*Sorry for the late posting, I had a busy day! -author*
———
“Jake, please,” Natalia said, putting a hand on Jake’s arm. She and her husband Saul had cornered him on the sidewalk outside his home. “It has been a week. You have done nothing but search for your girl. Come over for dinner.”
“Yeah, come relax,” Saul told him. “One evening won’t hurt. Besides, didn’t you say she sent you a message?”
Jake shook his head. “The notes, the phone messages… they weren’t her. The tone was all wrong, and the content… it’s just a ploy by someone to keep the police out of it. She didn’t leave. She was taken.”
Saul Wexler, Jake’s neighbor, hissed through his teeth. “They can’t track her phone?”
“I think the battery’s been taken out,” Jake replied. “It doesn’t even ring.”
Natalia sighed. “Still,” she said, “it will not harm you to have dinner with us.”
Jake nodded, surrendering to his friends. “I guess I’ve got time.”
Natalia smiled. “Bring Sarah, too,” she said. “We will have a brisket.”
Jake chuckled despite himself. Natalia was tall and gorgeous, with long, dark hair, fantastic breasts, and a vulpine smile that spoke of intrigue and excitement. How Saul, a meek accountant, ever scored a wife as hot as her, he’d never know. It certainly wasn’t because of his sexual performance. In fact, before Petra had disappeared, they had been helping Natalia with that aspect of her marriage; Jake had appeared to her in “dreams” thanks to the suggestibility of people who are frozen in time, fucking her brains out and trying to help her with her goal of conceiving a child.
They’d even groomed her, conditioning her to become aroused whenever Jake was around. That had been just for fun; he had been experimenting with coercion, learning how easy it was to convince people to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise. Like have extramarital sex with a neighbor, for instance. Judging by Natalia’s smile and the way she kept biting her bottom lip when she looked at him, it was working. Petra would be thrilled.
Petra. Jake flinched. In the week since his daughter had vanished, he’d spent months in stopped time. He’d searched entire boroughs of the city, house by house, keeping a record in a notebook of which addresses he had scoured through. So far he had discovered three sex dungeons, four drug labs, and a pretty impressive cache of money and guns that he suspected belonged to some sort of organized criminals. Several anonymous tips had gone to the local police about some of his finds. But nothing had looked remotely like a place where someone might take a kidnapped girl.
There had been no ransom note, no demands, and no sense to the situation. Petra had supposedly left a note explaining that she was leaving, and a second one in Jake’s bag explaining that she had needed to get away from him.
It didn’t add up. Petra was in love with him, and had been almost nonsensically enthusiastic about their incestuous relationship. She had initiated it, and together they had been having the time of their lives. For her to suddenly leave him over an attack of conscience was just ridiculous.
Still, a dinner with Saul and Nat could be just what he heeded. A chance to relax and recharge. And then he would redouble his efforts, searching the entire city if need be. He wouldn’t age while time was stopped, so even if it took decades, he could-
Jake twitched. Something had just touched his hand. He looked down and saw that his fingers had curled around a piece of paper.
“What’s that?” Natalia asked him.
“Nothing,” Jake said, unfolding the paper and looking at it. “I’ll see you this evening. Six o’clock?”
Natalia started to answer, but Jake didn’t hear her. He was too busy walking into his house, retreating from the situation before his hands started to shake with fear and rage, because it wasn’t nothing that he was holding. It was a note.
A note from Petra’s kidnapper. Read more »