed his jaw. “Damn, woman. You pack a punch with that head butt.”

“You deserved it.”

“Your response had to be genuine or he’d have seen through it. Great reaction, by the way.” He tried to wiggle his hands up to his pockets. “Damn idiots didn’t even go through our pockets. I have a set of keys in my pocket, if you can get to them. We may be able to saw our way through this tape if we can get to them. At least if we get loose, we’ll have a shot when Raul gets back.”

“Was it a bad idea to tell him what I did?”

“Extremely, but you’d have had to tell them something, or I would have, eventually. Doing it fast felt genuine and panicked, so he bought it.” Ryan slid down the wall to make his pockets more accessible to her.

Beckett forced herself to her knees and tried to wiggle her fingers inside Ryan’s jeans. “What’re we going to do?”

“Well, we’re going to try and escape. Failing that, we’ll fight our way out. Trump card is my brothers. If they’re out there and armed, they could be what gets us both out of here alive.”

“They won’t let you leave, even if they haven’t called the cops yet.”

Ryan nodded, his mouth set in a thin, grim line. “I’m aware. They’re all pretty pissed.”

“Wouldn’t you be in the same situation? You did shitty things, Ryan. You deserve to go to prison.”

“And if I get you out of here alive, give the feds enough information to bring down the Malatoas, and make sure everyone else involved in the drug smuggling gets locked in a cage? Then what do you think?”

Mulling the challenge over as she worked, Beckett considered the prospect. “You deserve to go to prison for the things you did. Just because you’re doing the right thing now doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be consequences for what you’ve done in the past. Saving my life, getting us out of here, and doing all those other things might be enough to keep the court system from locking you up, but it won’t be enough to win your family back over. People have died because of you. That doesn’t just go away because you decide you want to play nice.”

“Are you seriously telling me you would prefer it if I’d gotten myself locked up for fifteen or twenty years?”

Beckett triumphantly pulled the keys from his pocket. “If you know enough now to keep yourself out of prison, you knew it then. You ran because it was easiest, because you’d dug yourself a hole so deep you thought that was the only way out, and because you never loved me or our children for a single day.”

She stared at him evenly, anger churning behind her eyes, but her expression neutral. She took several moments to breathe deeply, giving herself time to calm down and make sure she could keep her voice low.

“I was a good wife to you. I’m a good mother to our children. I’m a good person. I work hard, I do whatever I have to do to give Rhys and Harlow what they need, and I grieved for you for years. You did that. You made a choice. This did not happen to you. You brought it on yourself through your decisions. You can change the path now if you want to, but it won’t erase what you’ve already done.”

Ryan took the keys from her and began examining each one, looking for the one with the sharpest teeth. “I should get some credit for tonight. Saving your life oughta go a long way toward making up for shit.”

Shaking her head, Beckett watched him start trying to cut through a dozen layers of duct-tape with a car key. “First, I’d have to believe you were sorry about anything other than getting caught.”

****

Murphy laid flat on his stomach, Caleb next to him. The only cabin with lights on was a hundred yards away, but the thick vegetation gave them shielding from being seen. Looking over his shoulder when he heard rustling, he saw Jax coming up the path from where they’d parked their cars.

“What do we know?”

Caleb didn’t stop looking at the cabin. “The van was there when we got up here. We could see some through the window, but not a lot. It looks like they’ve got Ryan and Beckett in the bedroom at the back. They’re tied up with something. The Malatoa guy left about fifty minutes ago. Robbins is still in there with them.”

“Where did Malatoa go?”

“No idea.” Murphy glanced at his youngest brother quickly, then turned back to watching the cabin. “We thought about one of us leaving to follow him for about five seconds but decided we should stay here with Beck.”

“Good call. Where’s Savi?”

Caleb chuckled. “Following Malatoa.”

Jax efficiently loaded the rifle in his hands. “Have either of you called the police?”

“Nope.” Murphy scrambled up the embankment to sit next to Jax. “We’ve been discussing that, too. Police make noise, they don’t sneak in, and they could get Beck and Ryan killed. Did you bring the pistols?”

Jax tossed one to Murphy and leaned down to hand the other to Caleb. “They aren’t accurate from this distance. I’m the only one of us a decent shot, so I keep Dad’s rifle.” He studied the cabin. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

“Neither do we.” Caleb briefly looked over his shoulder. “I want to beat them unconscious and tie them up for Clint to come collect. I can swallow my less sophisticated urges as long as we can get Beckett back safely and Ryan in one piece.”

Murphy snorted. “Ryan can be retrieved in multiple pieces for all I care.”

“Not if we want him to give the police enough to bring the Malatoas down and keep us all safe.” Jax slung the rifle over his shoulder by sliding his arm through the leather strap. “So what’s the plan?”

Caleb was the one to answer. “I think we should go down there, take on this Jason Robbins, and be waiting for Malatoa when he gets back. Three against one. I like our odds.”

Murphy pulled his phone out of his pocket when it started buzzing. Answering it, he pressed the device to his ear. “Hey, Savi. What’s going on?”

Savi’s voice was low and panicked. “Malatoa just broke into Beckett’s house. He was in there about five minutes and came out looking pissed. He’s heading back your way. I don’t want to trail too close or he’ll see me. What should I do?”

“Stay far enough back he doesn’t see you, but close enough you can tell us if he changes direction. Do you remember the way back here?”

“I marked it on the GPS. I can get back to you.”

“Good. Head this way, park where you were before and call me when you’re there. One of us will come and get you.” He clicked off the phone and addressed Jax and Caleb. “Malatoa is on his way back and he’s pissed. If we’re going to do this, we don’t have much time.”

Jax tapped his fingers against his leg. “I say we wait for him to get here and take them both at once. I’ll stay up here with the sight trained on the fuckers, and the two of you get the truck and go in horn honking like you’re two drunken assholes. They come outside, you jump out of the truck with the pistols and take them. If either of them makes a bad move, I shoot them. I’m afraid if anything doesn’t look perfect when Malatoa gets back that he scrambles and we never see him again.”

Caleb switched positions with Murphy. “I understand the concern. We could wait until Malatoa is in there, then one of us goes to the front entrance, one to the back, you stay up here and we call the cops.”

Murphy nodded sharply. “I like that one. Let Clint clean it up, and we stop them if they run. Get down here, baby brother, and check to see if you can get clear sight lines on the main room and the bedroom from this ledge. This is the best view you’re going to get, so if it won’t work, we need to figure something else out.”

Jax slid down the slope and laid on his belly, pressing the scope to his eye and moving the barrel of the gun. “I have a clean view of the door and the main room. I could get them from here if I had to.”

Caleb smiled grimly. “Let’s hope you don’t have to.”