Dance With Me - By Hayden Braeburn Page 0,26
his bone white dress shirt. Dylan worked hard to swallow his panic at finding Mason Everett's clothing. At least Priscilla's clothes were also there and could tie her to his disappearance. He was pulled from his guilt by the sound of Sean hollering from the bathroom. “Find somethin'?” he asked as he made his way across the small room.
“Syringes. She drugged him.”
Dylan nodded as his assumption was confirmed. “Only way she could grab him, that's for sure.”
Sean scooped one up, leaving the other on the counter. At Dylan's cocked eyebrow, he lifted a shoulder. “One for me, one for them. Gotta leave the cops something to work with.”
Cops. Now, there was an idea. “You callin' the Aylesford cops or the Tyler cops?”
“Both. First, I'm calling Alec.”
Sean had just pulled his phone from his back pocket when it began to vibrate. He tossed Dylan a look and slid his thumb across the screen to answer it. “Tell me something helpful, Cartwright.”
“She's in the middle of nowhere.” Alec's frustration was apparent in his brittle tone. “Or, her phone is, at least.”
“The middle of nowhere? We're less than half an hour away from Shenandoah National Park. How nowhere do you mean?”
“I mean, she's forty miles away from you.”
“Send me the GPS coordinates. We're going after him.”
“I'm sending them now.”
“Call local PD for me, too. We've got a crime scene here. If Tyler won't listen, call Aylesford. If Ayleford won't listen, call the Park Rangers.” He paused. “No, call the Park Rangers anyway. Fill them in and give them the coordinates.”
“Sean, please find him.” Kat's voice was faint, laced with pain.
“We will, Kat, don't worry.”
He heard her snort. Not worrying wasn't on the table. “Just find him.”
SEVEN
Mason cringed when he heard the door open. While he had been successful in freeing his ankles, the tape on his wrists was not as forgiving, no matter how he sawed at it against the posts. He prayed he had made enough progress to break away.
Priscilla carried another syringe, a roll of duct tape, a pair of scissors, and her compact handgun with her, laying them all on the bedside table. She still wore the nightie, and he wondered first if he would manage to break free of the tape, and second whether he should go for the gun or the scissors when he was free. The syringe bothered him. If she were to dope him up again, he wouldn't be able to move let alone stage an escape.
She selected the scissors from the table. “You don't need these clothes, my dear Mason,” she told him as she began snipping through his t-shirt. She grinned. “You're not going to need clothes for a while.”
It wasn't until she was almost completely bent over, the scissors halfway up his abdomen that he kicked out, managing to hit her in the thigh and knock her off balance. Scissors still hanging from his shirt, he rolled to his stomach and drew his legs up under himself, providing the leverage he needed to break the tape. Finally free, he rolled off the other side of the bed, positioning himself between the mattress and the wall.
Priscilla let out an otherworldly scream. “How dare you, Mason! You're going to ruin everything! Everything!” She palmed the small gun in one hand, sliding the roll of tape over the other. She would catch him, tie him down and inject him. There was no other way. “Why do you have to fight me? I just want to give you our children.”
“I don't love you Priscilla. I never did.”
“What?” she bellowed. “You did. I know you did. We were supposed to get married and have babies, but you were too young, too rebellious. I let you sow your wild oats, but now you want to marry someone else? I can't let you. You've messed up my plans. No one is allowed to alter my plans!”
She was a lunatic. He had been drugged and abducted and he had no doubt she planned to rape him, yet she was screaming at him about messing up her plans. “What the fuck, Priscilla? We were together for our junior and senior year of high school. We didn't love each other.”
“Don't you curse at me!”
That's what she yelled about? “Let me go!”
She shot at him, missing by about six inches. “You will love me, or you will die, Mason.” She squeezed off another shot, this one a bit wider. “Why do you have to make this so hard?”
His ears were ringing from the gun