For a second, Pen wasn't sure he'd be able to push words past the searing lump in his throat.
He started to see spots, stars dancing across his vision, but somehow, he managed to draw in enough air to speak.
“Where are you?”
Her voice hitched, and he felt it like a punch in the gut. “Pen?”
“Where are you?” he repeated, so torqued with tension he could feel himself shaking. She'd only said two words, but he would have recognized the sweet, husky sound of her voice anywhere.
“I'm... I'm safe. I'm okay.”
Thrilled as he was to hear it, Pen didn't give a shit. He needed to know where she was and figure out how fast he could get there, right now.
“Where. The fuck. Are you?”
She blew out an unsteady breath and the sound of her sniffle was muffled. He could hear the tears in her voice every bit as clearly as he could the sound of an engine starting somewhere in the distance.
“Just outside Temple.” Jesus Christ. Texas. She was in Texas, less than a hundred miles away.
He leapt to his feet, patting himself down to find the keys to his bike even as he headed for the door.
“Stay where you are. I'm on my way.”
“No!” she said quickly, causing Pen to freeze in place with his hand around the door knob.
“I thought you wanted to come home,” he forced himself to say, wondering if she'd actually written the note or if Ghost had and this was some kind of set up.
“I do, but I—”
“Are you alone?” Pen interrupted harshly. He couldn't think about how scared and vulnerable she sounded. He couldn't let his guard down until he was sure.
“Yes. You don't need to come get me because I'm already in the car. I had to stop and pee a little while ago, and I've been drinking this really gross coffee, and you know what happens to me when I drink coffee.”
He leaned forward to rest his forehead on the door, staring down at the scuffed-up leather of his boots, listening to her babble and stutter nervously.
He did know what happened when Wren drank coffee. She turned into the damn Energizer Bunny and would be bouncing off the walls all night. If she was already on her way to him, she'd be here in about an hour.
“Nasa said Ghost left him the pen. How’d you get him to do that?”
The sound of keys jangling and the low growl of the car starting almost covered up the sound of Wren letting out a slow, steady breath.
“He didn’t leave it behind. I did. I’ve been living in Santa Fe, and about two months ago, he found me and brought me back to Texas,” she admitted softly. “It’s a long story, but the short of it is we made a deal. He needed inside the shelter because I helped one of the girls escape, and if I did what he wanted, Ghost said he’d let me go.
“It wasn’t anything I couldn’t live with, so I made the deal. It felt like fate when I found this backpack with the NASA logo on it, you know?” Wren sniffled hard, her voice cracking as she got worked up.
Pen gritted his teeth, wanting nothing more in the world than to comfort her, to tell her everything would be all right, but the speed of her story increased, and he couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
“Like a reminder that if I did this one bad thing, maybe you’d find some way to forgive me, and I could come home. So I was like, ‘It’s no big deal. He isn’t asking me to kill anyone or hurt them, right?’ All I had to do was go into this women’s shelter and look for a flash drive.”
“And then I got in there, and after getting over how big the building was, I realized it was a fortress those dumbasses couldn’t get into, and for about a week, I just sat on my bunk and thought about trying to call you.
“But there were all these women in there with their kids, women just like me, trying to get away from some asshole making their lives a living nightmare, and I knew if I didn’t make good on the deal I made, all of them would suffer for it and it would be completely my fault.
“So, I started looking. All the cleaning that had to happen in there made it possible for me to search the place top to bottom, but I didn’t find anything, and he was getting impatient.
"I had to talk him down a few times, and I have no idea how I managed to hold him off as long as I did.
“A few days ago, he finally lost it, and said he was coming in to look for himself. That it was my choice whether he came in quiet and left the same way or made a mess to get what he wanted.
“Having seen firsthand what Ghost considers a mess, opening a window to let him in was the only way to make sure he didn’t kill anybody.
"I thought he’d be in and out before the sun came up, and I freaked out when the shelter manager came in at breakfast to say someone was coming to do some maintenance on the security system.
“I couldn’t sneak off to figure out if Ghost was gone yet or not, and then Patti had us all move into the game room a while later, and while I was trying to get upstairs and shut the window, I heard Nasa’s voice.”
Wren was crying in earnest now, and it gutted him to not reassure her everything would be okay. Pen swung back and forth between righteous rage and unbearable sympathy for what she must have gone through.
“I ran down to warn him, but I literally turned a corner and Ghost yanked me into one of the private rooms. He just held me there with him, didn’t say one word to me until Patti went up.
“I don’t
