A/N: I have absolutely no remembrance of where Adrienne and Justin were at this point in the show, but for the purpose of my story, I'm taking creative license. Sorry for the length of time after the last chapter. Holidays were hectic.

It was shortly after noon when Adrienne Johnson Kiriakis closed and locked the front door of the house she shared with her husband Justin. With her keys in one hand and her purse in the other, she skipped lightly off the porch and got into the driver's seat of the SUV that was parked on the horseshoe driveway. As she turned the ignition, listening as the well-tuned engine roared to life, her eyes noticed the time on the dash. She was running late for her lunch with her mother, Jo. Each week, they made a point of getting together for a mother-daughter lunch. Aside from that, Jo was a frequent guest at the Kiriakis home, where she delighted in helping out with her grandsons.

Shifting into "drive", she eased the vehicle around the curving driveway and out onto the street, turning in the direction that would take her to her mother's nearby condominium.

She barely noticed the car that was parked on the curb near the house, but her neighbor's visitors often parked on the street, so she paid it no attention as she passed. And therefore she failed to notice when the car pulled away from the curb and fell in line behind her.

It was a short drive to the condo, and when she reached her destination, Adrienne turned on her blinker and pulled into the covered, multi-level garage, driving slowly past the assigned parking spaces until she reached the guest parking, and turned into an empty space. A van that had followed her in pulled into a space across the aisle.

She turned off the ignition and got out of the car, but when she leaned back inside to get her purse off the seat, she felt a sharp, startling jab in her hip, and knew instantly that she had been stuck by something very sharp.

"Hey!" she protested resentfully, whirling to face the person she initially assumed was a resident who had been careless with a sharp object while moving past her.

A stranger stood there, but the expected apology did not come, and she realized instantly that the incident had not been an accident. The perpetrator was a casually dressed man in his thirties with nothing about his appearance that would have marked him as threatening, except for the syringe he held in his hand. He did not respond to her objection. Instead, he took a step back and glanced around, obviously making certain that no one was around to witness the crime.

She experienced a mixture of anger and apprehension. "What the hell did you inject me with?" she demanded, taking a step toward the man. There was already a strange buzzing in her ears, and she shook her head in an attempt to clear it. The car keys slipped from her fingers and jingled on the concrete floor.

His eyes settled on her in response to her outburst, but again, he did not respond. She knew he was waiting. Waiting for whatever he had injected her with to start working. Most likely, she realized, it was something that would eventually render her unconscious. Fear began to replace her anger.

"Who the hell are you, and what is it you want?" Adrienne asked, holding on to the open door to steady herself. "What was in that syringe."

"Just something to make you cooperative," the man said, patiently.

"Cooperative?" she echoed. "Cooperative about what?"

The man merely looked at her, waiting.

"What is this, a kidnapping?" she asked.

The man did not answer, but his eyes moved ominously around the parking area.

While his attention was briefly directed away from her, she made an impulsive attempt to get back inside the SUV, but, he reacted instantly, grasping her by the arm to stop her. By the slightly rubbery feel of his fingers, she knew he was wearing latex gloves.

Already, she was starting to feel a bit woozy, but she still had enough of her faculties to wrench her arm free of his grasp. "Let go of me!" she insisted. The gesture knocked the syringe from his hand, and it rolled out of sight beneath the SUV. He cursed, his eyes following it until it was out of sight, but he did not go after it. She was his target, and he would not be distracted, even for a moment, until the effects of the drug kicked in. After failing to apprehend Kayla Johnson, he knew that Vaughn would accept no excuses.

The SUV door was open, and she groped at the driver's seat in an attempt to gain access, but the garage was beginning to spin madly, like a nauseating ride at the amusement park.

He recognized the signs that the drug was working, ad he was calm when he grasped her arm again. With a sensation of overwhelming vulnerability, she realized that he was attempting to steady her, to break the fall that was coming.

"Don't fight it, Mrs. Kiriakis," he advised in a surprisingly kind voice. "It's going to happen regardless, so you may as well accept it. We're not going to hurt you as long as you do as your told. You'll be released unharmed, I promise."

"What do you want with me?" she asked. Her tongue felt thick, and her words were slurred. She knew she was on the verge of losing consciousness.

He placed his arm around her waist and held her firmly, glancing worriedly around the garage. Voices echoing down from an upper level indicated they were not alone in the garage. Moments later, a car door slammed. "Come on, let's go. My van is just over there."

"I'm not coming with you," she told him, trying to make her voice sound firm, but she knew the words were barely legible. She pushed at him ineffectively with her fist. "Damn it! What did you inject me with?"

"Nothing to worry about," he assured her in an infuriatingly conversational tone. "You're going to be okay. There will be no lingering effects."

"Look, if its money you want, my husband . . . . My husband will . . ."

She got no farther. Sinking into total unconsciousness, her weight sagged against him, and he half carried, half dragged her to the van. The car on the next level had started, and in a couple of minutes it would be driving past.

He cast a lingering glance at the SUV. There was no time to retrieve the syringe. He had been careful to leave no prints in it, so he climbed into the van with the unconscious woman and backed out of the parking space. His employer would not like the fact that he had left evidence behind, but if he was lucky, Vaughn would not find out about it until payment had been delivered and he was long gone.

Jo Johnson paced nervously in the living room of her condo, pausing every few minutes to glance at the clock on the digital cable TV box. Turning, she started the other direction and was confronted by the clock on the microwave oven, reaffirming her fears, and she stopped to stare at the illuminated numbers.

An uneasy sensation spread through her, filling her with anxiety. Adrienne was very late for their weekly lunch, and it was unlike her not to call to let her mother know if something had come up.

Her eyes shifted to the telephone on the lamp table. She had telephoned her daughter several times, but there had been no answer, a troubling outcome, for Adrienne was never without her cell phone. She always said she wanted to be in touch with her sons, and was obsessive about keeping it charged and available in chase she was needed.

As she stared at it, the telephone rang, startling her out of her reverie. Hope sprang eagerly. Maybe that was her!

She scooped it up without looking at the caller I.D. "Adrienne?"

"Jo?" Justin asked, his voice clearly puzzled that his mother in law had answered the phone with an inquiry that suggested she was hoping the caller would be her daughter.

"Justin!" she responded, clearly disappointed. "I was hoping you were Adrienne."

"She isn't with you?" he asked. "I've been trying to reach her on her cell phone, but she isn't answering."

"I know, I've been trying to call her too. She was supposed to have picked me up for lunch more than an hour ago, and she hasn't showed up. She always calls if she's going to be late. Something's wrong, Justin. I know something's wrong."

He methodically drummed the eraser end of his pencil on his desk pad, trying to imagine scenarios where his wife would be unable to answer her phone, but nothing came to mind that was not alarming. "Did she say if she had anyplace else to go before picking you up? Maybe she was delayed."

"No, she was at the house when I spoke to her earlier. She was going to come straight here."

"All right. I'll see if I can track her down."

Justin disconnected the call with Jo on the company phone and sat for several moments at his desk, cluttered with case files, gazing at the handset, very troubled by his mother's in law's phone call. It was Saturday, and he had come in to his law office catch up on some paperwork, as he sometimes did due to the quiet and lack of activity that was often distracting during work days. But the possibility that something might have happened to his wife was a distraction that would not be ignored. Adrienne was always prompt, precise, and reliable, and it was unlikely that she had simply taken a detour or made an unexpected stop without letting someone know.

As he returned the company phone on the hook, his cell phone began to play the musical ring tone he had selected to identify the incoming call as his wife.

An immediate sense of relief replaced the concern. Most likely, she had merely been delayed somewhere, perhaps due to a flat tire or some other mundane occurrence with the car. And it was a fact that she occasionally forgot to recharge her cell phone. A simple matter that happened to most everyone at one time or another.

Picking up the cell phone from his desk, he lifted it to his ear. "Adrienne? Where are you?"

His query was followed by several moments of ominous silence, during which that uneasy sense of apprehension returned.

"Adrienne?" he asked again.

"Am I speaking to Mr. Kiri - Kiri . . . akis?" a male voice asked, stumbling hesitantly over the unusual name.

This time, the pause was initiated by Justin, startled by the unexpected voice of a strange man on his wife's cell phone. "It is," he replied when he had found his voice again. "Who is this and what the hell are you doing with my wife's phone?"

"This is Detective Carl Wade, of the Dallas Police Department."

Justin felt a sudden chill of trepidation, as if a full bucket of ice water had been thrown over him, drenching him with numbed disbelief. Jo was right! Something was wrong.

"What happened?" he asked in a voice so overcome with dread that he did not sound like himself. "Is Adrienne all right?"

"That's what we're trying to figure out, Mr. Kiri -"

"Kiriakis," Justin told him impatiently.

"Mr. Kiriakis," the officer finished. "We were summoned to the Skyline Plaza Condominiums by one of the residents who reported finding an SUV parked in a guest space with the driver's side door wide open and a woman's purse in full view on the passenger seat. Your number was programmed into the cell phone that we found inside the purse."

"And my wife?"

"We're trying to determine -"

"Are you still at the parking garage?" Justin asked, cutting him off. He heard the careful manner in which the officer was speaking, and understood that they were going to evade his questions. To get the answers, he would have to seize control.

"Yes, but -"

"Stay there. I'm on my way."

"Mr. Kiriakis, we would prefer that you -"

Justin disconnected the call, refusing to allow a debate on the subject. Tucking the phone into the holster that was attached to his belt, he scooped up his car keys and strode into the receiving office and out the front door, locking it securely behind him.

Justin's heart felt heavy with worry and anxiety as he crossed the parking lot at a jog to his vehicle and slid into the driver's seat behind the wheel. He wasted no time getting the car into the flow of traffic, and accelerated as rapidly as he dared toward the Condo.

As he drove, the image of Adrienne's face kept coming into his mind. Like every married couple, they had their share of matrimonial ups and down. There had even been one divorce early on that could have split them up permanently, but they had weathered the storm and had emerged from it more mature and on a more solid foundation of love and respect for each other than ever before. In short, he simply could not imagine his life without her.

He somehow managed to avoid a speeding ticket, even though he broke every speed limit on the way to the Condo he had insisted on purchasing for Jo's birthday years earlier, so that she could live near their home. Of course, she had protested that it was too much. Jo Johnson carried no sense of entitlement to anything, unlike so many people in this day and age, proudly preferring to work and earn her own way. Some gentle persuasion from Adrienne had finally convinced her to accept. She was now enjoying retirement.

Justin grimaced as the image of his mother in law flashed into his mind. After losing her older son, Steve, it would devastate her if anything happened to her daughter as well.

When he reached the parking lot, he turned on his blinkers to announce his intention to the person behind him, then accelerated into a tire-squealing fast left turn between two oncoming cars, ignoring the annoyed blast of the horn from the second car, which had been forced to brake to avoid a collision.

Locating Adrienne's vehicle in the vast parking garage was not difficult. As soon as he was inside the dimly lit garage, he could see the flashes of red lights from the multiple police cars that were working the scene. The ominous flashes bounced eerily off the concrete walls and reflected off the steel girders.

Grimly, Justin followed the source of the flashing lights around the corner to the left and found the through-lane blocked by three police cars.

His heart hammered loudly in his chest as he parked his truck behind them and turned off the ignition. As he stepped out of the truck, he was noticed by one of the police officers, who approached him with a stern expression.

"I'm sorry, sir, but you can't park here."

"Watch me," Justin challenged, in no mood for a battle of wills.

"This is a possible crime scene. You need to turn around and –"

"I'm Justin Kiriakis," Justin said, raising his voice above that of the officer. "That is my wife's SUV over there, and right now I want to know where she is."

The officer looked at him appraisingly for a moment, taking note of the defiance in his eyes and the determination of his posture. "Sir, I understand that you're upset, but I cannot allow you past the barricade."

Justin's eyes fixed on the other officers who were gathered around Adrienne's SUV, noticing that hey seemed to be looking at something on the ground. His blood went frigid again and pounded relentlessly in his temples. "Oh, God," he groaned. "Is she dead?"

"Sir, I really can't –"

"Get out of my way!" Justin snapped, trying to shoulder his way past the officer.

"Sir –" the officer protested, grasping him by the arm.

Justin whirled around to face him again. "Listen to me, Officer –" His eyes dropped to the nameplate that was pinned to his uniform. "Officer Galindo. I will go over you, under you, around you, or through you, but one way or another I am going back there!"

A second officer, whose attention had been distracted by the confrontation, called, "It's all right, Raul. He's the husband and I need to speak with him anyway. Let him through."

Justin ducked under the yellow crime scene tape and approached the SUV. It was still sitting exactly as she had left it with the driver's side door open and her purse on the passenger seat. Seeing it, knowing that something terrible must have happened, he felt as though he had been punched in the stomach.

"Are you Detective Wade?" he asked the officer who had permitted him to enter. "You're the one who called me?"

"Yes. You're Kiriakis?"

Steeling himself to what he might see, Justin walked around the rear of the SUV to the driver's side, and his eyes dropped expectantly to the pavement beside it, but there was no sign of Adrienne. Lifting his eyes again to the detective's face, he asked, "Where is my wife?"

"At this point, we don't know the answer to that."

"Then she's not . . . " He stopped, unable to say the word.

The detective was watching him carefully, and although he gave no indication of his thoughts and opinions, he decided at that moment that the husband's distress over his wife's disappearance was legitimate, and silently scratched him off his mental list of suspects. "We're treating this as a probable abduction," Wade told him. "Clearly this was not a robbery, since her purse, money, and credit cards are still present. There is no sign of violence, but we did find this on the ground under the driver's side of the car." He held up a plastic evidence bag.

Justin leaned closer to examine the syringe that was visible inside it. That must have been what they were looking at as he had arrived. His eyes moved past the evidence bag and focused on Wade. "A hypodermic?"

"We'll send it to the lab for prints and to have the residual contents analyzed to find out exactly what was in it, but it seems fairly obvious that it was some sort of tranquilizer injected to neutralize any attempts on her part to escape."

Justin nodded. That seemed logical. And if they had injected her, then it seemed safe to assume that, at that moment at least, she was still alive. His eyes wandered over the other officers who were dusting the SUV for fingerprints and scouring the ground for evidence."

"We'll need your fingerprints as well, Mr. Kiriakis," Officer Wade said.

Justin's eyes snapped back to the officer's face, angered by the implication. "Mine? Surely you don't think that I –"

"I didn't say that, sir. It is standard procedure to obtain the prints of anyone who might have used this vehicle so we can separate them from any prints left by persons unknown, who will become persons of interest in this case."

Justin heaved a heavy sigh and dragged his fingers through his hair, feeling suddenly exhausted, drained of energy, and deeply discouraged. "Of course, I know that. You'll need my son's prints as well. Alexander borrowed his mom's car this morning while the tires were being rotated on his own car. And I think she took our youngest son, Jackson, to the dentist yesterday, so his prints will probably be in there as well. I'll go get them and bring them to the station with me."

"We appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Kiriakis, and I promise we'll do everything we can to get your wife home safely. Do you have any idea why someone would want to kidnap her?" Wade asked.

"Yeah, I'm afraid I do," Justin said, bitterly. "I come from a rather wealthy family and I own a profitable law office here in Dallas.. The Kiriakises are well known in Greece, and my uncle Victor heads up the American branch of the family. He owns a number of profitable businesses and some property up north. It would be a simple matter for someone to find out that my family has money."

The officer nodded in agreement. "You're thinking extortion. A ransom in exchange for Mrs. Kiriakis."

Justin shrugged. "Makes as much sense as anything else. They wouldn't dare attempt something like this with my uncle. He has a lot of employees, bodyguards, people who will do anything he asks, but me . . . I don't have his resources. Never thought I would need them."

"All right, we'll cover that angle of the case, and we may need to install surveillance equipment on your home phone in case the kidnappers try to contact you."

"Anything you want. We'll cooperate fully. I just want my wife back safe and sound."

"Is there anything else you can think of that might help us find this person? Have you fired anyone recently, for example, someone who might want to get even?"

Justin shook his head. "I can't think of anything else at the moment."

"What was your wife doing here? Is this where you two reside?"

"No. Her mother lives in a condo here. They were going to have lunch together." He sighed, dreading what he knew he must do. "And I'll need to tell her what happened. She lost her oldest son to a murder some years back. Facing the prospect of her daughter being kidnapped will be hard for her, but I think it'll be easier if it comes from me."

"Yes, sir. I think it probably will." He did not ad that notifying family members of things like this was the hardest part of his job.

"Do you need me for anything else?"

"No, not at the moment. Be sure to leave your address and all phone numbers when you come in to be fingerprinted. That way we can reach you if we need anything else. Oh, if your wife's mother has been in the car recently, we'll need her prints as well."

"I'll tell her."

"After that, just go home and sit by the phone."

With a heavy heart, Justin returned to his truck and moved it to a valid parking space and entered the building. He was not surprised to find curious bystanders gawking toward the garage and talking excitedly.

"Any idea what's going on?" one of them asked as he walked past.

"I'm sure it will be on the news," he replied, shortly, then boarded the elevator to Jo's floor.

When the elevator arrived on Jo's fifth floor condo, he stepped into the corridor and made his way to her doorway. Decorative pictures of cowboys and oil derricks, Dallas's historical past, lined the corridor walls, and the plush carpet muffled his footsteps as he approached her door.

Pausing at Unit 503, he paused briefly to collect his thoughts and plan how he was going to inform her that her daughter had most likely been kidnapped, then, when no plan came to mind, he lifted his hand and knocked on the door. "Jo? It's me, Justin," he called.

"Justin?" The door opened almost immediately, and Jo Johnson, dressed in a lovely blue pantsuit that looked stunning against her blonde hair, looked anxiously into his face. "Did you find her?"

"No, I'm afraid not."

Her posture seemed to slump with worry, but she stepped back to allow him inside her home. "Come in," she beckoned. "Where could she be?" she wondered aloud. "This isn't like her!"

He stepped inside and pushed the door closed behind him, then turned to face her, a view that provided a lovely view of the Dallas skyline through the floor to ceiling glass wall behind her. A balcony, decorated with a small bistro table and chairs, potted plants, and a comfortable lounge where she liked to read was also visible. "Jo, the police are down in the parking garage. Adrienne apparently made it this far, but then disappeared."

Jo's eyes were large with alarm. "What do you mean 'disappeared'?"

"Her SUV was found in the parking garage, the door open and her purse still on the seat. The police were called, and they found a used hypodermic needle on the ground under her car. They think she was kidnapped."

"Kidnapped?" she repeated in a whisper.

"Yeah. Most likely, it was someone thinking to extort money from us. They must have either followed her here or were lying in wait for her, but it's certain that they took her by surprise and used whatever was in the needle to disable her enough to keep her from fighting. Now, the good news is that it seems to suggest that she is still alive and that they will contact me with a ransom demand."

Jo looked terrified. "Justin, what if they –"

He took her shoulders firmly in each hand and looked sternly into her face. "No, we're not going to think like that. I'll pay them anything they want, but the stipulation will be that she is returned unharmed. We'll pray that will give them enough incentive to assure her safety. In the meantime, I need to get Alexander and Jack and get them to the police station. The cops want to fingerprint anyone who has used the car recently to eliminate our prints from others that might belong to the kidnapper. I just wanted to stop by to let you know in person what's going on."

"Thank you for that," she said, her voice trembling.

"If you were in her car recently, they'll need your prints as well."

"No, we took my car last week."

"Okay." He leaned over to kiss her cheek. "Try to think positive. We're going to do everything possible to get her back."

She nodded, but he knew from her expression that she was unconvinced. She was thinking about her other loss, the death of her first child. "Justin, I don't think I could stand it if –"

"I know," he interrupted. "I'm going to do everything I can to keep her safe."

"I know you will. Keep me informed. Please."

"I will."

He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, then left.