The kid back there will eventually be found. Eventually be freed. Whether or not he’ll be alive at that point is up to him and his own inner strength. Marcus just needs two days. By then he’ll be at the girl’s house. By then the boy can warn her all he wants… there’ll be no one there to answer his calls.

Two days. It shouldn’t be an issue. The cripple is self-sufficient, seems to care for himself despite his handicap. Has a van parked in the back, so doesn’t need a caretaker and doesn’t have a day job to be missing from. He is a ghost, a hacker, the nerd’s profession as clear as day with his evasions to Marcus’s FBI mentions. The perfect tool to not be missed, the perfect tool to keep his mouth shut about what had happened today.

Threats and promises. They have been Marcus’s bread and butter in his life of excess. The boy won’t speak. Not when his bank account is drained and he’ll need more cash. Not when he doesn’t want police attention any more than Marcus does. Before leaving, Marcus had threatened the boy with calling the Feds, taking his amateur hacking empire down, should the boy ever call the cops. Then, an end-of-tunnel light: the return of some of his money, a hundred-grand hush gift, should the boy deliver on his begged promises and keep his mouth shut.

Marcus is jittery, this wait for her lasting too long. The months of house arrest, tacked on to the twenty-two months in the pen, and he is dealing with sex withdrawals from hell. He needs to touch a woman, needs to feel the rise and fall of her skin, her breath, the soft wet wrap of her mouth around his shaft. His cock had been about to burst, knocking on that door. And now he has to wait even longer. A couple more days that stretch before him like years. He doesn’t pity the experience that the camgirl will undergo as a result of his level of need.

Getting in the car, he gives one last look at the house and starts the engine.

CHAPTER 68

JEREMY STARES DOWN, watching her sleep. She is so beautiful, so peaceful when she sleeps, all of her fight gone. He’s almost forgotten how serene it makes her look—his last opportunity to see her sleep four months ago—a three-day period when exhaustion had dragged her into sleep for ten hours at a time. She’d been a stranger to him then, their lives unexpectedly colliding—the beautiful girl with the cold shoulder returning from a trip and launching herself into his arms, fully surrendering into his care. She’d let him feed her, hold and kiss her, her sleeping body trusting in its innocent press against his own.

Four months ago, he might have just been in the right place at the right time: the only source of a vehicle on that fated Thursday night of her departure, the only available warm body on the Friday night of her return. Whatever the reason, that situation had gotten them here, to a relationship. Love. He still doesn’t believe it, that he’s become this lucky. That this delicate beauty with the balls of a giant and the soul of an angel has chosen him. Accepted his love and created her own.

He watches her sleep and wonders at the nap. It’s eleven a.m.—the time in which she normally cams, her schedule very regimented and rarely deviated from. He pulls the blanket higher on her, noticing her clothes, another oddity on a woman that spends the majority of her time naked.

He straightens, his time tight. He needs to go. Doesn’t have time to linger, his minutes owned by UPS, packages impatiently waiting in the truck. Leaning over, he presses a kiss to her head before stepping to the kitchen, and setting a bag on the counter, soup inside. He gives her one final glance, her breaths even, her face tranquil as it peeks from a mess of dark brown hair. Saving the image in his mind, that of his wildcat asleep, he heads for the door, his feet pausing on the threshold, a foreign item snagging his attention. Spinning slowly, his mind questioning the sighting, his eyes lock on the gun, a 9mm lying casually atop a giant Charmin Ultra box.

A gun. He didn’t know she had a gun. Then again, he didn’t know she had a hundred grand to drop on a car that she hasn’t driven since. More questions that he is afraid to ask, terrified of the answers. He steps toward the gun, eyeing it warily, her cell phone lying next to it as if to provide indisputable evidence to its ownership. He stares at the gun as if his examination will morph it into something else. Anything else but a weapon that can kill with careless abandon.

If he knows only one thing about her with certainty, it is that she avoids weapons. Tries to cut steak with a butter knife for God’s sake. Doesn’t keep plastic grocery bags in the house because they can be used to suffocate.

Yet here, lying out as if it was used yesterday, a gun.

He stares at it, then her. It, then her. And, in the pit of his stomach, a seed of doubt grows a little larger.