A cold knot tightens in my gut as I step into the room, my gaze flicking to the messed-up bed, then back to the paper in Reid’s hand.
What the hell is going on?
I stay quiet, not wanting to break Reid’s focus, but every second stretches tighter than the last. Who did he just threaten to kill, and why?
More importantly… where’s Sierra?
“Hello?” Reid barks. “Barnes? You still there? Damn it!”
He curses, hurling the phone onto the bed.
“Reid.” I move closer now. “What’s going on?”
He looks up, his eyes blank for a moment, like it’s taking him a moment or two to work out who I am, then he comes to himself.
“He’s taken her.”
For a split second, everything inside me goes still.
Then my pulse slams back in, hard and fast, a surge of heat flooding my chest.
“Barnes—Amanda’s husband. He’s snatched Sierra. Kidnapped her.”
The words have my world collapsing in on itself.
A tingling whine turns into a scream in my ear. Sierra’s scream.
I imagine Sierra in pain, being beaten by that bastard.
No. My chest fills with acid. Please, no.
I don’t panic. I can’t. Panicking won’t help her.
“Why? How? When?” My voice is a quiet rasp, aching with the horror I’m feeling. I lower myself, touching the warm bed, my stomach twisting in knots.
“I don’t fucking know how.” He runs his hand over his face. “But he must have found out about Sierra… that we’re in a relationship, I mean, and decided she was a soft target. He’s using her as a weapon against me. He wants Amanda’s location. Says he’ll trade.”
I shake my head, hating that there’s a small part of me that even considers it. “We can’t.”
“Agreed. Anyway, even if we did, there’s no guarantee we’d get her back.” He runs his hand over his hair, gripping it like he wants to tear it out. “Fuck. Fuck!”
“Easy,” I say, because he looks like he’s either on the verge of a very bad panic attack or he’s going to turn this room upside down.
Neither of which will be helpful.
“What the fuck were the security team doing during this, huh?” His blazing eyes turn to me. “How did this bastard get through them?”
“Surveillance should show us,” I say, and Reid is already tearing out ahead of me to his office, where we can access the footage uploaded to the cloud.
I stand tense behind him as he scrubs through the footage, searching every corner, until he sees it.
A man, emerging from a storage closet, is heading inside her room.
“This happened recently,” I note. “She was hanging out with me outside until lunch.”
“How did he get here?” he mutters, his eyes rooted to the footage.
“Maybe he snuck in during the raid,” I say. “In the confusion, it would be easy for him to hide there and have no one the wiser. We stupidly didn’t run any checks to make sure the place was secure. We just assumed they all left.”