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Finn’s expression when I pull away is dazed. It’s a good look on him.
“What was that for?” he asks, a little blurry, touching the corner of his mouth.
I straighten the lapels of his jacket, smoothing the fabric over the leather holster underneath. Weapons don’t turn me on, but knowing Finn’s protecting us turns out to be a kink I didn’t know I had.
“That was for me,” I say. “Where’s Natalie? Shouldn’t she be back by now?”
Finn frowns and checks his watch. “Yeah, she should.”
A call to her cell phone rings straight to voicemail.
“Her purse is still here.”
“And her jacket,” says Finn. “She wasn’t going out, just down to the front desk. Why did you let her go?” Finn glares at me.
“She wasn’t leaving the building.”
Right. We agreed days ago that as long as Natalie stayed in the building, Finn would stay in the office with me.
“Sorry. I’ll go,” I say, grabbing my keys.
“We go together.”
My stomach sinks as soon as the elevator doors open to the ground floor. There’s a fair amount of foot traffic, people coming and going for lunch. Natalie is nowhere in sight.
Finn heads straight for the front desk. I walk the length of the lobby, checking through the enormous windows just in case she’s stepped out on the sidewalk for some reason, but she’s not there.
“Any luck?” I ask, coming to stand next to Finn at the desk. He shakes his head.
“She came down here, but the food delivery guy told her he needed help getting the order out of the truck.”
We share a look.
“That’s not good.”
“No, it is not,” he agrees. “Sam’s checking the camera feeds for the front entrance, just in case.”
In case of what? “Maybe she ran into somebody she knows.”
Surely, we’re overreacting. She’s only been gone a few minutes.
It feels like hours before one of the security guys—Sam, I assume—comes back and says he’s got to get permission before he can show us the footage, but his boss is on his way. More waiting, and I can see Finn’s stress level going up with every minute that passes, heading for the red zone. At length, a burly older man lets himself in behind the desk, picks up a tablet, and starts tapping. He spins it around to show it to us.
“Six cameras outside,” he explains, mercifully brief in his explanation. We use the timestamp from when my father called, since Natalie would have been in the elevator at the time. The screen shows six frames, all views of the sidewalk in front of the building. People milling about, cars parking, pulling away, or just passing by. After just a few seconds, Natalie’s dark head emerges from the front door, following a man in a denim jacket and a black baseball cap.
“There!” Finn points at the frame. The burly man taps the screen as Finn notes the time. Tap, tap, tap.
Helpless and increasingly furious, I watch Natalie talk to the man. She laughs nervously at something he says, then her face just drops, her eyes going wide, her hair flicking back and forth as she looks all around her. They’re on the sidewalk next to a gray SUV.
The man opens the door to the back seat. Natalie bites her lip and starts to shake her head.
“No.” Finn is the one who says it out loud.
The man on the camera leans closer to her and says something. Natalie presses her lips together and nods once, slowly.
She climbs into the back seat.
“No!”
