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Chapter Five

“ I ’m home!” Jax’s call rang through the house.

Kenna stared up at the ceiling, coming awake while she listened to him make his way through the house. She shifted on the bed. Fully clothed. Not even under the covers. Instead, it seemed as if she’d slept on top of them.

He appeared in the doorway. “Hey.” Soft words, and a soft expression to match. “You took a nap?”

She lifted up far enough to look at herself. A sting of pain pricked her neck and the inside of her left elbow. But that wasn’t what caught her attention.

“With my shoes on?” She wiggled her feet and kicked them off, leaving her in her socks. But it didn’t fix the problem.

He came over. “Time to get up, or you won’t sleep tonight.”

Jax held out his hand, and she took it with her right, sitting up. She looked at the scar on her forearm.

He said, “You’re out of it. Must’ve been a good nap. I’ve been trying to call you for the last hour, but you didn’t answer.”

She shook her head and looked down at the inside of her left elbow. A red mark, like the spot where a needle had been placed. She’d seen that before through surgeries and being captured by Dominatus .

“They did something to me.” She shivered, trying to think. “I was in the parking lot outside the grocery store. I felt something.” She touched her neck, shifting her hair aside and tilting her head. “Is there a mark on my neck? I think someone stuck me with a needle.”

She felt his fingers on the skin of her neck, and he rubbed the spot. She hissed.

“I don’t see anything on your neck.”

“Someone stuck me with a needle.” She showed him her arm. “Look.”

Jax crouched in front of her. “You might’ve scratched yourself. Maybe you had a bad dream.”

She looked at the alarm clock on the bedside table. “How is it nearly seven?”

“You slept hard, and now you’re feeling disoriented. Give yourself a second, okay? Then we can figure out what happened. Maybe you cut your arm earlier.”

None of that made sense, except the disorientation. Everything in her objected to the suggestion she was just confused about her afternoon.

“I know what happened. I was kidnapped.” Kenna pushed off the bed, using his shoulder for leverage.

Getting up was a whole lot easier than it normally was, leaving her off-balance. With the heaviness she’d been feeling giving her so much lethargy, as if she wasn’t strong enough to carry her own body around, she was more used to having to force herself to move.

She looked down at her arms and legs. “I feel better.”

“See.” He stood. “Give yourself a few minutes. Your brain will catch up to being awake.”

Kenna rolled her shoulders and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “No, I mean I feel better. Maybe better than I have in a month.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“It’s suspicious.” She headed for the kitchen, not wanting to fight with him if he really thought she’d just slept hard and dreamed vividly.

There was no dreaming the mark on the inside of her elbow.

Someone had done something to her in the grocery store parking lot, and she’d lost nearly three hours of time.

“How can I not remember driving myself home? Why did I fall into bed with my shoes on?”

“It’s possible you were extremely tired.”

“I was, but that’s not it. I don’t drive around on autopilot like I’m unconscious.” She looked around the kitchen, trying to figure out if anything was odd. Her keys weren’t on the hook where she always put them. She went to the garage and hit the button for the trunk of her car. No groceries.

Kenna checked the cupboards and then the fridge. “Did you put the groceries in the fridge?”

“I only got home a couple of minutes ago. I haven’t done anything.”

She grabbed a can of juice from the fridge, shook it, and popped the top. Downed the whole thing in just a few gulps, thirsty and hungry at the same time. In fact, she was ravenous. “Why am I starving?”

“Did you eat lunch?”

She had no idea. “I went to the doctor’s office, then met Bruce in the park.”

“I heard about the kids and that woman Bruce tussled with. Maybe the adrenaline took more out of you than you realized.”

“And maybe I was kidnapped.” She showed him her elbow. “Otherwise, how do you explain this?”

“I can’t.” His expression darkened. “I believe you if that’s what you think happened, but we need evidence if we’re going to run with a theory.”

“Fine.” She wandered to the alarm panel. “This was deactivated.” She tapped through to the history. “At three thirty-five.”

“Is that when you got home?”

“The groceries were put away.” Had she really done all that and forgotten about it? Kenna patted her pockets. “Where’s my phone?”

“Where’s Jolene?” He started to turn away.

Kenna called out, “Can you call my phone so I can find it?”

She went to the living room while he checked the bathroom.

After they’d looked in all the rooms and he’d checked for Jolene under the bed, Kenna started opening closet doors.

When she opened the hall linen closet, a thin door that held a slender set of shelves inside the small space, Jolene hissed at her from the top shelf. “Jax!”

He appeared at the end of the hall.

“She’s in here.”

“Did you shut her in the closet?” He reached in and lifted the cat down, setting her on the floor where she trotted off.

She didn’t need to get mad at him for suggesting it, but she kind of wanted to. “Why would I have done that? She’s only going to mess up all these clean sheets and towels.”

“Okay, dumb question. Sorry.” He looked at his phone. “Your cell is still ringing.”

“I don’t hear it.” Kenna walked through the house. “Keep it ringing.”

She didn’t want to miss it because the call had gone to voicemail when she walked right past it. She opened the door to the garage, since that was the only other place to look, and heard the faint sound.

Inside the car…

She crouched and reached under the driver’s seat, digging out her dusty phone.

“It was under the seat.” The call ended, and she wiped it off on her pants.

She really did feel better. She was moving more easily, and her body didn’t feel so heavy.

If someone had taken her this afternoon and done something to her…

they’d made her feel better. “This makes no sense.”

Jax retrieved the steaks from the fridge. “I’ll go fire up the grill. We can eat and figure it out, maybe?”

He probably thought she was going to snap out of this funk if he gave her food. Which, to be fair, usually did work.

Maybe whatever had happened at work today meant he didn’t have the bandwidth for the threat of Dominatus right now. Which was fine, unless she really had been kidnapped by them this afternoon. That wasn’t something either of them could ignore.

Or, at least, she couldn’t.

He set the packaged steaks on the counter and went to the back patio door.

She loved sitting outside in the evening watching the sunset, finally able to share her whole life with Jax.

It was part of her happily ever after that she was here full time, not just with her RV temporarily parked in the garage.

He loved his job at the FBI, even if he might have wanted to quit a few times to go on the road and solve cases with her. His work at the bureau gave him access to channels that would be useful in the fight against Dominatus .

Kenna called Maizie, who picked up after a couple of rings. She put the phone on speaker and decided to make potatoes, because they made everyone feel better.

“Quiet afternoon?”

“Not exactly.” Kenna explained the events of the past fifteen minutes. “My arm hurts where they stuck me with a needle. Can you check?—”

“The security cameras. Good idea.”

Even before she’d moved in, Jax had installed security cameras inside the house in the kitchen and living room and outside in the front and in the backyard.

If she’d supposedly deactivated the alarm when she got home at three thirty-five, there would be no movement logged inside after that because it was set to turn off when she got home.

Otherwise, every movement through the house would be constantly tracked and sending notifications to both of them.

But it was possible the footage showed something from inside the house.

“Grab your laptop. You can look at the same time.”

“Thanks, Maze.” Kenna had to make the circuit of the house twice to find where her laptop was, discovering it on the lower shelf of the end table in the living room. “Why is this here?”

She had no idea when she’d put it there or the last time she’d looked at it.

This whole thing was off. Was it her or something that’d been done to her? How was she supposed to figure it out? She sat at the breakfast bar and prayed while her laptop turned on, asking for wisdom.

“Click that.”

A window popped up asking for her permission for someone to remotely log in to her laptop. Kenna accepted the request, and her mouse started moving. Windows opened, and Maizie logged on to the site for the security system.

“I want to see when I came home.”

Maizie said, “The outside camera should show you pulling into the garage.”

Which meant Jax would have had an alert that she got home. “What time?”

Jax had more information than she did about what had happened to her this afternoon, considering the notification would have told him that she had arrived hours ago.

Apart from the groceries being put away, or maybe including that, everything seemed like it added up to her being so tired she had been on autopilot.

But none of that explained the needle mark on the inside of her arm.

Aside from going and getting more blood tests, she couldn’t know what they’d done to her. And even if she did that, who was to say the results wouldn’t be just the same as the previous round? Nothing was wrong with her except elevated calcium levels.

She sipped more juice, watching Maizie scroll back to three this afternoon. “There it is.”