I flipped on my blinker and slowed.
“Keep driving straight.”
An angry female voice from behind me startled me so badly that I followed her directions instead of taking the turn.
I glanced behind me and gasped when I saw Reign in my back seat.
She smiled at me and said, “Miss me?”
I swallowed. “Reign, I never knew you well enough to miss you. Why am I driving straight?”
I reached for my phone to call Copper, knowing he would want to know that Reign was in my Suburban, but never got the chance to because something cold and hard pressed against the base of my neck. “No.”
Nausea swirled in my gut.
Fuck.
“Pull off into that driveway right there.”
I did, getting farther and farther out of Dallas before she gestured toward an abandoned-looking parking garage.
“There, turn.” She pushed the gun into my neck.
I turned and came to a stop inside the parking garage.
What I saw in that parking garage made my blood run cold.
Twenty-Four
With a body like yours who needs hair.
—Text from Chevy to Copper
COPPER
“Hey, what’s up?” I answered the phone as quietly as I could.
Still, my quiet wasn’t quiet enough because Holt jolted, turned his head to the other side, and started shaking his head back and forth before he settled back down again.
“What’s up is that your cuckoo bird flew the cuckoo’s nest.” Webber sighed.
I didn’t need him to tell me who the ‘cuckoo bird’ was. Reign would always be that crazy person in my head.
I grinned. “Reign was released?”
“Reign wasn’t released. Reign snuck out in a laundry cart in the dead of night,” Webber said. “So, I just wanted to let you know in case she shows up. Doubt she’ll come around me seeing as I was the one to have her committed.”
“How’d you know that she’d snuck out?” I asked.
And dammit, was it ever going to get to the point where I didn’t have to worry about Reign?
“Made some friends in the place after dropping her off. Slept with the head of the psych department,” Webber drawled.
That didn’t surprise me.
I rolled my eyes. “Of course she did. But she’s all the way up there in the Dakotas. I bet it’ll take her a while to get all the way down here.”
“She’s been missing a week now,” Webber groaned. “I wasn’t informed at first because they’d been tracking her. Knew exactly where she was because she didn’t try to hide her escape. Once she got to this prepper’s place in Arkansas, however, she was able to move a little faster because she stole an old Army transport truck. Guy didn’t think to say anything about it missing because he’s a little scatterbrained. He thought he left the truck in a field, but he has a lot of fields, so it took him a while to realize that it wasn’t in any of his fields.”
