by Malcom, Anne
“There is no rest of it,” I said quietly.
He blinked. Then he laughed. Like really laughed. Like we were across from each other at a restaurant and were sharing a joke that only two people in love could really understand.
Instead, it was two people who had both pretended to love each other, both for very different reasons. Me, because all of my love was used up, spent on another man. Craig, because he was obviously some sort of creature, some sort of monster not capable of such an emotion.
“Yeah, like you could spend all that in one go,” he said, still speaking in that false jovial tone. “I know you’ve been away. But I also know that you barely spent anything on your trip. You volunteered. You stayed in hostels,” he spat the word. “You’re still in that piece of shit apartment. You’re still driving a piece of shit car. So I know you didn’t spend it. Not my Polly.”
“I didn’t spend it,” I agreed. “I donated it. Half to a charity providing for battered women and half to St. Mary’s Children’s Hospital.” The rest was used to help the people at my shelter find jobs, homes, peace.
There was a silence after my words.
A roaring one. One that rang in my ears.
Then the laptop was no longer on his lap. It flew through the air and then smashed against the wall.
And he was up.
And then he was hitting me.
There was pain then.
For a long time.
And then I broke.
Broke, as Craig promised, in a way that meant I’d never be whole again.
Heath
Twelve Hours Missing
He had gone through a packet of rubber bands.
He was now on whisky.
Though he was limited to two glasses since no way in fuck would he let his faculties be impaired when they got news of where Polly was. When he went to get her. And when he’d find her safe and fucking sound and unharmed.
He snorted as he finished the second glass, slamming it down on his desk hard enough to shatter it. Glass shot in all directions, creating a visible mess in the stark order of his office.
He barely noticed it.
He wouldn’t have noticed if a hurricane flew threw and ruined all the order he’d thought was so important.
Only one hurricane mattered. The one who’d tore through the order of his life, of his fucking soul. The one who believed in peace, even when the world showed her violence. Who believed the best in people even after they’d shown her the worst. Polly who gave everything to the people around her, even when she had nothing left to give. Polly was the one that everyone thought believed in the fairy tales, yet here he fucking was, clinging to one because he was too fucking weak to handle the truth.
That being the chances of Polly being unharmed were slim.
He was a professional. He knew what happened to kidnap victims. Especially when the victims were kidnapped by abusive spouses. Especially when abusive spouses were connected to a human trafficking ring. Especially when the victims looked like fucking Polly.
He squeezed the glass, forgetting it was broken. Warmth spread onto his hand as a jagged edge cut the skin. There was no pain of course. He was in battle mode. It was the state in which he’d trained himself to switch off all human faculties that could be considered weakness in order to do his job without hesitating. Physical pain was a weakness. As was mercy.
He had gotten through a fucking war with ironclad control over this state.
But sitting in his office, with nothing to do but wait and imagine what was happening to Polly right now, he was losing his fucking shit.
His door opened.
His chair was falling to the ground immediately, with the force in which he stood up.
Keltan eyed him, then the whisky bottle, then his hand.
“Gonna need stitches,” he commented.
Heath didn’t reply.
“We got something.”
He pulled the glass from his palm, standing.
And he prepared to go to war. The most important one he’d ever fight. To find his peace.
He hoped to fuck that his peace wasn’t shattered.
Because that would mean Polly was.
* * *
They had set up the conference room and the large computer screen in the middle of the table showed a skinny, ungroomed man wearing a Sons of Templar cut. He was in a room full of screens and discarded energy drinks.
“Craig owes a lot of fucked up people a lot of money,” Wire said dispensing with pleasantries and small talk. Heath was glad as fuck for that. He didn’t have the patience, the fucking strength for that shit. “And since our girl Rosie bled him dry, he can’t pay up.” Wire grinned at Rosie, who managed a weak smirk back. “These are not the kind of people to forgive unpaid debts. Unpaid debts are cleared with blood and pain. By the looks of it, Craig can’t handle either, unless of course he’s doling it out to defenseless fucking angels like our Polly.”
Heath clenched his fists at the rage in Wire’s tone. The truth in it. And the emotion. Everyone was affected by this. They’d been through shit before. A lot of shit. Both the men at this table and the men wearing the cut that Wire had on his back.
But this was different. Polly was different. It was unexplainable, but everyone knew it. She was separate from the world that she’d grown up in. She was separate from the fucking world she was born in.
That world shouldn’t have been able to touch her. To fucking hurt her. But it did.
“So he took her to pay a debt,” Keltan surmised, jaw tight. He was composed because the fucker had a poker face that had cost Heath a lot of money over the years. But he saw the cracks emerging with every hour she wasn’t back.
He saw it because he felt them in himself with every passing second.
Wire nodded. “He owes them a cool two point five mil,” he said, his keyboard tapping.
Heath wondered if he’d be able to hear that previously asinine sound without attaching it to this moment. This fucking nightmare.
Maybe he’d be able to handle it when he’d touched Polly. When he cataloged every inch of her body to make sure it was unmarred. Then he cataloged every inch of her soul to make sure it wasn’t broken or bruised in any way.
Maybe then.
But maybe fucking not.
Because horrors did not get erased. They became memories. Visceral and dangerous and they were always stark and fresh. Heath knew that better than anyone. If he let himself, he could smell the charring flesh of his commander. He could feel the warm stream of blood coming from a suspected insurgent he’d gunned down.
Suspected.
There was no nobility in war. And there sure as fuck weren’t confirmed enemies. He didn’t know how many of the people he’d killed deserved to die. It didn’t matter. Orders were orders. There was no place for moral reflection in a war zone.
That was for when you got home.
When you stared at a handgun and a half-empty bottle of whisky and wondered how many families were torn apart because of you. Wondered if you’d ever stop feeling the blood or smelling the death. Wondered if it would be better if you pulled a trigger one last time, ending it all.
For some reason, the tapping of that fucking keyboard seemed worse than all of that shit right now.
“Probably thinks that she’s still got it,” Wire was saying.
Heath straightened. “What do you mean thinks she’s still got it?” he demanded.
Wire glanced up from where he’d been staring off-screen.
“She got all of his money in the divorce,” Heath said. He knew it all because he’d tortured himself with every fucking minute detail of it. “She hasn’t bought shit, she went on her trip and volunteered most of the time. The fanciest place she stayed was an AirBnb. Money doesn’t mean shit to her.”
Everyone was looking at him and he didn’t give a fuck.
“No, money doesn’t mean shit to her,” Wire agreed after a beat.
Heath hated that he knew that abou
t her. It was fucked up and selfish. She gave herself to everyone freely and without expectation. He fucking loved that about her. But he wanted to own those things. That knowledge. He didn’t want anyone else knowing shit.
“Which is why she doesn’t have it anymore,” Wire continued.
“What the fuck do you mean?” he gritted out.
Wire glanced to Rosie and then back to him. “Dude, she donated almost all of it to charity pretty much as soon as she got back Stateside. Used a shitload of it to help home people from her shelter. She kept enough to fund her training. Live humbly on. It’s never been about the money for her.”
There was silence.
Well, until Heath threw his coffee cup at the wall and it smashed.
No one reacted.
Because everyone else was digesting what the fuck this meant.
It meant the chances of Polly coming out of this shit unharmed just when from abysmal to impossible.
“How in the fuck could you be so stupid?” Heath shot at Rosie, pushing free of his chair, laying his palms on the table and leaning forward. He’d missed a piece of glass and it was pressing into the flesh of his skin.
Luke stood immediately. “Watch yourself,” he clipped, face darkening.
Heath paid him no mind. “You bled him dry, knowing that the money didn’t mean shit to Polly.”
Rosie put her hand on her husband’s arm, presumably to stop him from attacking Heath like he was poised to. Heath didn’t give a fuck. He was out for blood. Luke was his friend, but at that point, it didn’t matter. He’d give him a decent fight, something to distract him from the cold and visceral dread that clawed at his throat.
“Money didn’t mean shit to Polly,” Rosie agreed, glancing from Luke to Heath once she was assured her husband wasn’t moving. “But it meant shit to Craig.” She made a face as she said his name. “And he took something from her. Something she could never get back, something that should not have been taken from someone like Polly.”
Heath’s heart clenched now he had the knowledge of how much he took from her. How he put his fucking hands on her. That knowledge would be taken to his fucking grave. Along with the guilt of how he’d treated her in his ignorance.
Rosie wasn’t done. Because when that woman was on a roll, she was on a roll. Every one of her words were bullets.
“And she because she is who she is, I couldn’t take anything more valuable, like say, his dick so his money was the next best thing. And I knew Polly wasn’t going to keep it. Because she’s Polly,” her voice wavered slightly. “I knew that she’d likely hand it all over to the old man that she walks to the bus stop every day or the young kid she’d been helping with his college payments ever since she met in a Starbucks one time. I knew that because that’s who Polly is. She’d literally carve out her heart and hand it to someone just so they could have two more heartbeats than they needed.”
She gave him an accusing look.
“Than they deserved. So don’t you try and lay the blame for Polly’s asshole ex snatching her out of the comfort of her own home on me, because I won’t let that fly. You want to look for someone to blame? How about you go find a fucking mirror then ask it why she was sitting at home, alone unprotected, most likely thinking about the man who broke her heart. And I’m not talking about the one who is currently holding her captive right now.”
She was yelling at this point.
“You think about that while you go all manly and smash perfectly good mugs and perfectly good, kind and giving fucking hearts.”
She stood up quickly, flipped him the bird and then stormed out of the room.
* * *
Heath was staring at his bloodied hand, wondering if he was wearing more or less than Polly was wearing. If she was in more or less pain than him. Wondering how many marks she was wearing on her perfect body. The body he’d had in his arms this morning.
Was it only this morning?
And he’d gotten out of bed with the intention of a fresh start. With the intention of never letting her go again.
He wondered if his bloody and torn hands would ever hold her again.
His door opened and closed and his head snapped up, instantly alert, instantly bracing.
“No news,” Lucy said quietly, knowing that’s what Heath was surviving on. Scraps of information that might lead him to her.
He flinched at the growing bruise on Lucy’s face. On the pain in every part of her.
Keltan followed behind her, hand on her lower back. Of course the fucker wasn’t gonna let her walk the short distance from the bed to Heath’s office.
Heath didn’t blame him.
If—no, when he got Polly back, she wouldn’t be walking from the bed to the kitchen alone.
“You okay?” Heath forced himself to show concern for Lucy. Because Polly would want him to do that. Because Polly showed concern for everyone, no matter how much pain she was in.
Lucy raised her brow in response.
“Yeah,” Heath agreed.
Lucy sat down across from him.
Keltan stood behind her, hands on her shoulders.
There was silence.
“You love her,” Lucy said finally.
Heath didn’t hesitate. “More than anything on this fucking earth.”
She smiled. “From the start?”
“From the second I saw her in that bar, and every second after that,” he said.
Lucy lost her smile. “She’s not the same as us,” Lucy said, voice quiet. “And I don’t mean this in a bad way. It’s in all the best of ways. Because there was something special in her, something soft and precious and something that I’ve always considered my duty as her sister to protect. Everyone that encounters her and loves her considers it their duty. To make sure that Polly continues to experience the world exactly how she sees it. And now that’s gone. I can’t protect her anymore. And even in the best case scenario, it’s going to break my sister.”
Heath didn’t flinch with the words. Though they cut him. Speared him. As did hearing the absolute sorrow in the tone of one of the strongest women he knew. Lucy had more of a poker face than half the men he’d served with. He’d seen it for himself.
But this wasn’t like anything they’d experienced.
This was Polly.
And she was so fucking different than them in all the best ways, which meant that this was cutting them to the core in all the worst ways.
“You’re wrong,” Heath said.
Keltan stiffened as he spoke and leaned forward as if to spring. Heath didn’t doubt he would if he didn’t like the next words coming out of his mouth.
“She’s stronger than you think. Than you know,” he continued not giving a fuck about Keltan’s glare. “She isn’t going to let the ugliness of the world break her.”
His words sounded certain, sure.
But they were little more than a prayer.
No one normally listened to his prayers, but Duke burst into the room.
Heath stood.
“We got her,” Duke said.
Chapter Sixteen
Polly
Sixteen Hours Missing
You get rescued in the nick of time.
That’s what happens in those fantasies in the head you pretend you don’t have. You know, the ones where something crazy happens and wakes up that person that you’ve been thinking about forever and then they come and save you, right in the nick of time.
Then they hold you in their arms and you’re safe and warm. They whisper to you about how they’d never leave you, how you were safe now.
It would’ve been nice if that happened.
But this seemed to be the period of my life when the universe had to educate me on the fact that fantasies didn’t play out here in real life.
Not mine at least.
So I was not rescued in the nick of time.
Or at all.
The back of the truck was uncomfortable, to say the least. My hands bound awkwardly behind my bac
k contributed to that. As did the uneven terrain we seemed to be traversing on. I guessed it wasn’t a main highway from the number of times I went flying forward, back, up, down.
I had opened up a cut on my cheek.
It was from Craig’s wedding ring.
I hadn’t noticed he was still wearing it until it tore at my skin when he was beating the crap out of me.
I wondered why he’d worn it for so long. It can’t have been out of love. Because even deluded and ugly love didn’t let a person do what he’d done to me.
I wasn’t thinking about that.
It wasn’t going to help me.
It wasn’t going to help anything.
I was careful to keep my mind very blank as the journey continued. I took in the large area I was being jostled around in. Not too much, mind you, because I was shackled to something on the edge of the truck. It was considerate. Chaining me up to the side of the truck. So I wouldn’t go flying all the way across the truck. Without my hands to break my fall I could break my neck.
That might be nice.
Quick.
But I couldn’t wish for death.
That was so utterly selfish.
Heath’s words haunted me.
“You drive like you bowl through life. Full of almost hitting things, near misses, almost disasters. You’ve been lucky, so far, Polly. But no one is lucky forever. The world doesn’t give almosts forever. One day, you’re gonna fuckin’ crash.”
I wondered how much satisfaction Heath would get knowing he had predicted the future. I didn’t crash, literally, of course. But my body and soul was shattered into a thousand different pieces and that was pretty much the same thing.
The words bounced around the empty expanse surrounding me, hitting me now and again. It hurt. Which was surprising. I’d thought I’d stopped feeling pain.
I was in a large truck. Like a big long haul one. It was designed for large amounts of cargo. It had a strong smell of off milk. Maybe yogurt?