Though my brain knew she was almost grown, my eyes saw a child locked behind bars in a dark basement, bruised and scared. But she wasn’t alone anymore.

“I’ve been better, how ’bout you?” Abby asked from her own cel , maybe five feet away.

“Fine, as far as I can tell. How long have I been out?” I turned in a slow circle, glancing around at what little I could see of my new surroundings. There wasn’t much to look at.

“I don’t know. They brought you down about an hour ago. Maybe a little less.

I didn’t believe they’d actual y caught you until I saw your face. I was so sure they were lying.”

I didn’t know whether to thank her for what I assumed was a compliment, or explain how—idiot that I was—I’d swum right into their net. So, I changed the subject. “What do they want?” I sank onto the floor to sit with my legs crossed.

She shrugged. “I was hoping you could tel me. Didn’t they send a ransom note, or a list of demands, or something?”

“Nope.” I shook my head. “No contact at al . Not so much as a phone cal to take credit.”

Her disappointment tugged at my heart, but I didn’t know how to make it any better. So I changed the subject—again. “Any idea where we are?”

Abby shook her head. “I don’t know anything. I’m not even sure how long I’ve been here. What’s today?”

“Wednesday.”

Her eyes widened. “Only Wednesday? Real y?” I nodded, intimately familiar with the way time sometimes seemed to stand stil . “Assuming I wasn’t unconscious for more than a day.”

“You couldn’t have been,” she said, staring past me, obviously deep in thought. “They got me Monday night, but it was morning when I woke up here. And they didn’t leave to go after you until…” Her eyes met mine in question. “This is Wednesday?”

“Yeah.”

“Last night, sometime shortly after dark.”

A timeline began to take shape in my head. They’d gotten Abby roughly thirty-six hours earlier. “Wait

a minute.” I glanced at her, daring a tiny smile. “You’ve only been here a day and a half.”

“So what?”

“So, they got me around five this morning, and if they were here with you at dusk the night before, we can’t be more than six or eight hours away from the ranch.”

She rolled her eyes, unimpressed with my Nancy Drew routine. “Yeah, but that could be anywhere.”

“Not real y.” I stood to pace the length of my cel , thinking aloud. “They’d be stupid to keep us in any of the territories. We’re in one of the free zones. We have to be.” Pausing in mid-pace, I closed my eyes to study the U.S. map I’d committed to memory back in junior high, overlaying it with the territorial boundaries I knew by heart.

Impressed with myself, I opened my eyes and smiled at Abby. “Mississippi is the only one they could have gotten to in less than eight hours.”

Huh. I guess my teacher was right after al ; geography had come in handy in the real world. But I had yet to use an augmented matrix outside of class.

“How far is Mississippi from the Lazy S?” Abby asked, her eyes tracking my movement as I resumed pacing.

“You can drive to Jackson in about six and a half hours. How long did it take you to get here?”

She shrugged. “I have no idea. I was in and out of consciousness. But it felt like a long time.”

I frowned as if that told me something important. It didn’t, but I saw no reason to shoot holes in my own credibility. “I bet we’re in Mississippi.”

Abby was quiet for a moment, processing the new information. “Okay, so how does that help?”

Good question. It took me nearly a full minute to come up with an answer.

“Knowing we’re in Mississippi means it won’t take the cavalry long to get here. The council’s meeting at the ranch now.” Not great, but it was the best I could do. And figuring something out, however smal , made me feel useful.

“The whole council?” Abby asked, excited now. “My dad?”

“Yeah, and your mom too.” I used Marc’s shirt to wipe sweat from my face. My heart throbbed painfully as his scent triggered a jarring flashback of the night before.

“Faythe?” Abby stared at me, concern weighing down the corners of her mouth. “You were talking

about the council…” she prompted.

I blinked, clearing my head as wel as my vision. “Yeah. Daddy called a meeting yesterday.”

She stood, following me from behind her own bars as I resumed pacing across the front of my cage.

“Do they have a plan?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t in on the meeting.” I just couldn’t tel her that I was getting drunk and laid while the Alphas were trying to figure out how to get her back.

We paced in silence, and I used my stride to measure the size of my cage.

Fourteen steps across the front, placing my feet heel-to-toe. By my guess, the cel was about ten feet long.

In her cage across from mine, Abby lowered herself to sit yoga-style on the floor, watching me with huge, sad eyes.

“Abby?”

“Yeah?”

I wanted to ask her about Sara but was at a complete loss for a tactful way to broach the subject. I’d been waiting for her to bring it up, and could only think of two possible reasons to explain why she hadn’t. The first, and most preferable, was that she didn’t know. Sara could have died before they took Abby. In fact, Sara’s death might even have been why they took Abby. A new toy to replace the broken one.