Because he loved her.
The past didn’t matter. He wanted her present, her future. Anything she would give him, Owen, Olivia and he would take. She’d been missing from his life for too long, had taken a piece of his soul with her when she’d run, and he had a chance to get it all back. He’d already lost her once. He wasn’t going to let it happen again. “I’m coming, baby.”
His muscles protested as he pushed himself harder. The large white dome over the main building had been buried beneath several inches of snow, the grounds pure white. There were still a few cars in the main parking lot, and too many footprints for him to isolate the ones he’d followed from that tractor shed. Despite the personal nightmare tearing apart his family’s life, students were still living out their lives by trying to survive math class. However, after more than one hundred school shootings across the country in the past year alone, security measures wouldn’t allow anyone in the building without checking in with the office first. And police would’ve already been on location if the bastard had been dragging Owen behind him. So the man in the ski mask had to have gotten inside another way. Jogging along the east side of the structure, Benning kept his back to the light reddish-brown bricks. School had ended a few hours ago, most of the students and teachers off campus, but there was still a chance any one of them could be put in danger. He should’ve informed the rest of the Tactical Crime Division, only there hadn’t been time. He was on his own.
Benning tested the door trying to blend in with the same color paint as the bricks around it at the back of the building. He’d gone to school here over twenty years ago but couldn’t exactly remember what was on the other side of the barrier. The knob turned in his hand easily. Unlocked. His stomach clenched. This was it. They had to be here. He threw the heavy metal door out wide and rushed inside. In a single breath, the door slammed closed behind him on automatic hinges and cast him into darkness. His exhales echoed in the small space as he raised his hands out in front of him. No voices. No footsteps. Nothing but stale, humid air slipping through his fingers.
Sweat built along his spine despite the temperatures growing more frigid as he took the stairs one by one. The sound of his boots on cement broke through the groan of piping and electrical humming. The basement. Pushing his hair back behind his ears, he narrowed his gaze ahead as the stairs ended. His blood pumped hard at the base of his head as he pushed one foot in front of the other, slowly working down the long corridor stretched out in front of him. Every cell in his body vibrated with awareness. Every sound, every smell, every blink of the old fluorescent lighting at the other end of the hall. Cracks mapped out dendritic patterns across the cement, up the cinderblock walls and along the edge where the wall met the ceiling. A constant dripping ate away at his senses as he closed in on the end of the corridor.
They had to be here. Because if they weren’t... No. There were no other options. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life wondering what’d happened to his son and the love of his life. Couldn’t live with the thought that he could’ve done more. The muscles in his jaw clenched hard. He’d seen what Ana had put herself through. Cutting herself off from her family, from the people who loved her, from feeling anything. He wouldn’t do that to Olivia. This ended now.
A shadow darted across the wall ahead.
Benning froze. He hadn’t been sleeping well, hadn’t been taking as much care of himself as he should have since the twins had been abducted, and he’d been hit not once but twice in the back of the head over the past few days, but he hadn’t imagined that. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. Warning slithered through him, and he stretched his hand out toward a supply shelf bolted into the wall to his right as he passed. Cold steel warmed in his hand as he gripped a crowbar. The weight of metal tugged on the stitches on his shoulder, but the pain wouldn’t slow him down this time. There was too much at stake.
The shadowed outline of a man came into focus at the end of the corridor, but in the next second disappeared. A deep laugh echoed off the cinderblocks around him and settled in his gut, and Benning strengthened his hold on the crowbar. He wasn’t alone down here. “I brought your camera back, you bastard.”
Chapter Fourteen
Familiar dark eyes locked on hers, and she couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. All this time, it’d been him from the beginning? “You kidnapped Owen and Olivia. You attacked us at the safe house. You buried Harold Wood’s body in Claire’s basement. All of it. It was you. Not her.”
Her partner when she’d first been assigned the Samantha Perry case.
Agent Ericson York.
It’d been years since they’d worked together, but this didn’t make sense. He’d taken an oath to uphold the law and seen firsthand the kinds of monsters that were out there. Monsters like Harold Wood. Her fingers brushed against Owen’s arm behind her as she cornered the boy as far
