Page 70 of Dangerous Command

But the phone kept buzzing, and my mind went to what was most important. I could survive, and Maddie was resilient. She had gone through so much already; she would survive too. But Mack needed her more than I did.

“You should get that,” I said, stepping away, giving her the distance she needed.

She straightened herself, huffing out, shaking away the tension too.

“I should,” she said. She put the boots and bottle of conditioner to the side. She answered the phone.

“Hello—”

Instantly, the cries of a child screeched from the tinny speaker.

“Mack?!”

“Maddie,” Lucy rasped in a hushed voice. She said something else, but I couldn’t understand. My heart raced in my chest. Maddie’s jaw dropped.

“Mack,” she said. “Mack! Mack!”

I grabbed the phone from her. “Lucy,” I said.

“He’s here,” Lucy whispered. “You’ve got to do something about it. Please.”

Mack’s cries echoed past Lucy’s voice. Maddie trembled; she couldn’t process it. A banging noise crashed in the background of the speaker, as if the two of them were locked in a closet, hiding somewhere. Lucy hushed Mack. “We’ll be okay, baby,” Lucy said. “We’ll be okay. Your mama is coming—”

Then the line went dead.

My heart palpitated, my vision spotty. Where was the security at her apartment?

I had removed my men.Shit!

Maddie grabbed her purse and raced to the front door.

“We have to go now,” she said.

“Right behind you.”

I called the pilot, telling him that we needed to head back right away. Then I called my brothers.

“Maddie’s apartment,” I said. “Now!”

When the plane was in the sky, I turned to Maddie. She had called Lucy several more times, but the call went straight to voicemail. I wasn’t close to Mack by any means, but the urge to pull him and Maddie to my chest, to shield them from the world, grew stronger with every second.

“Who is it?” I asked Maddie. I tried to say the words delicately, but they came out more aggressively than I had anticipated. Maddie bit her nails. “Your stepdad?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her nails were chewed to a pulp, her cuticles bloody and torn.

“You must have some idea,” I said. “He came back months ago. What are the chances that he came back for Mack?”

“Derek,” Maddie hissed, finally looking at me. “I can’t deal with this right now. All I can think about is my son.”

Maddie headed to the small bathroom on the plane, retching out the rest of her stomach contents. I wished I could help. My phone buzzed:Wilflashed on my phone’s screen. I answered it, glad that Maddie was behind a closed door, in case the news wasn’t good.

“You’re at the apartment?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Wil said. “Who did you expect to be here?”

“A kid and an old woman,” I said. “The kid should be dark-haired, about six or seven, and the old woman has long gray hair—”

“We got the old woman,” Wil said. “She’s—” he paused, and from that millisecond of silence, I knew that Lucy was dead. I rubbed my forehead, bracing myself for the words. But Wil hadn’t mentioned Mack. At least there was that. “She’s… not doing so hot. Dead, actually. And the kid is missing.”