“I didn’t,” Mom said, even as Ramsey’s phone dinged. “It was in Gibs’ email.”
In his email—
“What does Gibs think?” Ramsey asked carefully.
“He doesn’t know what to think. No word from her in forever then this ridiculous note from a trash email that just bounces back when he tried to answer it?” Her scoff said everything. “I need to go, just—deal with that girl for me. Thank you baby, talk to you soon. Love you all.”
Then she was gone.
“What. The. Fuck.” was about all I managed to say.
Ramsey changed screens and then he was staring at the note. We crowded around him to stare at it.
Pay five hundred thousand in Bitcoin to the following address in the next ten hours or you’ll never see Kaitlin Crosse again. No one will.
There will be no further contact.
Ice spilled into my veins.
“They have to pay it,” Jonas said. “She’d never do this.”
“No,” I said slowly, shaking my head. “Ace wouldn’t.”
But we were both staring at Ramsey. “This happened today—someone took her today...”
And they didn’t think it was real.
Son of a bitch. Where the hell were we going to get five hundred thousand dollars?
Five
RAMSEY
Five hundred thousand dollars. That—that was not an insignificant amount of money. The message Mom sent us came from an email address that didn’t exist. A spoofed one—maybe they could track it back.
To do that, though, we needed to get law enforcement involved. Mom thought it was prank, a cry for attention but—
“This isn’t Ace,” Lachlan reiterated like he needed to convince me. “I don’t know who that kid is in that photo or who that guy is, or even why she has that picture with them. But that—” He pointed to my phone. “I know that’s bullshit.”
“You don’t have to persuade me,” I told him as I continued to stare at the note. “I just—we should report this.”
“To who?” Jonas asked. “Law enforcement won’t pay a ransom. And it clearly says there will be no further contact.”
“Her mom?” I hazarded the guess. “She’s wealthy too. If Gibs won’t pay…” And I really couldn’t wrap my mind around that. Why the hell would Gibs think this was a prank? She didn’t need his money.
There was no way they knew about the call this morning. Or how fucking heartbroken she’d been the night before. This was…
“Maybe we should call Gibs,” Jonas suggested, his expression troubled. “Mom—Mom doesn’t like KC.”
That was the understatement of the year. Mom was utterly irrational on the subject of KC.
“She might not be thinking clearly on this.” The hesitance in his voice wasn’t lost on me.
“No shit,” Lachlan said, pacing a circle in the room. A slam from down the hall had all of us glancing at the door. “Mom has a serious hate-on for Ace…and I don’t think it has to do with Ace not seeing Gibs.”
I frowned. “I talked to Juliet about her.” That yanked both of their gazes toward me. “Just wanted to know if she knew why…was it because we live there?”
“What’d she say?” Lachlan asked, though he resumed his pacing. I could hardly blame him. I was restless as hell.
“Just that she was a wonderful girl, but their touring schedules clashed—that was what she thought anyway.” I shook my head. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. I need to show this note to Creglin, he needs to get other law enforcement involved.”
“Then what?” Lachlan asked. “We know they won’t negotiate. That’s up to the family…usually. And the terms are right there, send the payment and they send her location. Don’t send the payment and we get nothing.”
“Can your dad pay it?” Jonas turned to Lachlan. “He’s loaded, right?”
“No way he’d pay it.” Despite his words, he was already pulling out his phone. “We need to find Aubrey, Torched has to pay them a pretty penny. Maybe we can pay it that way.”
I’d never felt so fucking helpless in my life. At least when I found her crying in the rain—I could do something about that. Scrubbing a hand over my face, I tried to think this all the way through.
Someone had kidnapped her. They kidnapped her right off campus. Not only that, they kidnapped her in a blindspot. We didn’t know who, but we knew why.
The ransom was why.
Kidnapping KC for ransom, though, was not even a possibility on my radar. “Someone broke in here and took her guitar, trashed her room, and hit her…”
“Your point?” Lachlan asked his expression grim. He hadn’t called his father, he’d texted him. My guess? The response was bad news.
“Just—when the fire happened, someone wedged something in the door to the upper floors. It wouldn’t open from the other side. I had to yank it out.”
“You didn’t say that,” Jonas accused. “When that happened, why didn’t you tell someone?”
“I half-forgot at first, my focus was on getting them out, not what was there. But—looking back. She wouldn’t have gotten out if I hadn’t. None of them would.”
“So you think her kidnapping is related to her stalker assault? And the arson?” Scowling, Lachlan shook his head. “None of those have similar outcomes—I mean, the fire could have killed her and a lot of other people.” He looked sick at the idea.
Hell, it made me sick to think about it.
“The robber took her guitar,” Jonas said. “But that guitar is important to her, and then they trashed her room.” We all looked at that door. “Do you think they meant to hurt her or was the campus security guy right, it was just a crime of opportunity?”
I had no answers. None. “To get her this morning, they would have had to have been watching her. She doesn’t go for coffee there usually, does she?”
This time, both Jonas and I looked at Lachlan.
“Right, cause I’m the stalker in this room.”
“If the shoe fits,” Jonas said.
“You also ran with her a lot,” I pointed out. Right now, we did not have time to fight.
“She almost always went to Dancing Goats,” Lachlan said. “The Pit Stop is hella outta the way for her and when we’re running, we don’t stop there, we wait until we’re closer to the dorms.”
“So, someone saw her come out of my suite this morning… and that someone could be on the cameras here.” Cameras, I wasn’t supposed to access without a damn good reason, and this was one.
“Aren’t they monitored by campus security?” Lachlan asked as I stalked out of Jonas’ suite to head downstairs.
“They are recorded and stored in the cloud,” I told him. “But I can access recent recordings in the event of students behaving badly…”
And it was also in case of vandalism, usually. Though underage drinking had been a real problem a few years back. It still was, just the kids got better at hiding it.