The Stolen Girl Read online

  THE STOLEN GIRL

  Copyright © 2014 SAMANTHA WESTLAKE

  All rights reserved.

  NOTE: ALL CHARACTERS APPEARING IN THIS WORK ARE FICTITIOUS. ANY RESEMBLANCE TO REAL PERSONS, LIVING OR DEAD, IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL.

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  For Mary, always

  ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

  As he climbed the steps up to his family home, Senator Leonard Sterling saw his Secret Service detail keeping close, watching as he ascended up to the outdoor porch that stretched around the outside of the sprawling two-story gabled home.

  Sterling turned and glared at the black-suited man. “Barry, I am still perfectly capable of climbing my own stairs, of my own house!” he announced, a hint of anger in the deep and resonant timbre of his voice.

  Agent Barry took a couple steps back, but didn’t retreat all the way back to the car. Ascending the last few steps, Senator Sterling let out a sigh. Just a few years ago, he would have bounded heartily up these steps without a second thought. Ever since high school, when he had shot up a foot in a month like a spring weed, he had struck an impressive figure of a man. Broad shouldered, All-American in college, the senator had always kept himself in excellent shape, well-conditioned and muscled. The years had merely sharpened the edges of his angular face, emphasizing his cheekbones and strong jawline and sending streaks of iron gray through his black hair. But the last couple of years had been hard. Harder than he ever would have thought. He might still turn heads and catch the gazes of the young female reporters, but he felt like an old man.

  Reaching his front door, the senator drew his house key out of his suit pocket and slid it into the lock. When he twisted the key, however, the deadbolt didn’t resist; it was already unlocked. Beth must have forgotten to close it after taking in the mail, he guessed. He’d have to chastise her for it.

  “Elizabeth?” Sterling called out, raising his voice to project through the big house. “Hey, honey, I’m home.” Stepping inside, he dropped his briefcase on the living room coffee table. It was full of papers, but they could wait. He always had new bills and proposals to review, a never-ending flood of paper. But right now, Sterling wanted nothing to do with his job. Instead, the tall man made his way to the kitchen, scooping the television remote up from the marble-topped center island and clicking on the TV in the corner of the room.

  Immediately, a female news anchor appeared on the screen, dressed in the perfect mix between professional and seductress that so many of the White House reporters had mastered. Her blazer dipped to show off just the slightest hint of cleavage, but her eyes were serious as they gazed into the camera, and her no-nonsense voice filled the room. “And in other news today,” the woman read from an invisible teleprompter, “Capital Hill is still remaining very close-lipped on the budget debates and refusing to disclose any details about a possible deal. We received a statement just a few hours ago from the office of Senator Leonard Sterling. Sterling has not wavered from his strong stance on budget reform - a choice which appears to be helping him in early polls looking at potential presidential candidates for the upcoming election. The senator’s office states…”

  Sterling turned down the volume. He knew exactly what his office states - he had personally reviewed the press release before it was sent out, as he always did. “Beth?” the man called out again, listening towards the ceiling for any response. He didn’t hear one, but he was sure that the girl was up in her room, probably pouting or busy on her computer.

  Pouring himself a glass of water, Sterling took a long sip, and then started towards the stairs out in the living room that lead up to the second floor of the house. “Elizabeth, I know you don’t want to go out, but I need for you to at least make an appearance at the fundraiser being held tonight,” he called.

  Reaching the bottom of the stairs, the man stopped, leaning against the ballister. “I know it’s been hard,” he said, his tone slightly quieter, talking just as much to himself as to his daughter. “I still miss her every day as well, and there isn’t a night when I don’t lay awake, wondering if there was anything that I could have done. But we need to focus on our own lives, on moving forward.”

  Sterling gazed off into the distance for several seconds, focusing on nothing, before shaking off the melancholy. “You’re eighteen, and you’ll be going off to college next year,” he went on. “Just think - a few more months, and you’ll be out on your own, free of your nattering father’s silly old demands. But for just a little longer, I need for you to keep up a brave face, and to come stand next to me and smile at these fundraisers.”

  There still wasn’t any answer coming from upstairs. Sterling started to climb the steps, his brow furrowing. His only daughter had a tendency to ignore him, but she was still a good girl, and she usually would have responded by now. “Beth?” he queried, hesitantly using the nickname that his wife had chosen for their daughter. The word felt thick in his mouth, as if stiff from disuse. “Beth, are you there?”

  As he reached the top of the stairs, the senator drew to a halt. Something was off; he could feel it. Elizabeth’s door was cracked open - it looked like there was a shoe or boot or something in the doorway, blocking it from closing. A breeze was blowing from the cracked door down the hallway, smelling like fresh air and carrying the chill of a late spring. Sterling moved in closer, approaching the light shining through the slit of the open door and splashing across the hall.

  Reaching the door, he pushed it open with one hand - and gasped. The glass of water, held in his other hand, slipped from suddenly nerveless fingers and shattered on the hardwood floor. The man’s mouth fell open as he stared into the room.

  It looked as though a fight had occurred inside. Elizabeth had always kept her room quite neat, and seemed to focus even more on cleanliness now that her mother was gone. She had never left dishes or clothes scattered around, even as a child, but in the last few months she had always left her room looking like a showroom model, pillows perfectly centered on the bed and pencils perfectly aligned on her desk.

  But this room was a disaster zone. The decorative pillows, which the senator had always privately considered to be useless but his wife had loved, were scattered across the floor. One of them must have split open, as feathers covered several surfaces. Beth’s shoes, normally all neatly aligned at the foot of her bed, were also thrown across the floor; one of them had caught at the door with its heel, propping it open. Sterling’s eyes rose up to the window, the breeze from which sent splashes of feathers flying about in lazy little tornadoes. Someone had roughly punched out the glass to gain entry, and fragments of the window pane were scattered around the inside of the room. A splash of bright red was visible on one jagged fragment; the intruder must have cut himself when punching out the window.

  But worst of all was what rested on top of the unmade and disheveled bed. Elizabeth’s laptop was there, a silver MacBook Pro that she’d been ecstatic to receive for her sixteenth birthday, still open and knocked askew. But next to it, on top of the tangled sheets, was her iPhone. As the light glin
ted off of it, Sterling felt his heart sink down into the pit of his stomach. Elizabeth never went anywhere without her phone; the little device was basically an extension of her hand at all times. And if it was here and she was not, he had to assume the worst.

  The thought that his daughter might have left of her own volition never crossed Sterling’s mind. His daughter had been born with a rare level of maturity; she had always been the calm, considerate one, asking quiet and serious questions instead of screaming and bawling. Sterling and his wife had been worried that she would slip into a rebellious phase, would go find some hippy washout from society and would end up plastered in photos across the internet. But Beth had always been mature, responsible, the perfect daughter. And that made her absence hit the man all the more strongly.

  Filled with a burst of scared adrenaline, the senator ran down the stairs, taking them two at a time and not even thinking of the possibility of injuring himself. “Barry!” he roared at the top of his lungs. He flung open the front door and yelled again. “Barry, I need for you to come here right now!”

  ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

  I blinked a couple times, struggling to open my eyes. My entire head felt woozy, and I could feel a killer headache beginning to form behind my temples. Something at the back of my head really hurt, and my arms were curiously sore. Where was I?

  I finally opened my eyes, and gazed around in confusion. I was sitting on a carpeted floor, my back up against something hard. My hands seemed to be stuck on something behind me, painfully pulling my shoulders back. I tried to move my legs, but they also seemed similarly stuck, my knees folded beneath me and my feet back behind me. Something was pinning me in place!

  Deep in my chest, I could feel a rising wave of panic. Using every ounce of my mental focus, I forced it down, forced myself to remain calm. Instead, I tried to look around at the furniture, to figure out where I was, and maybe what could have happened.

  It didn’t take long to at least work out a general idea of where I was - I was in a hotel room. A lower-end one, if I had to be more specific. Thanks to being dragged around the state with my father as he made campaign stump speeches every few years, I had spent a fair amount of my childhood running around the halls of hotels. Of course, those were usually much nicer than this one; clearly, whoever had plopped me down in this place didn’t have a senator’s salary.

  Despite the lower quality, however, the large beds with floral covers that easily hid stains, the dark carpet that did the same, and the vague watercolors on the walls, specifically chosen to not offend, clearly belonged to a hotel chain. There didn’t appear to be anyone else in the room, and the curtains were drawn on the window. I could see slivers of sunlight slipping through the bottom of the thick light-proof curtains, but there didn’t appear to be a clock in the room - not one within my field of view, at least.

  I tried to think back, to remember how I might have ended up here. As far as I could recall, the last place I had been was up in my bedroom, waiting for my dad to get home. Now that my mom had passed away, he had started spending longer and longer hours at the office. The media had seen this as a sign of a man focused on his career, on doing good for the nation and for his constituents, a natural party leader, but I knew the truth. Dad simply didn’t want to come home, didn’t want to have to face the empty house that was still somehow filled to the rafters with memories of the family he had lost.

  I had been sitting on the bed in my room, browsing Facebook on my computer, when I had heard a scraping noise from outside my window, I remembered. I had pulled out my headphone, pried myself away from the screen of my laptop and turned-

  -just in time to see a black-gloved fist come arcing through the window, shattering the glass with a loud crash. I had screamed, but it was useless; no one else was home.

  All along the second floor of our house, a section of the roof was relatively flat; that must have been how the intruder had gained access to my bedroom window. My eyes flitted around the room, frantically searching for some tool, some weapon that I could swing. I briefly considered closing my MacBook and using that. It was cased in metal, after all. But then, my eyes fell on the aluminum softball bat resting in my closet, and I changed my mind. As the man outside my window cursed and fumbled with the latch, I rolled off my bed and lunged for the long metal pole.

  My hands closed around the rubber-tape grip. I spun around, bringing the tool up to my shoulder, and found myself confronting a massive bear of a man. He was dressed in black leather and denim, ragged jeans stained with dark, dried liquids and a biker’s jacket. I could see drops of blood dripping from his hand where he had cut it on the glass, but he wore a grin on his face. I guessed that he was in his late thirties. Muscles bulged inside the sleeves of his jacket, and I could see the tip of a tattoo on one wrist, on the exposed skin between the sleeve of his jacket and the cuff of his glove. A bandana was wrapped around the top of his head, pulling back a shock of short-cut blonde hair.

  “Hello, kitty,” the man spoke, his deep voice filled with barely restrained fury. “Why don’t you come here?”

  I didn’t respond, but as the man stepped forward, advancing across the room towards me, I raised the wavering bat. “Don’t make me use this,” I threatened, hoping my words sounded more intimidating than they felt.

  The sight of the bat made the man pause for a moment, but then he strode forward again, filled with renewed energy. With a scream, I swung out with the bat as he came closer. But reaching up with one hand, the big man caught the bat in mid-swing, his fingers tightening as he yanked it out of my grasp.

  I screamed again, but the man’s big hands closed around me, and one glove came up to clamp my mouth shut. “Quiet, you little whore,” he snarled down into my eye. “Now, if you don’t want me to break your damn neck, you’re gonna come quietly!”

  Tears were already starting to well up in my eyes, but I stopped screaming, biting back those shrieks of helplessness. I nodded, instead, and the man released his grip on my mouth. His other hand held onto my arm, however, gloved fingers still managing to dig in painfully to my bare skin.

  The man forced me towards the door of my bedroom, roughly shoving me down the stairs in front of him. “Outside,” he commanded, pointing at the door.

  I stepped forward, unlocking the deadbolt on the door and pulling it open. The idea flashed in my head of running; our house was surrounded by woods, woods in which I had run and hid and played ever since I was a little child. I could probably get away from this man in the forest, could hide long enough for him to leave, and could double back and get my phone and call for help.

  But as I opened the door, the man standing behind me, I never got the chance to put my plan into action. For a brief second, a splitting pain had come from the back of my head, and the world had vanished into whiteness. And when I had next opened my eyes, I was here, in this hotel room.

  My recollection was interrupted by the scraping sound of a key in a lock, and I saw the bolt being drawn back on the front door of the hotel room. I quickly shuffled back down onto the floor, tilting my head forward so that my strawberry blonde hair fell in front of my eyes and shrouded my face. Through this shield, I peeked out through hooded lids, trying to catch some details about my kidnappers.

  Two men entered the room, both wearing heavy black leather boots. Through my long bangs, I looked upward at the pair. Both men were at least six feet tall; both were also dressed in jeans. One of the men wore black leather over his chest - I guessed that it was the one who had broken into my house, who had kidnapped me. The other man looked to just be wearing a loose white tee shirt. I couldn’t make out any other details through my hair, however, and instead focused on trying to hold still.

  “Fuck off, Roads!” The words came from the man in the black leather, and I immediately recognized the voice from my abduction. “I’m the president of this club, and my word is final! You’ve been causing trouble for a while now, talking behind my back. Either you’re with us, or you
’re against us! What’s it gonna be?”

  “I’m not against you!” This was the other man, the one in the white shirt. Roads, my abductor had called him. “I just think that maybe we should reconsider this plan, Slammer. We’ve pulled some shit, and I’m cool with that, but kidnapping? And the daughter of a political figure, on top of that? This could land all of us in a lot of hot water. We’re in over our heads here.”

  This second man also spoke in a deep baritone, but his voice sounded more caring, less filled with rage and hatred. His conciliatory tone didn’t seem to have its desired effect on Slammer, my abductor in the black jacket, however. “Who’s president of the Outlaws, huh?” he pressed, and I saw him slam a finger into the middle of the white shirt.

  “You are.” The words sounded forced, but they came nonetheless.

  “That’s right.” Slammer sounded satisfied. “And you better get that through your fuckin’ skull, Roads. Now, let’s see if our little kitty here is awake.”

  The man in black, Slammer, squatted down next to me. I felt his hand slide through my hair on the back of my neck, and he hauled my head back. My eyes snapped open from the sudden pain, and I found myself staring directly into a face that gazed back with the flattest, scariest expression I had ever seen in my life. There was no caring, no mercy in this gaze. I felt as though, in Slammer’s eyes, I was no more than a tool.

  “Looks like someone’s been listening in,” Slammer said, spreading his lips in a grin without a single trace of humor. “Like what you’re hearing, kitty?”

  I summoned up my courage and pulled air into my lungs to reply. “Let me go,” I said, keeping my voice soft and open. “Please, just let me go, and I won’t even tell anyone what happened.”

  Slammer’s grin widened. “You’re not getting away from me, kitty,” he hissed. “Oh, no. You’re our meal ticket to the big time. Little golden goose, you are.” I saw the man’s eyes drop from my face, running over my exposed body. I was still dressed in the pajamas I had been wearing when he had kidnapped me - a pair of fleece draw-string pants, and a spaghetti strap tank top with only a thin built-in underwire bra. The low neckline didn’t do much to cover up my chest, and I could feel Slammer’s eyes leering down at me.