Falling Star (Beautiful Chaos #2) (10 page)

I WOKE UP, I don’t know how much later, and the first thing I did was massage the bruise on my neck where the needle had been jabbed in, hoping to God that Travis hadn’t injected me with some sort of lethal virus used for chemical warfare, or some crazy shit like that—if it really was Travis—I still couldn’t be a hundred percent sure. Had we been kidnapped by some other nut-job? It was a possibility.

Leo sat up, looking less pale than a while earlier. He squinted his eyes. The neon-light was still on.

“You really think your own brother would pull something like this?”

I stretched out my arms above my head. “He hates me, Leo.”

“How could anyone hate their own sister? Impossible, no?”

“Jealousy. He feels like his life came to an end when his dad met my mom. He had a complex about being a freckly redhead. He was also asthmatic. I was already acting. He was dyslexic and couldn’t learn lines. He tried. My agent took him on but it didn’t work out. He couldn’t act to save his life. I was the breadwinner. I got good grades in school; he sucked. It was a lot of things.”

“Yeah, but . . . you’re grown-ups now. Get life.”

“Get a life?” I laughed at Leo’s accent, always missing pronouns. He was cute when he spoke.

“I’m starving,” he said. “Feel like shit. Headache still.”

“Me too.” I managed to stand and made my way over to the trash can, led by the smell of hummus and pita bread. I picked the take-out bag out of the trash and smelled it. “Fuck him.”

“What?”

“He’s poured bleach on the food. Yeah, it’s Travis alright who’s abducted us—just the kind of thing he’d do.” A memory came back to me of how he’d pissed on my birthday cake once.
Urinated on my birthday cake
! That’s how screwed up he was. I looked around the square room that had obviously once been some sort of office. The bed was empty except for the sheets. Our clothes were nowhere to be seen. Our cell phones gone. Leo’s watch: gone. I shuffled over to one of the blacked-out windows, feeling a little exposed in just my bra, panties, and thigh-highs. “There’s thick tape all over this. Are you able to get up and help me?”

Leo staggered to his feet, his large, muscled frame swaying, trying to find balance. He gripped his head with his hands. “Feel like someone smashed me on head with baseball bat.”

“Well, at least we didn’t wake up wrapped in cellophane like mummies, with a knife at our cheek.”

“
What
?”

“
Dexter
. You watch that show?”

“Oh yeah, once or twice. I hope your brother isn’t serial killer.”

“No, just a cereal eater and a crazed psycho.”

“Yeah, well, if it is him who’s done this to us, he must be pretty fucked up. I need a drink.” Leo lurched off to the bathroom, and I heard him frantically drink from the faucet. The drug had dehydrated us both, obviously.

I clawed my nails into the edges of the shiny gray duct tape, picked at it and tried to pull it off. “This is stuck down good,” I shouted out.

Leo reappeared, water splashed all over his face and body. “We need a knife.”

I tried to laugh. “Naked and knifeless.”

We set to work on the duct tape, my nails breaking in the process. Finally, a corner came off, then more, until we managed to peel away the black paper. The window was triple-glazed. “Fuck,” said Leo. And then he screamed in anger, “It’s fucking un
openable
!”

We looked at each other and then the view below. We were high up, alright. Probably the thirtieth floor. The only skyscrapers in LA were Downtown. And because of earthquakes, they were scarce. I recognized some of the buildings below. “Well, at least we know where we are,” I said.

“Fat lot of good, though. We have no way of telling anyone. At least we can turn off that fluorescent light. I still feel like shit. Can’t think straight. What now?” He looked up at the ceiling. “You think we can smash through and find air-con ducts—some way to get fuck out of here?”

“We need a ladder. Maybe you’re strong enough to smash through. Me? I can hardly stand.”

“We can try later. I feel like all my energy has been sucked out,” Leo said. “We need to rest up. Get strong again.”

I shrugged. “Nothing to eat. No TV. No books. No way of communicating to anyone, unless we scream till we’re blue in the face, but it looks like this room is very well soundproofed. We can take a shower, sleep, and tell each other stories, and hope that my brother appears, so I can find out what the fuck he wants from me and put an end to this.”

“Meanwhile we can—” Leo’s look was lascivious, his eyes half-mast. Sex. That’s what Leo encapsulated: sex. He was no-holds-barred Sex on legs. Even in this sorry state.

“Nice try, Leo.”

“You’re beautiful, Star. You’re naked, except for those skimpy little black panties, stockings, and bra. You think I haven’t noticed your delicious body in that sexy getup?”

My lips tilted into a wonky half-smile.

“You’re beautiful, Star,” he said again. His gaze was intense. I’d say he was undressing me with his eyes but as I was already practically undressed . . .

I thought of Jake, How he’d told me he loved me then swallowed back his words. My eyes flicked down to Leo’s chiseled abs and defined chest. He was beautiful too. A raw, dirty beauty—the kind you wouldn’t bring home to mother but you fantasized about late at night. The kind you’d secretly like to have ravage every single inch of your body. But not me. I was looking for a
real
relationship. The fairy tale. And until that came along, I wouldn’t be giving myself to anybody, least of all a rugged, tattoo-clad Russian, who habitually fucked a whole lot of women, drank copious amounts of vodka, probably gambled, and probably got into fights. Russian/Ukrainian, whatever he was.

“I’d really like to make love to you, Star. Fuck you, too. But make
love
to you—savor your body, taste you, make you come hundred different ways.” He cupped his groin—he was hard. Typical. There he was, wiped out by the drug, yet he could still get an erection.

His brashness made me want to laugh but the situation we were in was no laughing matter. “Not now, Leo. Please. We need to figure a way out of here.”

“If we’re going to die, or get chopped up or whatever, least we can do is go out with passion in veins.”

He certainly had a way with words and I couldn’t help smiling. “Wish we had something to eat,” I said, changing the subject.

“I can eat your pussy. We can both offer each other plenty nourishment.”

I smirked and pushed at his rock-hard chest. “No, Leo.”

“Just taste, I’m hungry too.”

Boy, was he persistent. I made my way to the door and banged my fists on it with all my might, yelling as loudly as my lungs would muster: “Help! Somebody help us!” But my sounds were muffled—the room swallowing my screams. It seemed hopeless.

Completely and utterly hopeless.

I
T WAS six a.m. when the phone rang. Thirty-six hours had passed since they’d been missing. I jolted up from the sofa, knowing that the news would be either really good, or disastrous. “Hello?” Finally I’d fallen asleep, all of five minutes ago.

“Sorry to wake you, Jake. Alexandre Chevalier here.” The accent was French, the voice deep. For a moment I couldn’t fathom who it was. Then I remembered: the man who gave Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter a run for their money—no, a
sprint
for their money—Alexandre Chevalier, CEO of HookedUp, the biggest social media company in history, which had then bought up half of Hollywood. Pearl’s young husband. Sinfully powerful and wealthy for a man his age. Any age. A force. People had told me he was a ruthless businessman, but when I met him one time, he was charming.

He went on, “We’ve been interviewing Star’s friends and staff to get some kind of lead,” he told me. “Looks promising. Her cell was clean though—stripped of messages, calls—whoever took her knew what they were doing.”

I replied groggily, “What have you found out?”

“The cell may have been wiped clean, but we can still extract data,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you to sit tight another day or so. Don’t wrap up filming yet. Give us a few days more. We’ll get there. My niece is on it.”

This conversation was getting more surreal by the second. Who
was
this guy? “Your
niece
?”

“Elodie. Between you and me she’s good at this sort of stuff: hacking, getting into people’s computers and so on. The private investigators you hired seem a little bit slow on the uptake, so we needed to act. Anyway, Jake. Stay put, we’ll cover all costs; obviously everyone will be kept on full pay. Let the cast and crew know they can go sightseeing—see the Presidents’ heads or whatever. I’ll keep you posted.” He hung up.

It was a great feeling to know that other people cared too, but if the Chevaliers thought I was going to simply sit around and twiddle my thumbs until they found Star, they had another thing coming. I had to find her—get on the case myself. The image of Star’s face was imprinted in my mind: her wide smile, her shining, hypnotic blue eyes, her long blond hair that cascaded around me when she kissed me in places that now made me shudder. Her full, sexy lips. Her innocence and her arrogance, her vulnerability and her cockiness. Her quirky intelligence. I took a deep breath and begged silently to whoever was listening to bring her back to me.

All in one piece.

And then I thought of something: my dog.

Star and Fierce had gotten close. Her clothing was still at my house. He had an amazing sense of smell—after all, Rhodesian Ridgebacks were originally hunting dogs. I decided to go to Star’s house where the Lexus had been dumped in favor of her Porsche.

Perhaps Fierce could pick up her scent.

L
EO AND I spent hours trying to gain access to the room’s false ceiling. He could lift me, but with no tools to help us I could do no more than thump with my fists. And with no ladder or chairs in the room, he couldn’t get high enough to exert enough force either.

“What would James Bond do now?” Leo asked.

“He’d have some sort of laser watch that could cut walls in two or some other newfangled gadget.”

I padded in my stocking feet—neither of us had shoes—over to the only place we could sit comfortably, and I slumped down on the mattress, exhausted by our efforts. We hadn’t eaten for more than what seemed like forty-eight hours and our stomachs were rumbling. We’d taken showers and there was nothing more for us to do than rest up. I lay back, my head propped under my hands. Leo also came to lie on the bed. We didn’t exactly have any furniture around here so this bed was it.

“You were in prison?” I asked.

“Yeah, how do you know?”

“What you said about the light blinding you after you got out of your cell. What were you in for?”

“Robbery. Breaking into safe. Also manslaughter.”

I swallowed. Nice, I was hanging out with a murderer. “Who did you kill?”

“My sister’s rapist.”

“No shit. Jeez. Was she okay?” I heard my words: more concerned with his sister—not caring that he’d actually killed a man. Strangely, I admired him for it.

“No woman is okay after rape. That’s what people don’t get. Rape isn’t something that happens in a moment. Rape is for life. Rape never leaves your soul, your memory. She can never be the person she was before.”

Leo was the first person I’d met who’d killed somebody. Somebody who wasn’t in the armed forces, anyway. “How did you kill him?”

“Just bare hands. My temper took over, you know?”

“But you didn’t serve so long for manslaughter. I mean, you’re only twenty-six.”

“My uncle arranged for my escape. Why I moved to London.”

“I see.” I lay there and closed my eyes, trying to imagine everything. If Leo had managed to escape from prison, maybe he could think of a way out now. “How did you get out?”

“My uncle bribed guard. Long story. Not pretty. What about you, Star? You have story about past?”

“I’m just trailer park trash who made good,” I said, feeling this to be almost true, although it was so far back in my life history that it didn’t seem real.

“Trash? Never. You were born princess.”