A Cry In The Dark. Jenna Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ sitting in the big leather wing chair most of the afternoon. Dark hair. Tall.” Ruth let out a dreamy sigh. “Very, very tall.”

      With eyes like pools of midnight on a cloudless night. “The guy in the gray button-down?” Danielle asked, and her heart beat a little faster. A lot harder.

      “That’s him,” Ruth said. “Real good-looking guy.”

      Intense, Danielle silently corrected. Striking.

      Gone.

      “All better,” Ruth pronounced, but the words barely registered. Danielle stared across the lobby, toward the elegant wing chair that now sat empty, the newspaper abandoned on the floor.

      The quick slice of unease made no sense. “Where did he go?”

      “He’s right—” Ruth’s words broke off. “That’s strange. He was there just a second ago.”

      Frowning, Danielle glanced around the lobby, toward the elevator, the sweeping staircase, the elegant front doors. Found nothing. Not the man, anyway. There were other patrons, the businessmen, the elderly couple from Wichita, the honeymooners from Madison, but the tall man with the flat eyes was just…gone.

      Except she still felt him. Deeply. Disturbingly.

      “You going to get that?” Ruth asked.

      Danielle blinked and brought herself back, heard the low melody of her mobile phone. Through a haze of distraction she reached for the small black device to which only four people had the number—her manager, her sister and her son’s school and day-care center. “Hello, this is Danielle.”

      “Turn around.”

      She stiffened. “Come again?”

      “Paste a smile on that pretty face of yours and turn around, away from the old woman.”

      Everything flashed. The motion of the lobby dimmed, slowed, seemed to drag. “I don’t understand—”

      “Just do it.”

      Her heart started to pound. Hard. Instinct warned her to obey, even as an age-old rebellious streak dared her to lift her chin and defy. She’d done that before, many times. And the cost had been high.

      Slowly she turned from the comforting din of the hotel lobby and took a few steps away from Ruth. “Okay.”

      “Good girl.” The voice was distorted, genderless.

      “Who is this? What do you—”

      “I have your son.”

      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. СКАЧАТЬ