Stolen(45)

Unbidden, the face of the woman with the blazing, energetic eyes—Caitlin—flashed across her mind.

Maybe she can help me.

In any case, she’d have to think about that later. For now, she had other things to figure out. Like who was the guy who’d bought her a prime rib dinner on Monday night.

The answer didn’t take a nuclear scientist to figure out, and it made her chest hurt again: her monster . . . or if not, then her monster’s minion.

In order to lock it safely into her memory, she closed her eyes, forcing herself to catalogue the details of her dinner companion’s appearance. He was tall, at least six feet, and older than she’d expected. He was dressed in a decent but ill-fitting dark gray suit and white dress shirt. His complexion was weathered, his nails tobacco-stained. He had unruly blond hair. His watery blue eyes had surprised her. They were hard—like they’d seen a lot of things most people hadn’t. At the time, she’d told herself the man had been wizened from his life as a newsman. But now, as she thought about his eyes, she decided she should’ve known something was off.

That window to the soul thing was really true.

Too bad she hadn’t tried harder to glimpse inside his.

She opened her eyes and shifted her stance to get the sun out of her face, and that’s when she saw him. Not her monster.

Cayman.

Her pulse bounded harder, and she instinctively took a step toward the man who’d protected her for so many years. But she quickly thought better of it and shrank back into the bushes to observe.

She should’ve been more observant all along—about everything and everyone around her. She shouldn’t have opened up at Monday’s dinner about her theories to a man she’d never met. And it shouldn’t have taken her so many years to open her eyes to the evil that seemed to follow everywhere she went. She wouldn’t make the mistake of trusting blindly again.

Not even Cayman.

Cayman approached the Campus Ridge apartment building with long purposeful strides and then disappeared inside.

Now would be a good time to run—if she wanted to go on being a rabbit.

She bit her bottom lip, hard.

She was done with that.

She was on a mission, now.

It felt good to choose, and she was choosing not to be the rabbit.

Now she was the hunter, and she liked it.

So what next?

Hunting required patience. So she waited, and for lack of anything better to do, she counted. When she got to four hundred, Cayman came back outside with Ben, the nerdy grad student who managed the off-campus apartment building. Cayman and Ben walked right past her, halting on the lawn just a few yards away from her hunter’s blind.

“Like I told you Tuesday, I haven’t seen Laura in a while,” Ben said.

Even though there was nothing in the papers, she knew people were looking for her. After all, she’d been gone for days. The police had been at the cabin. She was sure they’d found the dress, and probably, by now, they knew it was hers. And if they’d found the note . . . her throat closed, and her legs turned to jelly. She mentally gave herself a hard slap.

Don’t think about that now.

She dragged her mind back to the issue at hand.

Okay. What were they saying? Cayman had been looking for her since Tuesday. But everything was fine until Monday night. The timeline didn’t quite fit. How did Cayman know that she was missing so quickly? It would’ve taken time for people to notice that she hadn’t been around. It wasn’t as though she had a job and a boss, or a large group of friends who would miss her.

Ben stood close to Cayman, like he was comfortable. Like he knew him.

There were a lot of good explanations. Maybe one of her teachers worried when she didn’t show up for class and called her parents, and her parents sent Cayman down to find out what was up . . . only . . . this wasn’t grade school. In college, skipping class was no big deal. No one called your mommy and daddy.

There could’ve been a ransom note.

Like last time. But—why would Ben seem so relaxed if he thought she’d been kidnapped? So how, exactly, did Cayman know she was missing so fast?

Her mind kept circling around one explanation. It wasn’t the only possibility, but she just couldn’t shake the idea, that maybe, just maybe, Cayman had been in Denver all along. There was that time she’d thought she’d seen him at the student union  . She’d looked down to grab her books, and when she’d looked up again he was gone. She’d convinced herself she’d imagined him, there, lurking behind a newspaper. Because that was what she did. She was always telling herself she was imagining things. After all, that’s what she’d been trained to believe.