Finally Abby gasped for air. She had relived this scene a thousand times, and the pain in her heart never eased no matter how many times she saw it. Her eyes snapped open, confused for a moment, forgetting she was meditating in nature.
Bursting into tears, she slapped herself hard across the face and scolded her weakness, “Get a grip on yourself!”
Closing her eyes again, she listened to the birds sing their morning song. A woodpecker worked on his latest project near the top of a tall pine. A squirrel nibbled on acorns at the base of the oak to her left.
Eric smiled at her, “I love you, too. Now go!”
As her tear-filled eyes forced themselves open, she lifted her face to the sky and let out a scream that silenced every living thing it touched. The birds fell silent and the squirrel scampered away as her cry echoed through the forest.
Abby put her face in her hands and screamed again, “THIS IS BULLSHIT!”
Jumping up, she grabbed a thick branch from the ground and slammed it into the trunk of a tree over and over again. She ignored the fire building in her shoulder and battered the tree until the branch shattered in her hands, leaving her palms cut and bleeding.
“Fuck this,” she said as she threw the remnants of the branch to the ground and marched back to her cabin.
Abby was as surprised as anyone about this place she currently called home. Like most visitors to the region, she thought of the American Northeast as densely populated, with city stacked upon city. Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey were home to some of the most packed cities in America.
However, it turned out that there is far more country than city in the Northeast. Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and most of New York lay beyond the city lights, with huge expanses of forests and farms. Millions of acres worth of forests and farmlands spread across the region. Massive swathes of Maine remain as foreign to some Northeasterners as the deltas of the Mississippi.
Nestled deep within a few hundred acres of privately owned forest was the facility Abby called home. For now, she reminded herself.
Once the hospital stabilized her, after having nearly died from the gunshot wound and having a severely broken leg, Robert arranged to have her moved to a private rehab facility in the middle of nowhere. Discretion was the law around here. Without it, the facility would quickly go out of business, and it was too profitable a business to surrender.
It was where people who didn’t want to be bothered went to get better. The massive private fees paid by its patrons bought not only the best care possible, but also the guaranteed silence of everyone they met.
If anyone Abby came into contact with actually knew who she was, they never let on.
The leg break was a tough one, but Abby was determined to work through it as fast as possible. Her tibia was broken in two places. They were both clean breaks given the car’s high speed, but it was still six months before she could walk comfortably without feeling significant pain. She continued to push herself hard, and at eight months, was back to running every morning.
The leg was nothing compared to getting shot, however. It felt like it was yesterday, a pain much worse than she had ever imagined it could be. It was like being punched incredibly hard as a searing, white-hot fire engulfed the wound.
She had been lucky in that the bullet missed major vessels and organs, but it still severely impacted her left side. It hit above her left breast, an inch in from the shoulder. Given the angle, the surgeon said she was lucky it didn’t shatter her shoulder blade. Fortunately the 9 mm round didn’t make it all the way through. It did a number on her muscle structure, though.
The rehab staff was impressed with her commitment – she just about lived in the gym, weight training, stretching, doing everything she could to move things along. Doctors expected Abby to stay in residence for about a year, half as long as an average person, thanks to her work ethic and strict regimen. Abby, however, was not motivated by the idea of getting better. She pushed herself because she never forgot what was at the end of it all for her: Revenge.
And the time for that was drawing near.
2
AS SHE HIKED through the woods back to her accommodations, she felt that her physical readiness for confrontation at last matched her mental readiness. Had she been able to leap from her hospital bed ten months ago and hunt down Bryce, she would have. A few hours after Robert had told her that Bryce escaped across the Canadian border and disappeared, she actually tried.
She left three nurses incapacitated in her wake before two beefy orderlies held her down while a doctor administered a sedative. Three hours later he gave her another dose and ordered her placed under twenty-four hour watch. Anything to keep her from getting up and hurting herself or the staff. It would be eight weeks before Abby could put any weight on her leg again.
She spent a great deal of those eight weeks thinking about how her life had changed so drastically during the past few years. She replayed the first time she saw Eric on Trial Island in the middle of a storm. She didn’t know who he was, or who he would become. He was just a person, unconscious, out in the rough surf, who needed her help. She acted quickly, jumped into the water and saved his life, a debt he ultimately repaid by saving hers.
All of their time together struggling to survive on the island brought them closer together. They owed their lives to each other, and after escaping the island, intended to spend the rest of their lives with each other.
The year following their escape from Trial Island made Abby the happiest she had ever been. Living in their own little piece of paradise on another out-of-the-way island made each day feel like a dream. The friendships they made with the local people, the small villa they constructed with their own hands on the beach, and the love they had, came as close to a sappy romance novel as real life could get.
At least until JJ found them. Then there was another decision to make, one that would change the course of her life yet again—the decision to get her memory back.
Her heart remained torn over that decision. On one hand, getting her memory back led her to the first true love of her life, the beautiful daughter she didn’t know she had. On the other hand, it led directly to Eric’s death, the second true love of her life.
Would I make the same decision now, knowing what I know?
Robert had been coming to see her at least once a month since she arrived at the facility but had left a few days ago. She asked him, “Would you make that decision, knowing how it turned out?”
After some thoughtful silence, he locked eyes with her, “We all have to make decisions. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard. You can spend days mulling over these things, weighing the pros and cons, trying to take the absolute best course of action, but there are no guarantees. You would do well to stop second-guessing yourself and look to the future. Eric is dead, my dear. I miss him, too. Not a day has gone by in the last ten months that I haven’t thought of him. But nothing will change the fact that he is gone. And you know he wouldn’t want you to spend your life mourning his loss.”
Abby nodded. “I know, but it was my decision that led to it. My decision. If it weren’t for me, he would still be alive.”
He reached out and held her hand. “No, Abby, that’s where you’re wrong. We all make our own decisions. We decide the course of our own lives. Eric made a decision, too. When he saw that car barreling toward you and Ava, he made his decision. Someone was going to die, and he decided that that someone would be him. He shoved you out of the way and saved your life. That was his decision, not yours. His.”
“But...” Abby was immediately cut off by Robert, impatience in his voice.
“No buts, Abby. It was his decision. Your decision to get your memory back did not lead to his death. His decision to save your life and Ava’s life did. Don’t take that from him. He chose for you to continue living. If you want to honor his memory, that’s what you have to do!”
She leaned on her hand, propping up her head as the tears flowed. “Yo
u always know how to put it into perspective.”
He smiled.
“But how... how can I move past it? The monster that killed him tried to kill me and Ava... the monster that tortured me for all those years, who drove my daughter and I apart... he’s still out there. I can’t rest, Robert. I can’t live my life with him out there, never knowing when he might show up, always living in fear and looking over my shoulder. What do I do about that?”
“That is your decision to make.”
She found that the decision was not a hard one. Yes, Robert was right. She had to move on. Eric would want that. He would hate her living her life this way. He would hate her living a life full of sadness because of what he did for her.
She knew she needed to move on. She needed to continue living. Before she could move on, however, she needed to extinguish the beast who had plagued her for the past ten years.
Abby liked simple plans, and this was no different. Find Bryce and kill him. That was the extent of her plan. The trouble was finding him.
Bryce was well-connected in the underworld. When he showed up on her sister’s lawn, he had already been “dead” for a year. He was a ghost, with no records or trail of any kind. When he escaped that night, so did any knowledge of his existence.
JJ was on the case and confident he could track him down eventually. As far as Abby was concerned, he seemed to be dragging his feet as if he didn’t want her to find him. Was he worried about her? More likely Robert was, and had asked JJ to take it slow for her sake.
Her patience was wearing thin, though, and she would soon take up the hunt for Bryce herself. Abby felt she had one advantage: as far as the world was concerned, she was dead. The news reported that she had been gunned down by a mob hitman ten months ago and died at the scene. It was a story Robert went to great lengths to make sure everyone believed. If the word got out that she was still alive, Bryce would come find her, and that simply would not do.
Abby did not intend to be the hunted. No, this time she would be the hunter—and the element of surprise was her greatest asset.
Finally arriving back at her cabin, she smiled a little at thinking of her accommodations as a cabin. It would probably be more accurately describe as a luxury villa, but this was the backwoods country of Maine and luxury villa didn’t seem right. It didn’t exist in the vernacular for this area.
To look at it from the outside, it was a modest, twelve hundred square foot cabin, but after the thumbprint scan allowed her access to the interior, it was anything but. The entire interior was hardwood. Not simply the floors, but the walls and ceiling. It had a wide-open floor plan with the well appointed kitchen and dining areas opening up to the living space and a massive stone fireplace that took up an entire wall.
The locking mechanism secured the door in place behind her as she kicked off her shoes and walked down a small hallway toward her bedroom, where she deposited her clothes in the hamper and turned on a steaming shower in the large bath.
While the water was heating up, she took a good look at herself in the mirror. The scar from the bullet hole just below her shoulder had healed over though it was still red and a bit sunken despite the surgeon’s effort. The rest of her body looked great, in her opinion, the best it ever had. When she had woken up on Trial Island, she had been impressed with how she looked and felt, but thoughts of revenge meant she continued to push herself harder. Most striking was her straight, jet-black hair that hung down past her shoulders. Her loosely curled brunette locks that she wore on Trial Island had turned into a shorter blonde cut while she and Eric had been in hiding. Both were gone now, in hopes that she would be less recognizable.
Enjoying the hot steam of the shower, she was thankful to have her current accommodations, especially after her time on Trial Island, where she spent her days fighting for her life and her nights sleeping on whatever pile of leaves she happened upon.
Her cabin was more than comfortable. No one ever bothered her, and she was getting her mind and body back into shape. Even so, Abby was tired of living this life of solitude. She wanted to be with Ava. Not visit with her but be with her.
Once a week Abby left the facility to drive six hours northwest and visit her little girl who was living with Abby’s older sister, Sarah. Abby had enjoyed becoming reacquainted with her daughter over the past ten months or so. However their time together was limited to the weekends, when Abby checked out of her anonymous rehab.
Ava was nine years old now, so still of the age that she idolized her mother. Their weekends were filled with as much regular mother and daughter time as they could fit; doing each other’s hair, baking brownies, watching movies, doing crafts with beads. She even still enjoyed being silly, playing with dolls, and hide and seek, in the house, of course.
They never left the house.
Their entire relationship existed between the four walls of Sarah’s home. Abby would sneak in under the cover of darkness, and leave the same way. She worried about the danger that Ava would be in if anyone found out that Abby was alive and word got back to the wrong people.
She longed to be a mother again, to dry tears after a skinned knee, to go shopping together at the mall, or go to the park. It was the simple things she missed the most. She needed to get back to living the life that a mother and daughter should live, not this life of clandestine visits.
After she toweled off, Abby sat on the thick comfortable sofa and called JJ. She always had a difficult time reaching him at his office, but she hadn’t heard back from him in weeks. She figured he could use an early morning wake-up call.
“Do you have any idea what time it is?” his groggy voice said from the other end of the line.
“It’s time to get to work.”
He sighed as he sat up in bed. “How have you been, Abby?”
“I’m good. I’d be better if I knew where Bryce was hiding so I could end his life and get on with mine.”
“Abby, please, you know you can’t say stuff like that to me. I can’t track him down knowing that you’re going to kill him.”
She stifled a laugh, “But you will. Unless you have some sort of strict moral code you’re living by these days.”
Silence.
She smiled and said sweetly, “I won’t kill him, I just want to tell him to leave me and my little girl alone. Forever.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Seriously, where are we with this?”
“I’ve got other cases I’m working on.”
“For ten months? What kind of a fool do you think I am? You found me faster. If you wanted to find him you would, so what’s the deal?”
“There’s no deal, Abby. He’s long gone. I’ve tapped every resource I have. I’ve even got a couple informants that my brother, Ace, met with personally. No one has any idea if he’s even alive, never mind where he’s hiding.”
“Someone has got to know something!”
“If anyone does, you’re talking about his inner circle. Gaetano Rosso, the head of the family, maybe a few others. I don’t have anyone who can get info out of someone that high up in the food chain.”
“Well, keep trying, I’m running out of patience.”
3
ABBY GLANCED AT the screen of her ringing phone to see that her sister, Sarah, was calling. “Hi, Sar.”
Her sister whispered as she peeked through the drawn curtains of her dining room window, “They’re back.”
“The same guys?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I’m looking at them right now.”
Abby immediately felt a sinking sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Who the hell are these guys?
Sarah and Ava had never moved after what had happened on the front lawn of her house so many months ago. Abby had wanted them to, but Sarah didn’t want to pull Ava out of school. Abby wasn’t a huge deal in Canada like she was in the States, and even the Stateside media interest disappeared a few weeks after she had been “ki
lled”.
Everything had been quiet and ordinary, until the past few days.
Sarah called Abby several times over the course of the week. She had noticed them for the first time on the way home from the grocery store with Ava at the beginning of the week—two large men sitting in a late-model American car at the end of the street. She didn’t think anything of it until later that day when she saw the same car on the other end of the street, and then the next afternoon they were parked in front of her house. They weren’t even trying to be discreet.
Abby ticked through the options in her head. “You’ve called the police?”
“Yes, and they said there’s nothing they can do. An officer went over to talk to them the first day, and they told him they were on a lunch break and just relaxing and talking in the car. He tells me there’s no law against that and to have a nice day.”
“There’s no one else that will listen?” Abby asked, agitated.
“I’ve tried, Abby. I’ve called every afternoon for the past four days. Yesterday, the officer didn’t even go over to the car. He just came and pounded on my door, told me that no one is breaking the law, and I’ve become a nuisance. He said the next time I call they’re going to cite me for wasting the officer’s time.”
“That’s a thing?”
“In Canada, yes.”
Abby thought a moment. “You know where my box is downstairs?”
“I’m not going to bring a loaded gun up here. I don’t even like having it in the house.”
“Well, I wish you would, for Ava’s sake.”
“She’s nine years old, Abby. I’m not going to teach her that guns are the answer to trouble.”
“No, they’re not the answer, but an even playing field is always nice. In case you forgot, her father tried to shoot her—through my chest—on your front lawn less than a year ago. He’s still out there, and so are all his friends, and they’ve all got guns.”
“You said she’s safe now that he thinks you’re dead.”
Escape, the Complete Trilogy Page 48