Page 102 of Rescued Dreams

She swiped at her cheeks. “What happened to you? You were a firefighter. You protected people. How could you do this?”

“I’m not a firefighter anymore. Thanks to you, I’m nothing.” He wrapped an arm around her, securing her to his side with a grip more powerful than anything she’d ever felt.

She struggled against him but couldn’t get out of his grasp.

“I lost my job. My friends. My house. All of it, all because you say too much and people think too much who have no business questioningme.” He slapped his gun hand on his chest. “It’ll take that money of yours to set me up. Get me to Bolivia so I can start over.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

Nicholas dragged her into a small room with a folding table set up and one plastic chair, the only furniture she’d seen so far. “I want to see the look on your boyfriend’s face when he sees it’s all gone. He’ll know how it feels. What loving you does to a man, leaving him with nothing.”

He shoved her at the table. “Sign that paper.” Nicholas backed up, holding the gun on her. “Sign it, AmeliaHilden.” He chuckled. “Think I would’ve liked your daddy. Sounds like he might’ve been my kind of guy.”

She stared at the paper. A transfer of funds, everything filled out but the signature box.

“Tick tock,sweetheart.Everything needs to be in place when your boyfriend gets here.”

Amelia lifted the pen and turned to him. “If I sign the money over to you, why don’t you just leave? You’ll have what you?—”

He fired a shot. It went wide over her shoulder.

Amelia flinched, curling her shoulders in.

“Sign it!”

THIRTY-FOUR

“How do you know it’s this one?” Ridge asked, leaning forward between the two front seats.

Kane pulled off the highway onto an overgrown lane through the wooded area around Last Chance County. “Power bill is still being paid.”

Maria sat in the front passenger seat on her laptop, using a hotspot from her phone, scrolling through bank records. “This is the only one where utilities are covered. The rest are abandoned.”

“Covered by who?”

“Actually,” Maria said, “the same account that was pegged as being Amelia’s, the one used to pay those men to endanger firefighters.”

“Her brother was in jail. Is he still running his father’s empire—or what’s left of it—even now? Didn’t seem like he was interested in anything but Dad’s money.” Ridge bounced one knee up and down, trying to keep it together.

Maria said, “The account was opened by Elam Hilden. Supposedly. But he was in jail at the time. All of it was put into her name, like a transfer of ownership moving the funds to Amelia—under her birth name.”

“To set them both up?” Kane glanced over. “When was it opened?”

“A year ago.”

Ridge said, “So he’s been in town working on his plan at least that long.”

They’d been to the town house and managed to get the cops to let them look around inside. Olivia had to have been subdued and taken and both the girls loaded into a car as well. But no one had used the front door, so he had nothing on camera but the edge of the driveway.

Nicholas, or so he presumed, had to have come in through the garage and taken the girls, then backed out. The feed on his doorbell cam had shown a car coming in. Less than fifteen minutes later, he’d left. Inside, furniture had been overturned, and someone had clearly dropped a glass, shattering it across the floor.

It didn’t matter that the cops wanted to take evidence and test the blood on the glass for DNA. That wasn’t what would find his sisters. Or Olivia.

Or Amelia.

Everything. His whole world apart from the two in this car. They were captive to a man twisted around with narcissism, who had nothing to lose and everything to gain if his revenge plan came to fruition.

But why take his sisters?