home, Tiana saw no reason to go back to something that had only failed her time and time again. In this big, wide world, Tiana had discovered that the only person she could rely on with any sort of certainty was herself.
So be it.
She just had to gather her inner fortitude and her strength together. She intended to do whatever had to be done to find her sister. And if, along the way, she ran into Wayne, she felt confident that she could be forgiven for pummeling the worthless piece of garbage into the ground for having kidnapped Janie.
Tiana was convinced that was what had happened. He’d drugged Janie and kidnapped her. There was no other reason why Janie hadn’t gotten in contact with her in two weeks. Always before, no matter what kind of an argument they’d had, she and Janie had never gone for more than a few days without getting in contact with each other. Neither one of them had ever held any sort of a long-term grudge, although this campus Romeo had definitely thrown a wrench into the works and caused an upsetting schism to form between them.
But this went beyond even that. Something was definitely wrong.
She could feel it way down deep in her bones.
“If anything bad has happened to Janie,” Tiana promised the missing Wayne between clenched teeth as she packed a few essential things, then threw the single suitcase into her car, “I am going to fillet you and make you wish you were never born.”
Voicing the threat aloud didn’t make her feel immeasurably better.
But it helped.
Chapter 2
Tiana held her breath as she walked up to the motel door. The faded, peeling gray door was in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint and number 13’s 3 was hanging upside down, held only partially in place by a nail precariously inserted at the bottom.
The thought occurred to Tiana that the barely attached 3 might be an omen of some sort.
She dismissed the thought. Behind this door—hopefully—was the only lead she had to help her find her sister. By calling in every favor she’d had, she’d managed to get Wayne’s credit card activity traced. The cocky dimwit had used his card to pay for his motel room, allowing her to trace him to this run-down twenty-unit motel.
With any luck, Janie was here, too. Tiana wasn’t going to leave without the girl.
And if this lowlife had hurt Janie in any way, she would make sure he regretted it. Her sister was still a minor despite the fact that she was in her first year in college. Wayne was not. It was ultimately all the ammunition Tiana needed to have him put away.
Damn it, Janie, you’re the smart one in this family. You’re supposed to have more brains than this, running off with a loser. What were you thinking? Tiana silently demanded.
The next second, the direction of her thoughts did a one-eighty and anger turned to foreboding. Please be all right, Janie. Please. I’ll forgive this stupid lapse in judgment, just please be all right.
Glancing around to see if anyone was watching—this unit faced the rear parking lot, which was at present devoid of any activity—she took out the small precision tools she needed to help her gain entry into the room. The last thing she intended to do was knock, alerting Wayne so that he’d wind up fleeing through the back window, dragging Janie in his wake.
But as Tiana inserted the thin metal tool into the keyhole, the door moved back.
It wasn’t locked.
Tiana caught her lower lip between her teeth. She was either lucky—or something was very, very wrong.
It had been a while since she’d considered herself lucky.
Bracing herself, Tiana drew out her service weapon from its holster beneath her jacket. Her breath backing up in her lungs, she pushed the door open with her fingertips, moving it a painfully slow inch at a time.
The instant she saw Wayne spread out on the bed, she moved quickly, crossing from the entrance to the bed in less than a quarter of a heartbeat.
“Hands up, ‘college boy’!” she ordered, aiming her weapon straight at him.
Wayne continued to lie exactly where he was, not flinching, not moving.
Nothing.
That was when the dirty bedspread lying beneath him finally registered with her brain. The bedspread was soaked with his blood. Tiana realized that he wasn’t just staring into oblivion; his wide-open eyes no longer saw anything at all.
A wave of panic-fueled anger seized her.
“Oh, God, no, no, no. You can’t be dead, you worthless piece of trash, do you hear me? You can’t be dead!” she cried. “You have to tell me where Janie is!”
Wayne was her only connection, her only way of finding Janie. Biting off a curse, she pressed her fingers against his neck, searching for some sign of his pulse, faint or otherwise.
There was none.
Only blood that smeared against the plastic of the gloves she’d thought to put on before she’d entered—a habit from her day job where she’d learned to be very, very cautious about leaving crime scenes undisturbed.
This was surreal. It couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t!
Dazed, unable to process any thoughts, Tiana stared at the dead man for a full moment, trying to pull herself together.
Now what do I do? her mind demanded. This waste of human skin was her only lead and he was dead.
Not only that, but he now represented a serious complication. What was she supposed to do with him?
She needed to call this in, but she couldn’t very well stand around, waiting for them to arrive. She was going to have to make it an anonymous call to get them over here. Otherwise, there’d be too much to explain to them, and she didn’t have time for that. All along, as she drove here, she’d been fighting an ever-increasing feeling of urgency. She just couldn’t shake the feeling that she had to find Janie before it was too late.
There was this very real fear eating away at her that if she didn’t find her sister soon, she never would. Victims caught up in the stranglehold of sex traffickers could vanish in an instant.
Yet she couldn’t just leave this body here like this. It went against everything she was ever trained to do.
A compromise was in order. Since Wayne was already dead, Tiana decided that she’d call the police once she was well clear of here. From a pay phone—if she could locate one—so the call couldn’t be traced back to her. She didn’t have time for lengthy explanations or interrogations.
Returning her weapon to its holster beneath her jacket, she looked one last time at the person who had caused her so much grief. There was no pity, no sympathy for a life cut short. She felt nothing other than frustration. It occurred to her that she would have felt worse about any roadkill she encountered.
Crossing to the door, she threw it open, intending to run.
Only to find herself smack up against what would
