When I walked into the bedroom and saw the bed made neatly and the bathroom light on, that’s when I realized something wasn’t right. Lottie would never go to the toilet with the door open in case I came home, and she would have crawled into bed by now or called out when she heard us if she wasn’t in it.
Panic that she’d fallen and hurt herself hit me as I walked into the bathroom. What I saw on the floor wasn’t at all what I expected, though.
“Hey, did you know there’s a broken… Whoa, Levi,” Elijah clapped me on the back. “I never knew y’all had it in you. That’s quite a collection.”
Crouching down, I picked up the wrapping paper and the tag next to it.
Here’s to hair pulling, butt spanking, shmexy sex.
Merry Christmas!
Love, Lily, Luna and Dahlia xxx
Ps welcome to the family.
Reading it over my shoulder, Elijah muttered, “Can’t say I’m surprised it’s from them. They got me cock soap and this thing to keep my balls warm.”
Those had been his gag gifts and we’d all gotten something like that. Well, aside from my parents who were still feeling victimized by the fact they hadn’t gotten anything filthy.
Turning around, I broke into a jog as I moved around the house looking for her. “Lottie! Where are you?”
Between the two of us, we had every room checked and every light in the house on within minutes.
“I’m not sure if this is related, Levi,” Elijah said as he tried to catch his breath. “But there’s a window in the bedroom at the back that’s broken.”
Running through to the room, I screeched to a halt on the wooden floors when I saw the grass and dirt on top of the glass, with muddy footprints leading out of the room.
“Fucking shit,” I yelled at Elijah. “Call everyone and tell them we need vehicles, guns, and lights. Tell Dad to call Barron and Connor and tell them that Retter’s here and he’s got Charlotte.”
Pulling his phone out of his pocket, he rang straight through to Dad and started relaying the message while I grabbed my torch and went outside. There was an old shed about forty yards from my house, so I ran over to it and almost tripped over the body in dark clothing lying in the grass. It was too big to be her, but I turned it over and yelled out for Elijah when I saw the blood running down Archer’s face.
“Elijah, tell them we’re at the old shed and that Archer’s hurt.”
Confirming he heard me with a loud curse, he repeated what I’d just said to Dad and then hung up. “They’re on their way. How bad is it?”
With both of our torches now on his face I could see the full extent of the damage to Archer’s head. He had a split lip and his nose was bleeding, but it was the large lump on the top of his head with the deep cut in the center that was the biggest worry. I also had a problem.
“Elijah, I need to find her,” I rasped, looking up at him desperately. I was torn between making sure my brother was ok and also finding Lottie before he could hurt her badly, or worse – kill her.
The grim look on his face confirmed he had those exact same concerns, too. I’d filled him in on a lot of what had happened since he’d gotten here and he and Lottie had also become good friends, so I knew that he understood what I was going through.
Standing up, he skimmed the beam of his torch across the ground around us. “There are fresh footprints in the mud over there. I say we follow them until the others catch up with us,” he ordered, sounding more like he would if he was at work than he did outside of it. “Uncle Jerome’s coming here so he’ll look after Archer.”
Kneeling down, he turned my brother into the recovery position on his side.
Standing up, I tried to do what I needed to do – remove the emotions making it hard for me to breathe, and think where he could take her. The problem was, there was a lot of land and I didn’t know how well he knew it all by now. “What if he has a weapon?”
Pointing for us to go back to the house, he smiled wickedly at me. “So do we.”
He was right. We were all good shots – with the exception of Tate, but even then I’d trust him with one tonight – and we knew the land like the back of our hands.
* * *
Following the tracks on the ATVs hadn’t been that hard. What had been hard was seeing spots where there were body sized impressions in the ground like he’d dropped her periodically. How much more could one person take? If it had been me I’d have been ok, but Lottie was smaller than I was, she was fragile. Not that I’d tell her that to her face, she’d probably glue my balls to my thigh.
“We’re best getting off here,” Elijah said quietly as we got closer to the tree line. “The trees are far enough apart to drive through, but if he hears us he might do something to her.”
Nodding in agreement, I hopped off the vehicle and walked quietly through the frost-covered grass. It was cold, fucking freezing in fact, and I wasn’t sure what sort of clothing Lottie had been in when he took her.
When someone’s taken there are the obvious worries, ones that occur to everyone whether they’re involved or not. What I hadn’t realized until now, though, were the not so obvious ones like what clothing she had on, if she even had shoes and pants on, shit like that. Hypothermia hit quickly, and exposure to a temperature as cold as this with little protecting you from it? Would we find her in time to stop that?
Would we even find her in time to stop him hurting her?
Just then, a body materialized from the trees making me reach for my gun.
“It’s only Jackson,” Elijah told me, tapping me on the shoulder as he walked past. He was right. Eric Retter was only about five-feet-nine inches tall, but my cousins were all six-foot-four and over. Retter was also built like a weasel in comparison to the big bear standing in front of me right now. “How’d you get here so quickly?”
The night was a clear one and it was a full moon, so I could see his eyes sparkling as he looked in my direction and lifted his chin at me.
“Yo!” Looking back at his brother, he muttered, “Got here about half an hour ago and decided I needed to walk off the journey so I took a wander around. Saw someone headed this way carrying something over their shoulder and figured I’d check it out.”
As he spoke, I waited for his twin Marcus to come out of the trees too, but it didn’t seem like anyone else was around. “Marcus with you?”
Shaking his head, he turned back to face the direction he’d come from. “Nah, he had shit to do last night, so we drove separately. Wanna tell me what’s going on?”
Waving me forward, Elijah quickly told him what had happened, with Jackson’s jaw turning to stone the further into the story he got. He’d known Charlotte’s issue with Eric, but hearing the full details and realizing how unhinged he was now, it made things very different.
When he was finished, Elijah motioned for us to start walking. “Story time’s over. From now on, we need to be aware, quiet, and sneaky mother fuckers. We don’t know what he’s carrying, so be ready to defend yourself, ok?”
Defend myself? I wasn’t going to defend myself, I was going to fucking kill him.
We’d only been walking for about ten minutes when Noah and Madix joined us, neither of them saying a word. We might not have been trained, but we weren’t stupid – we knew what to do.
A rustling to our left sounded as we passed a thick area of bushes, making us all stop and crouch down. Instead of Retter coming out of there, though, Kari appeared.
“What the fuck?” Noah hissed quietly, looking over at me sharply.
Looking back at us, Jackson whispered, “Who’s that?”
Pointing at me, Noah replied, “The chick who’s been trying to get his attention.”
Rolling his eyes, he turned back to watch her as she looked around like she was waiting for someone. Without taking his eyes off her, he held his hand out with his index and middle finger pointing down and started moving them like they were walking. Then, he made the gesture for talking and waved me forwar
d.
Guess I was going to speak to her then. Getting up from my crouch, I walked toward her, calling out, “Kari?”
Spinning around with her hand on her chest, her face went from relaxed to like she was crying. “Levi, oh thank god. I got lost and was so scared.”
Making it look like I was searching the area around us, I looked back at where I’d just come from with a look of disbelief on my face. We’d watched her clearly waiting calmly, and what was she doing on our land in the first place?
Turning back to her, I forced a smile onto my face. “Sorry to hear that. If you walk that way, you’ll hit the field that leads you down to my parents’ house. They can call you a cab.”
Before I could turn away from her, she was pulling my arm in the direction I’d told her to go in. “You can’t leave me on my own, I might get lost or something. And what if someone finds me? I’m sure I heard footsteps walking past me earlier…”
Tearing my arm out of her grasp and catching her arm instead, I pulled her around to face me. “I’m going to ask you one last time – what are you doing here?”
Nervously licking her lips as her eyes darted around, she stammered, “I wanted to go for a walk, and it’s so dark that I… I…”
“You live a long way from here,” I snapped, calling her out on her bullshit. “And this is private property, so you’re trespassing. Now tell me what the fuck’s going on.”
I heard the footsteps behind me just before I felt the hand clamp down on my shoulders.
“There're noises in the trees over there, man,” Jackson whispered in my ear, and I watched Kari’s eyes widen when she saw him. “Tate’s coming up on our left, he’ll watch this one, we head that way. You with me?”
Not answering, I kept my eyes on her until Tate appeared. “Don’t let her out of your sight, man. She’s up to something.”
“She’s involved,” Jackson told me, saying out loud what I was already thinking. I wasn’t sure how he knew for sure, but her being here was no fucking coincidence.
Not sparing her another glance, I turned and started jogging through the trees behind Elijah. We’d been moving for five minutes when I heard it – the sounds of something being dragged and a deep voice mumbling.
“Could’ve had it all, but she had to fuck it all up,” the voice I recognized as Retter’s said, sounding out of it. “Wake up, bitch.”
There was a sharp smack and then a low cry followed it. Not thinking, I pushed past my cousin to get to where they were and stop him from hurting her again. Grabbing my arm, he yanked me back and covered his lips with his finger as he shook his head at me and motioned for me to follow him.
Squatting down as low as we could, we used the trees to get to a small bush near where they were, and peeked over the top of it. I’d thought I was struggling before, but the sight in front of me tipped me over the edge.
Lottie was on the floor in a crumpled heap wearing just her jeans and a white t-shirt which was covered in dirt, mud, and blood. Her arms were around her head as she protected the rest of her body with her knees, but there was little strength in her position. A normal person doing that would have their legs tightly up against their stomachs, but hers looked like they were only staying there because she couldn’t move them.
“On three,” Elijah muttered, pulling his gun out.
Doing the same thing, I braced to move, when another tall figure beat us to it, and grabbed Retter by the neck with one hand then punched him in the stomach with the other.
“Enjoy hurting women, do you?” my cousin Wesley growled, punching him again and dropping him to the floor.
Skidding to my knees beside Lottie, I picked up one of her hands, freaking out when there was no resistance at all.
“Lottie, it’s Levi. I’ve got you, baby.”
Jackson jogged up beside me and picked up her other hand, taking her pulse with a frown on his face. “It’s weak. Elijah, can you check her over and make sure she’s safe to move?”
Dropping to his knees beside me, Elijah started doing his job, all of us ignoring the scuffles going on behind us. “I’m worried about her neck and head, there’s no knowing if he dropped her on it. But she needs medical attention ASAP so we’re going to have to risk it. Noah’s gone to get one of the vehicles and when he gets back, we’ll move her. Jackson, support her head and neck.”
“Not so fast,” a female voice ordered, and we all turned as a woman I didn’t recognize walked out of the darkness with a gun pointed at us. “Hands in the air, gentlemen.”
Turning to glare at his brother, Elijah snapped, “Really? All of those years you’ve bragged about nothing getting past you and having the reflexes of a cat, and that,” he gestured with his thumb over his shoulder, “you didn’t see?”
Not looking bothered or moving his hands from where he was supporting Lottie’s head, Jackson shook his head. “I saw it.”
Wesley stopped hitting Retter as soon as he heard her voice but didn’t put his hands in the air either. He did, however, put them on his hips as he watched her walk closer to us.
“I said, put your hands in the air.”
Shooting a look of amusement at us, Wesley asked, “Do you want us to wave them around like we just don’t care, too?”
“Say ho-oh!” Jackson sang, a burst of laughter coming out of him. To anyone else it might look like he genuinely meant it, but his eyes were heated and he wasn’t in the slightest bit amused at that moment.
Gaping at us and our failure to comply with her demands, she screeched, “Hands in the air, I’ve got a fucking gun.”
“So do I, lady,” Elijah shouted. “In fact, we’ve all got them. But I’m taking it from how badly your hands are shaking that you don’t know how to use one.”
In the weeks to come, as I went over tonight’s events for the millionth time, I’d think about how we reacted at this moment and realize how stupid we’d been. Whether you believe it’s truly dangerous, a gun being waved around isn’t anything to laugh at regardless of whether or not you’re armed. But right then we were running on anger – and probably arrogance, too – so we didn’t give her what she wanted.
Just as he’d said the last word she fired, narrowly missing my head and splintering the wood behind it, pissing us all off even more.
“I told him to make sure he did it when none of you would notice. I told him a thousand times, but he wouldn’t listen. Kept taking his drugs and asking if he’d still have his job. Like a doctor can do their job when they’re high, the lawsuits would be astronomical and we’d end up broke. But he wouldn’t come home without her, so this was the only way to do it. Then I was going to kill him. She’s not even mine so what do I care what he does with her, but I won’t lose my job and everything I’ve worked for because of him,” she ranted, swinging the gun between all of us. “She’s just like Ed, a liability, but the world expects you to get married, expects you to have kids. If I wasn’t a family woman, they’d have given the job to someone who was. I’ve been through too much to fail now.”
“Cool story, bro,” Jackson yelled to her, still acting unaffected by it. “But it’s cold, I need to piss, and I’ve got cramp in my ass. Wanna get to the point?”
Another shot rang out, this one skimming his arm and making him growl under his breath as the skin opened up.
“Shut up,” she screeched, making us all wince involuntarily at the pitch of it.
“She’s a fucking whack job,” Elijah muttered, unnecessarily telling us something we could all see.
Wesley wasn’t close enough to hear it but he turned when Elijah said the words and grinned at us, and then looked back at her. “Are you going to deafen us, or kill us?”
Pointing it at his head this time, she sneered at him. “What do you think? My gun’s pointing at your face…”
A large hand appeared over her shoulder, plucking the gun out of hers before she even realized what was happening. And then, in the worst Australian accent I’d ever heard, my cousin Marcus – Jackson
’s twin – scoffed, “That’s not a gun, this is a gun.” And, walking around in front of her, he held up a Taurus 513. “They call it the Raging Judge, but I prefer the Glock 19 that’s in my car.”
“You said it all wrong,” Jackson called out as the woman’s eyes darted between them, no doubt confused why she was seeing double. “It’s meant to be a knife. In Crocodile Dundee, Mick says that when he shows the dude his knife.”
I didn’t care if he’d given out the winning lottery numbers, I just wanted to get Charlotte to hospital. Fortunately, Noah and Madix joined us just then, both of them riding an ATV and looking surprised by the appearance of Lottie’s mom as well as our other cousin. Even though neither of them questioned it until much later on.
Pushing Raquel Rose down on the ground next to the whimpering shit stain Eric, both Marcus and Wesley stood watching them while we got ready to move Lottie onto the ATV. It was going to be complicated, but we had to make it work. There was no other option.
At least there wasn’t until Connor and Barron turned up. Apparently, Noah had texted our dad to let him know exactly where we were, and after they’d cuffed Kari in their vehicle Tate had brought them to us.
Making sure both Raquel and Eric were now unarmed, they radioed through to the EMTs who were waiting for the all clear to approach the area. This meant that we were able to put her onto a stretcher with her neck properly immobilized, before taking her to where the ambulance was.
Now that the threat was gone, and the adrenaline had worn off, it bared mentioning that not one of us was joking or cracking a smile. Far from it. Not that I’d done either of those things once, but even the rest of my family were stony faced and somber as we loaded her into the ambulance and I climbed in beside her. They didn’t even crack a joke or try to lighten the mood while we waited for news on her condition at the hospital.
The only purpose that the bantering had served was to keep Kari, Eric, and Raquel off guard. Now we had our full focus on Charlotte.
Going For Gold: Providence Gold Series Book Four Page 17