Page 91 of Darkness of Mine

Jude strokes my hair off my face. “Not even when you were a kid?”

I shrug. The only way my dad marked our birthday was by adding an extra cross to the ones he made us carve into his victims. I don’t want to think about that too hard right now though.

“My birthday always fell in the school vacation,” I say instead. “The only reason I knew it was an important day was because of the kids at school. They’d talk about their parties for weeks and I always wondered what it would be like…” I sniff, my throat thickening. “Thank you for this. Really.”

I look at each of them in turn, making sure they understand how much this means to me. I never really felt my life was something worth celebrating until I met them. No one ever cared for me this much. No one ever did anything purely to make me happy. No one loved me like they do.

Oz gets up and comes over to kiss me. “From now on, you always get a birthday. Maybe even a half one too, like the King of England.”

I laugh. “Do I get a crown?”

Oz captures my chin in his hand. “Anything you want. Everything.”

Eli flips his cowboy hat and grins up at me. “You know what else you get on your birthday? Orgasms. Lots of them.”

I squeal again as Oz picks me up off Jude’s lap and carries me over to the stairs. The others follow but I distract him at the bottom of the stairs by kissing him stupid. He tastes like coffee and cake and joy bubbles inside of me like soda.

A hand twists around my hair and tugs my lips away from Oz. River’s demanding gaze looks down on me. “Enough of that now, we have plans for you.”

I squeeze my legs together and bite my lip.

Oz takes the stairs two at a time. He lies me on the bed in River’s room and Jude’s just reaching to take off his hoodie when Oz swears.

All eyes land on him as he stares at his phone. “Zach just used his debit card.”

Shit. This is it.

Cold water douses the pure delight from this evening. There’s no time for thought or discussion, the five of us launch into action. Oz notes the exact location the card was used, and River contacts my old precinct. He gets them to put a call out for any officers nearby with orders to hold Zach at the scene until we arrive.

We’re halfway to the twenty-four seven gas station when we get word that they’ve got him. My heart sits at the base of my throat, each beat sending my pulse racing.

Eli breaks about a hundred traffic laws as we race to get there, and I grip Oz’s hand in the back of the car.

My mind cascades through a million different scenarios. Zach won’t just tell us where Harley is. He won’t make it that easy on us. He could use her as bargaining chip or he could just refuse to tell us out of spite. If we don’t find wherever he’s holding her, she’ll die.

We’re quiet inside the car as Eli pulls into the gas station and stops next to the police car. The blue and red lights flash against the parking lot and gas pumps and I can just make out the outline of a figure hunched over in the back of the car.

A uniformed officer steps forward as we arrive. “We’ve got him secured,” she says. “He wasn’t armed.”

An itch pricks at the back of my neck.That’s not right.

“All he had on him was this.” She waves a brown envelope in the air before opening the back door to the squad car.

My shoulders drop and I curse.

A young man, who is most definitely not Zach, stares up at us from the back seat, his eyes wide with fear. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I swear.”

River nods at the officer. “Get him out of the car.”

She helps the kid stand up and he backs himself up against the side of the trunk, his cuffed hands hitting the metal.

“Do you have the card he used?” I ask the woman.

She hands it to me as her partner rounds the vehicle, scratching his head.

I hold the plastic between two fingers. “Where’d you get the card from?” I ask the boy, because now he’s out of the car I can see that he’s still a teenager. Brown shaggy hair straggles around his acne pitted face as he shakes his head. “Some guy gave it to me. He paid me fifty bucks to go and use it to buy a card.”

“When?”