Torn - Cynthia Eden Page 0,24

this is Wade Monroe.” She didn’t tell the stranger he was right, and that Wade had once worked as a cop. “We work for an organization called LOST. Our job . . . it’s to find people who have gone missing.”

The man seemed to absorb that detail for a moment. “And who is this missing woman?”

“Well, right now . . .” Wade stepped to Victoria’s side. “We’re looking for a woman named Melissa Hastings. She was at your bar last night. She left, and she never went home.”

The bar owner laughed. “She’s probably still sleeping it off! That stuff happens all the time. Don’t worry. She’ll show . . .” Then he turned and headed toward the entrance to Vintage.

Wade and Victoria followed him.

“Her roommate is worried,” Wade said. “Apparently, it’s not like Melissa to just vanish this way. We don’t normally take cases like this one . . .”

They hadn’t officially taken it, but Victoria didn’t point out that fact.

“But we were in the area already,” Wade added, “so we told the roommate we’d look around.”

The owner paused at the club’s door. “You want to come in my bar, don’t you?”

Wade’s smile was wide. “Well, since you offered.”

The guy sighed. “Come in. Look around. You aren’t going to find some woman hidden inside.”

“Thank you, Mister—­”

“Luther. Luther Warren.” He pushed open the bar door. “Try not to spend all damn day inside, would you?”

They’d try.

Victoria and Wade slipped inside. Luther flipped on the lights as he made his way toward a door marked private and went in. Then they got busy searching. Nothing seemed undisturbed. It was easy enough to imagine the space packed at night, but during the day, the cavernous place seemed . . . hollow. Empty.

There were no security cameras inside. Just a stage. Chairs and tables. A long bar.

And, as Luther had said . . . no missing woman.

MELISSA’S HEAD FELT . . . funny. Aching and heavy. And she couldn’t seem to think quite clearly. Her eyes opened and she squinted against the darkness around her, trying to figure out where she was.

But—­she couldn’t see anything. Just the dark. So heavy.

She wasn’t in her bed. Melissa knew that with certainty. She didn’t feel her soft mattress beneath her. Instead, she was lying on something harder, rougher. Thinner? Like a cot. Yes, she was on a cot—­long, narrow, and hard. And her hands—­they were tied to some kind of pole above her head. She could feel the pole with her fingertips. Her hands were tied, and so were her feet. Each foot was bound with rough rope, locked in place near the bottom of the cot.

All of these details sank in slowly for Melissa. So slowly. At first she just shook her head, certain that she was stuck in some kind of nightmare. Because she wasn’t really waking up . . . not to this. She couldn’t be waking up to this.

Her hands stretched and she felt the pull of the rough rope on her wrists.

Real rope that was scratching her skin.

She jerked then, hard, as fear spiked through her.

But the rope didn’t give. Melissa screamed, as loud and as hard as she could. “Help me! Someone help me!”

Only there was no answer to her call.

So she screamed again.

And again.

Someone had to be close by. Someone had to hear her. Help would come. She’d get out of here . . . wherever the hell here was.

“Help me!”

She yanked at the ropes, pulling with all of her strength, and Melissa kept screaming.

“I TOLD YOU,” Luther said about thirty minutes later, after Wade and Victoria had searched the entire bar, “no woman is in here.”

No woman, no cell phone. Nothing. “Did you wash the back of your building?”

Luther blinked. “I pay a crew to come by every day. If the place smells like piss, it won’t exactly attract a high-­end clientele, now will it?”

The man had a point. Wade rubbed his chin. “So the folks who come in here . . .”

“They’re college kids, tourists, folks with money to spend. This isn’t some dump on the edge of town. I bring in great bands and the place is packed every night.” Luther stood behind the bar now, his shoulders were ramrod straight. “I have a bouncer at the door—­his name’s Slater. He makes sure no trouble gets in here, and if someone had taken a woman out of this place—­unwillingly—­Slater would have noticed.”

Victoria moved to stand near Wade. She’d been quiet while they searched the bar, but now