“Sir, it wasn’t any of us.”
This can’t be happening. It doesn’t make sense. We’re in the fucking boonies in the middle of a blizzard. “Search the hotel. Every room. Get authorities involved if anyone gives you any shit. Now. She has to be here. Find her.”
The next hour is like a bad flashback. A fruitless search of the hotel. Local and state cops. An attempt to ping her phone only to find it must be off or dead. Questions and more questions while I tear the lodge and cabins apart looking for her.
A park ranger joins us and adds to my panic. “We had whiteout conditions last night. If she tried to walk from your cabin to the lodge, she could’ve easily gotten lost. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened in this area. It’s why we put the warnings out. We’re putting a team together now. There are a lot of barns and outbuildings in the area she could’ve sheltered in.”
“It was below freezing all night. With that wind and snow…” Dani trails off.
The ranger nods. “I’m afraid the odds of survival aren’t good, ma’am, unless she found some kind of heat source. If she was able to make a fire…well, let’s just get the teams out.”
“I heard a snowmobile,” I remind them. “Someone could’ve taken her.”
The officer standing beside the ranger replies, “We’re looking into that too, but it’s very unlikely given the circumstances and the storm. The lodge is checking to see if all their snowmobiles are accounted for.”
Lost in the snow. It’s not a theory I can make myself believe. “Naomi wouldn’t be foolish enough to try to walk through a blizzard.”
Dani stares at me. “Ax, if she was upset…” She shrugs.
Upset. She was heartbroken, but desperate enough to run into a blizzard to escape me? “Stay with Hatch,” I tell Dani. “I’m going out with my security team to search.”
The lodge is fast to provide us with snowmobiles and anything else we need. We also find out they don’t have any missing, and the look I get from the cops tells me they don’t believe me, but I know what I heard.
The morning is eerily peaceful when we head outside, and all I can do is look at the snow that seemed so beautiful and wonder if she’s under it somewhere. If she spent all those hours freezing and dying beneath its weight.
Chapter Fourteen
Naomi
It’s freezing outside but I need a moment in the open air. A moment to watch the snow and feel the peace of nature while my emotions are roiling and raw. I take a moment to pull on my coat and boots, but don’t bother to look for my hat or gloves. I’ll only be a few minutes, then I’ll retreat to my room.
It’s over with Axton. If it ever really started. I don’t know what I expected, but at least now I know. How am I going to get over him? How can I separate myself from him without losing everything else I love?
The bitter wind smacks me in the face as I step out the door. It makes me gasp and I open my mouth. The air tastes different, clean and crisp. I try to take a moment to feel it. To note my surroundings and take it all in, but it’s hard when I feel so defeated.
Wading through the snow—it looks like we already have six inches or so—I walk down the steps of the back deck and lean against the railing. When I look up, it’s an amazing sight, so many huge snowflakes coming at me so heavily. I’ve never seen snow like this.
The sound of an approaching motor reaches my ears and a tiny headlight barely cuts through the curtain of flakes. I assume it’s one of the guys, or that Axton sent security to check on me, though I’ve only been out here a minute.
“Naomi,” a familiar voice calls out from the shadows, as a figure a little taller than me climbs off of a snowmobile. I must be hallucinating because there’s no way who I’m seeing right now is real.
“Paige?”
She rushes forward into the light, her face bright red and wet with tears as she sobs so hard, I can barely understand her. “Naomi, I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry. I needed the money and I panicked, and I never should’ve done that interview.”
“What the fuck? Where did you come from? How did you?” I step back as she gets close to me.
“Dani told me where you guys were staying. She didn’t want to, but I promised that I just wanted to apologize, and we’ve been friends for so long and…” She comes toward me with her arms open, bawling and trying to hug me, and I’m stunned into place.
Just as she gets a foot or so away, her arm dips into her coat pocket. I don’t get a chance to see what she’s holding before a pain like I’ve never felt racks through my entire body, and I drop to the ground. It feels like I can’t move, and as soon as I try to, the pain jolts through me again, so hard I can’t even manage to cry out.
This must be a nightmare. We’re in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin, with a blizzard raging around us. My ex best friend can’t be here. She can’t really be tasering me, gagging me, tying my wrists and feet. This isn’t happening and I need to wake up.
“Keep fighting, bitch!” Her voice is gleeful as she drags my body over the snow and toward the sled attached to the snowmobile.
The prongs from the taser are still embedded in my skin and any time I try to move, she zaps me again. At some point, I lose control of my bladder, wetting through my thick sweatpants. She struggles to get me in the sled and after a hard shove, my head slams into the edge. Tiny sparkles raid my vision as it fades into darkness where nothing hurts.
“Wake the fuck up!” A sharp pain in my hip brings me around and the first thing I see is Paige’s face hovering over mine.
“Good. You aren’t dead,” she says cheerfully. “That would’ve taken all the fun out of it.” She yanks the cloth out of my mouth that she gagged me with.
“What are you doing?” My eyes adjust to the dim light from her flashlight, but I have no idea where she’s taken me. “Where are we?”
A sharp crack is followed by another and pale green light emanates from the two glowsticks in her hands. “Glad I thought ahead,” she says, as if we’re just hanging out and talking. “Remember when we figured out how much better glow sticks are than candles during a power outage? After that thunderstorm knocked the power out for two days?”
The green light pushes back the darkness enough for me to see my surroundings better. It’s some kind of storage shack. A stack of deflated snow tubes sit in one corner and broken plastic sleds in another. The walls are wooden and the whole place looks rickety. The bottom of one wall appears to be chewed away and judging by the hole dug out beneath it, the animals have found their way in. Coyotes maybe, or are there wolves up here?
“How do you like the place?” she laughs. “I hope it meets your standards because you’re spending the rest of your life here. Don’t worry, it won’t be long.”
My head throbs and it’s so hard to think clearly. “Why…how did you find me?”
Paige pulls my phone out of her pocket and waves it. “Your phone, or my phone, I should say. It has a tracking app. I’ve known where you were since you left my place. I’ll have to ditch it now. I’ve already taken the battery and SIM card out, so don’t think they’ll be able to track you here.”