The world stopped. Fast. Violently. She no longer faced the hotel guests, but knew if she turned around, she would see nothing. No movement. No life.
But then the words penetrated even deeper, beyond the fog of shock and the blanket of horror to the logical part of her, the part Jeremy had honed and fine-tuned, sharpened to a gleaming point, and another truth registered.
She was being watched. Someone, someone close, knew her every move.
The man. The man who’d been watching her, asking questions. The one who had vanished but whose presence lingered.
“You what?” she asked, slowly indulging the need to look. To see.
“Don’t move,” the voice intoned, and abruptly she froze. “If you want to see him again, you’ll do exactly what I say.”
The world started moving again, from dead cold to fast forward in one horrible dizzying heartbeat. Everything swirled, blurred. Blindly she reached for the counter. Her son. God, her precious little boy. Her life.
“No cops,” the man continued. It had to be him, she thought. The man from the lobby. The one who’d been watching her, asking about her. The one who’d vanished mere seconds ago. “Call them and negotiations end.”
She wasn’t sure how she stayed standing, not when every cell in her body cried out, louder and harder than the distorted cry she’d picked up an hour earlier. And she knew. God help her, she knew why she’d been on edge. Why she’d been disturbed. Her son. Someone had gotten to her son, and on some intuitive level, she’d known danger pushed close.
But just as with his father, she hadn’t been able to protect.
“What do you want?” she asked with a calm that did not come easy to her Gypsy blood. She’d been in situations like this before, dangerous, confusing, never with her own son, but she’d gone where law enforcement could not go.
“Call the day-care center. Tell them Alex walked home on his own.”
She swallowed hard. That was feasible. The center was only a few blocks from her small Rogers Park home. Alex knew the way. He was an adventurous kid, clever, daring, always in constant motion. It would be just like him to wander off when no one was looking.
“Then what?”
“Wait for instructions.”
Deep inside she started to shake. It was only a sick joke, she wanted to think. A prank. Payback for the sins of her past. But she’d met relatively few people since moving to Chicago and could think of none who would be so cruel.
It was a mistake, she thought next, but even as hope tried to bloom, reality sucked the oxygen from her lungs. She wanted to spin around and run, to shout at the top of her lungs as she searched for the tall man with the dark eyes. But with great effort, she kept herself very still.
“I’m calling them now,” she said with the same forced calm.
“Good girl.” A garbled sound then, something between laughter and scorn. “Do not betray us, my sweet. One word about this call to anyone, and your son will pay the price.”
The line went dead. And for a long, drowning moment Danielle just stood there, breathing hard, praying she wouldn’t throw up.
Then she ran.
“Thank God, Ms. Caldwell. We’ve been looking for him for the past ten minutes. We were about to call the police.”
“Don’t do that.” The words burst out of Danielle like a wild animal released from captivity. Her whole body shook. If the day-care director called the cops, Danielle would have to produce her son. And if she couldn’t, there would be an investigation. An Amber Alert. A full-scale search. In all likelihood, she would become the number-one suspect. She’d be hauled down to the station, detained, questioned.
And the man—the man with the dead-sea gaze, the one from the hotel, who’d sat and watched her for over an hour, who’d coldly issued his threats—would know.
And Alex would be punished.
“Everything’s fine,” she said, clenching the steering wheel with one hand as she raced north along Lakeshore Drive. “We’re headed out of town for a few days and Alex was just excited.” She had to get home. Fast. She needed to be in the small frame house she and her son had picked out, the one littered with his toys. Maybe he was already there. Maybe he’d gotten away, had run and run and run. He could run fast, she knew. He had the same uncanny knack for skirting trouble that she’d had.
Once.
A long time ago.
Before she made the wrong choice, and the wrong person paid the price.
“We’re so sorry,” the director was saying. Fear drenched her voice. The poor woman’s livelihood wobbled at stake. A day-care center that lost children in its care would not stay in business long. “I don’t know how he wandered off. We were watching him the whole time—”
“It’s not your fault, Elaine.” Danielle put on her blinker and zipped around a slow-moving minivan.
“But it is,” Elaine insisted. “This is inexcusable.”
Fear crawled through Danielle, as dark and slimy as an army of the earwigs she’d always hated, but she managed to keep her voice steady as she explained it would be several days before Alex returned to the day-care center. By the time she pulled into the cracked driveway of her little white house, she’d convinced Elaine Myers she wasn’t going to press charges.
“Alex!” She called his name the second she pushed open the car door. “Alex!”
Nothing.
The house looked so still, still and dark and quiet. Too quiet for the house of a six-year-old boy who didn’t even hold still when he slept.
She unlocked the front door, shoved it open and ran into the darkened foyer. “Alex!”
Nothing.
Her whole body started to shake, and this time she didn’t have to pretend. Didn’t have to hold back. She let the tide crash over and around her, let it push her to her knees.
The sobs came next, big, gulping sobs. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.”
Breathe, she told herself. Breathe. Think. But she couldn’t. She’d never felt so helpless in her life, not even the horrible rainy night she’d watched a car spin out of control and crash, then burst into flames. She’d run toward the wreckage, screaming, her brother Anthony trying to hold her back. But there was no one here now. No one to hold her back. No one to hold her, period. No one to help. Her son was missing. Gone.
Images assaulted her then, darker than the fear, the horror, the rage snaking through her. Her little boy. His dark hair and laughing blue eyes. His impish smile. He’d never spent the night away from home. Away from her.
He could be anywhere. His abductors could be doing anything to him. Bile backed up in her throat, and this time she couldn’t stop the churning of her stomach. She gagged, lost what little lunch she’d consumed.
She wasn’t stupid or naive. She watched the news. She knew about child predators. Knew too much.
Anthony.
Her brother’s name came to her on a shattering rush of memory, and with it came more tears. Dear, dear Anthony. So tough and brave, wounded on a level few would ever suspect. He’d taken on a man’s responsibility long before he was able to wear a man’s clothing. And for a long while, he’d succeeded. He’d protected her and her sister, Elizabeth. He’d sheltered them, saved them from the bad man.
But she’d turned her back on Anthony, on them all.
Blindly she staggered to her feet and ran to the kitchen, grabbed the phone. She had to call Anthony. He would know what to do. He wouldn’t turn