Chapter 215
Charla felt her heart stop.
My real wife.
“She’s not your wife!” Charla shrieked. “She’s a whore! She has bastards!”
Stone sighed. “Wrong answer.”
He moved the knife.
He didn’t stab her. He simply sliced — a quick, shallow cut across her upper arm.
“AHHHH!” The sound that tore from Charla was raw and primal. It wasn’t performance. It was pure agony.
“Did you hear that, Mr. Holloway?” Stone asked calmly into the phone. “That’s the sound of interest accruing.”
“I heard it,” Hilliard said, his voice like ice. “Tell your boss that if he wants to play games, he picked the wrong opponent. But if this is about Charla — tell him to finish the job. She’s a loose end he’s welcome to tie up.”
Click.
The line went dead.
Charla stared at the phone in Stone’s hand. The silence that followed was louder than her scream.
He had hung up. He had heard her pain, her terror — and he had mocked it.
“See?” Stone said, wiping the blade on Charla’s dress. “The boy who cried wolf. Eventually the wolf actually shows up. And the villagers? They just close their windows.”
Charla slumped against the metal wall. The wound on her arm burned sharp and hot, but the pain in her chest was worse.
She was alone.
Hilliard wasn’t coming. Her father didn’t know where she was.
“What are you going to do to me?” she whispered.
Stone smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes.
“We’re just getting started. The Boss wants a pound of flesh. And since you like cutting things…” He let his gaze drop to her hand. “We might start there.”
Miles away, Hilliard tossed his phone onto the passenger seat of the Aston Martin.
“Everything all right, sir?” Gavin asked from the driver’s seat.
“Fine,” Hilliard said, pressing two fingers to his temple. “English family theatrics. They’re getting desperate.”
He stared out at the rain-slicked streets. A small, stubborn unease pricked at him. That scream — it had sounded visceral. Too raw, too broken to rehearse.
He pushed the thought away. He had made the mistake of choosing Charla’s word over Cailin’s again and again. He would not let her pull him away from what actually mattered — not this time. This was a distraction, deliberately designed to break his focus.
“Focus on Cailin,” Hilliard said. “We have no leads. Start a city-wide search. I want every private investigator, every informant on my payroll activated. I want to know about every Jane Doe admitted to a clinic, every woman matching her description who bought a bus ticket. Go.”
“Sir.” Gavin hesitated, glancing at the GPS. “There’s one more thing. The men you had watching the English family — they’ve lost them.”
“Lost them? What do you mean, lost?”
“Gregg and Victoria English left the hospital twenty minutes ago. Our team followed, but a garbage truck blocked the side street. By the time they got around it, the English car was gone. Vanished.”