Page 22 of Vanishing Point (Bent County Protectors #1)

By the time Thomas had left Mags with Franny and Audra and headed back to Bent it was late. He didn’t go to his house, for a lot of reasons, but the main one was being there without Vi and Magnolia might just break him. He was barely hanging on as it was.

He went to the station instead. Copeland and Laurel weren’t there, but they had been texting him updates, and he knew they were hard at work. Unfortunately, most of the updates were boring, pointless and unhelpful.

They were running the prints. Talking to the hotel where the postal inspector had stayed. Waiting to hear the results of pinging the postal inspector’s phone.

So Thomas spent the entire evening leaving messages, sending emails, spreading as wide a net as possible.

He asked anyone he knew of with even the tiniest connections to law enforcement to see what they could do.

Zach’s FBI connections. Jack Hudson, the sheriff of Sunrise, who Thomas had worked with at Bent County when they’d both started out as cops and then again over the past year, when Jack’s family had been in some trouble.

He was friends with Zeke Daniels, who was pretty tight-lipped about his past, but Thomas knew he had something to do with some secret gang-busting group, so he messaged him too.

He even reached out to his cousin’s husbands who were former military, to see if they had any ideas.

He thought about driving around with some half-cocked idea that he would just sense where Vi was, but it was dark and he was exhausted, and while sleep would be impossible, driving around wasn’t smart.

He wasn’t going to magically find her like that. It required work, and investigation, and being smart . Everyone was working overnight on this. Everyone he trusted. The best detectives he knew.

But he had never been on this side of things, not like this. And suddenly he had a lot of empathy for the people in his past who hadn’t followed his, at times, black-and-white view of the law and helping people.

Was this his punishment?

He shook that thought away because this wasn’t about him . It was about Vi. Who had driven off with the postal inspector for some unknown reason. He held on to the tiniest sliver of hope that it might have been of her own volition, for a good reason that would become clear as soon as possible.

Thomas went back to his computer, focusing on Dianne Kay. But there was nothing to indicate a woman who was anything other than what she’d presented herself as. A postal inspector from Texas. And wasn’t that good? That Vi was with someone who appeared to be on the up-and-up?

Except for the whole quitting her job thing and questioning Vi when she technically wasn’t on the job.

He clicked off the monitor with more force than necessary. He needed more coffee, and probably some food. Though he didn’t think he could stomach either, but he’d try.

Before he could leave his office, and still far too early for anyone to be awake, Rosalie stormed into his office. “I got some intel for you.” She slapped a grainy black-and-white still from a surveillance video to his chest. “That son of a bitch isn’t in Virginia.”

Thomas took the picture away, stared at it, resisting the urge to crumple it. He could surmise who the SOB was just by the violence in Rosalie’s tone. “Where was this?”

“Convenience store in Fairmont. Friday. ”

Thomas swore. Fairmont. Friday. Eric Carter was in Wyoming. In Bent County. In the same town the postal inspector had stayed.

He couldn’t hear much else beside the hammering beat of his heart echoing in his ears.

Vi’s ex-husband was here . Close enough to do something. Maybe… Maybe the postal inspector had known that. Maybe she was helping Vi.

But Thomas couldn’t find a way for that to make sense and ease this slam of terror and fury that the man who’d abused her for years was in his own county.

“Did you find out where he was staying?” Thomas demanded, skirting his desk.

“No. I tracked him to this convenience store using his alias, but as far as I’ve been able to tell, he hasn’t used his credit cards or his alias since that gas and food purchase on Friday. I’ve got Quinn on it, though, and she’ll call me if she finds anything else or anything new comes across.”

Thomas had no doubt the way she was going about getting access to credit cards was illegal, but he didn’t ask for details.

He grabbed his keys. “Let’s go then.”

But Rosalie stopped him, arms crossed over her chest, blue eyes wary and assessing.

“Probably best if you stay out of this one, Hart. You’ve got all those pesky laws to follow.”

“I’d break any damn law to find her, Rosalie.” Any of them. “If we take my patrol car, we can ride code all the way to Fairmont.”

Rosalie paused for only a second. “All right. Let’s go.”

E RIC CAME BACK in a foul mood. He hadn’t managed to shoot anything, which was hardly a surprise since he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. Maybe he was a good shot in the realm of police work, but he’d never hunted anything a day in his life.

Oh to have the unearned confidence of a man.

Vi sat on the chair, wondering if there was anything sharp in this cabin that she could use to cut through the zip ties. She moved her hands this way and that, testing if she had the dexterity to do it. Maybe not the ones on her wrists, but she could do the ones on her ankles.

And then she could run.

Maybe it all felt hopeless, but she was determined to trick her brain into only seeing possibilities. Positive thinking in the most negative of situations. That was kind of what her therapist had taught her—though for mental spirals, not actual danger.

“Well? Why aren’t you making anything for me to eat?” Eric demanded of Dianne. Who jumped up and scurried into the kitchen area.

“I can make you a sandwich.”

“A sandwich ? After the day I’ve had?” He advanced on her, and she pressed herself against the old, grimy countertop that he had her blocked into.

“I’m sorry,” she said desperately. “I just don’t know much about cooking. I can bake. I can—”

“If you take these zip ties off me, I can make dinner,” Vi interrupted. Because she just…couldn’t stand it. It felt like watching a movie of her old life. The fear, the desperation, but so deep in it there was no seeing the abuse and intimidation caused by a warped man—not by her own failures.

Eric turned slowly. He’d always known how to use slow in the most menacing ways. His dark, empty gaze bored into her. But he wasn’t turning Dianne into an old scene out of her life anymore, so she relaxed.

For a minute.

Then he started moving toward her. With every step he took, Vi’s body reacted. Freezing. Heart tripling its beat. Hands getting clammy. Fear gripping her throat and making it hard to breathe. So that she was no longer watching old scenes from her life. She was feeling them.

He moved over to her, each step a loud, violent threat , and she knew something was coming. Even if he didn’t hit her right away. He liked to draw it out, to see how afraid he could make her before he snapped.

But she’d just watched him do that to Dianne. She’d just spent two years crawling out of that. So she held his gaze, and tried to hide the physical fear reactions of her body under a cold, unperturbed mask.

He leaned his face in close to hers. He smelled like cheap soap and beer. His face was twisted in fury, an expression she still saw in her nightmares. She was shaking now, no matter how hard she tried to hold herself still.

“Do you think I’m stupid?” he asked in that deceptively mild tone he’d once employed so well.

The last line of control before he lost all control.

She’d been on this precipice so many times—and there’d been years she’d thought she controlled the outcome.

That if she did the right thing, he wouldn’t fall over the edge and take her with him.

She’d been so very wrong.

Physically, she recoiled. Everything inside her trembled because her body knew. What would come. That there was nothing she could do about it.

But her mind also knew a thing or two she’d learned over the course of these past two years. She fought the old self-preservation instinct to look down, cower away.

She would never cower to this man again.

“Stupid?” she asked lightly, and even though her hands shook, her voice was clear and strong. “I’m banking on it.”

The blow was swift, vicious. Hard in her stomach, under her rib cage. Right where it would do a considerable amount of damage. The pain shouldn’t be shocking. She’d spent so many years suffering under this man’s blows.

And still, she hadn’t braced herself in quite the right way.

The force of the blow had the chair she was sitting in toppling backward and splintering into pieces.

She fell to the ground and pain shot through her shoulder blade as chair hit floor, and shoulder hit the edge of the chair back.

Then the back of her skull erupted in pain as the force of impact made her head snap back onto the floor.

Then he was standing over her, a foot on either side of her hip. He kicked a part of the chair out of the way, and she couldn’t stop herself from flinching. He sneered down at her. He was wavering a little bit—the blow to her head hard enough to make her vision feel off.

“I wish I could let them find your body, Vi. Because every inch of it will be bruised and bloodied once I’m done. It’s a shame you’re just going to disappear forever.”

She didn’t say anything else. She might have if so much pain wasn’t throbbing through her body. The knock to her head made her dizzy and nauseous. She couldn’t really concentrate on him standing over her.

She should have. She should have remembered.

He grabbed her by the hair, laughed when she howled in pain as he jerked her by the hair out of the chair and off the floor and onto her knees.

“That’s better,” he said.

He released her hair and she fell forward, managing to catch herself by her palms even with her wrists zip-tied.

She struggled to inhale, holding herself up on all fours. Struggled to calm herself. Struggled to blink back the tears that wanted to spill over.

He wanted her screams and her tears and her pain. He wanted her to beg him to stop. He wanted to know he had all the control, and she was nothing.

She had to find some way to not give it to him. She sucked in a breath, squeezed her eyes shut. Two tears fell onto the ground beneath her. If they fell, maybe he wouldn’t see them when he looked at her face again.

She stared at the two drops of moisture, willing them to be all. And that was when she really looked at the floor, the splintered chair, and the little glimpse of something shiny.

A piece of metal lying in between a gap in the floorboards. A dime. She almost sobbed right then and there. She’d stopped believing in signs from the universe, from people she’d lost a long, long time ago.

But seeing a dime had saved Thomas. Or at least, he claimed it had. He’d told her that story about not getting shot in the head, and in this moment… She wanted to believe. Believe everything .

It was her own sign. She would make it through this. Someone was watching after her.

And when she looked just a few inches beyond the dime stuck in the floorboard gap, her breath caught.

There was a nail. It wasn’t very big and kind of rusty. The chances of it actually cutting through the zip ties were slim to none, and it was too short to be much of a weapon.

But it was sharp, and it was something.