Nobody Knows

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  I’m so scared for you. I’m hoping that, just maybe, you lost my address and that maybe the only reason that you’re not talking is because you don’t want to talk to me anymore. Not because the worst has happened and you’re actually dead.

  Today I’ve finished my first semester of nursing school.

  Today, I got rip-roaring drunk, went to sleep, and then had a dream that… never mind. I’m not going there. I’m not going to tell you what my dream was about.

  Write me back.

  Please, write me back.

  Sierra

  • • •

  “What the fucking fuck?” I asked as I came face to face with Malachi’s parents.

  In my house.

  On my fucking brand new couch, kicked up, as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

  “Get out of my house, right now,” I ordered shortly. “And where is my dog?”

  “We let him outside,” his mother said. “He was barking, and we thought it would be best for him to wait out there. Please, come in and get comfortable, we have a few things we would like to talk to you about.”

  I gritted my teeth and pulled my phone from my purse.

  I didn’t wait for them to tell me why they were there.

  Instead, I dialed the cops… or would have had my phone not been snatched out of my hand by Malachi’s father before I’d even dialed the first number.

  “Give that back!” I growled, pissed off as all hell now.

  “I suggest you give us a moment to talk,” Mr. Stokes, Malachi’s father, ordered.

  I was glad that Malachi no longer went by Stokes. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.

  They didn’t deserve a beautiful son like the one that they got.

  “I’m here for one reason and one reason only. Money. You get us money, and we’ll leave,” he said swiftly.

  I snorted and crossed my arms over my chest, refusing to give their dumbness an answer.

  “I’m willing to get you a cut for a quarter of what we get if you vacate our house,” he said. “For all intents and purposes, this is our place, and we want it back until our home is fixed in Florida. Now, we’re leaving. We’re staying at a hotel just outside of town. I left my phone number on your pen pad on the fridge. Please feel free to use it when you make the right decision.”

  With that, he gestured to his wife who was drinking my goddamn tea, and pointed to the door. “Let’s go.”

  He set my phone down on the entrance table and closed the door behind them, leaving me in a state of shock.

  Did they just bribe me? Did they honestly think that I would let this go?

  Because it was goddamn highly doubtful that they realized just how much I hated them for what they’d done to Malachi over the years.

  A dog barking had my heart clenching in worry as I ran to the front door and peered out.

  There I found Axe outside, barking at Mr. Stokes as he got into his car.

  Instead of closing the door to his car, though, he slammed it open, trying to get Axe away from him. But all he ended up doing was causing his car door to make an alarming creak and pop that sounded like he’d broken the damn thing off.

  Axe jumped back, continued to bark, right out of reach of the stupid man.

  All the while, Malachi’s mother fanned herself as if she didn’t have a care in the world about what she’d just done or what was happening now.

  Giving up, Malachi’s father closed his car door and started to roar away.

  Axe followed.

  Unfortunately, when they decided to let my dog out, they’d done so into the front. Not the back.

  Meaning, that Axe followed their asshole selves all the way down the driveway and refused to listen to me as I screamed his name to come back.

  Mr. Stokes swerved and narrowly missed hitting Axe.

  He would have had he not jumped out of the way at the last second.

  “Son of a bitch!” I cried and started to run down the stairs. “Axe!”

  Axe, upon hearing me call his name, stopped where he was and looked back at me. Which was a good thing because Mr. Stokes took that corner so fast and hard that he would’ve run poor Axe right over had he stayed where he’d been.

  I breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing him go.

  I needed to call Malachi.

  Now.

  He was supposed to be here. What made him go home?

  Had he known that they were here?

  Surely he would’ve come right over if he’d known that they were literally in my house, not just outside of it.

  “Axe!” I called again when my dog stayed right where he was.

  He was no longer looking at where the Stokes car had disappeared, but at the house with an odd expression on his face.

  “Axe, come on, buddy. Let’s go!” I called again.

  Axe started to run. I’m talking, the fastest I’d ever seen him run before.

  All out sprinting that caused him to look like an antelope and not a dog.

  He was halfway to me when I felt the pull of my hair from behind.

  I gasped, turned, and froze when I saw the person behind me.

  “Call the dog off.”

  I licked my lips, then snapped them tightly shut.

  “Fine, do it the hard way,” he said.

  Then, before I could so much as open my mouth to say a word, Adrian Mastings reached up and punched me in the side of the head.

  One second I was aware.

  The next I wasn’t.

  I woke up to pain.

  Whole, all-encompassing pain.

  My head throbbed in time with my heart, and my bones physically ached.

  I tried to open my eyes, but found that I couldn’t.

  My eyelids weren’t working correctly.

  A commotion, barking, reached me.

  “Axe,” I called. “Axe.”

  My voice was weak, like a kitten.

  And there was something around my neck.

  It felt like a rope, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “Axe,” I called again, but still I couldn’t get my voice up above a whisper.

  Something was wrong with my voice box.

  It felt weird when I tried to speak, like I was trying to force the sound out past things that it shouldn’t be forced past.

  A shout had me freezing, wondering if the person that’d hurt me so badly had returned.

  The weird hum that I’d thought was part of my head hurting idled down, but just as quickly as the sound stopped thrumming through my ears, the rope around my neck tightened.

  Slightly at first, very slowly, until all of a sudden that rope started to pull.

  I tried to claw at my neck, to loosen whatever it was, but my hands didn’t feel like my own, either.

  I was about to die.

  Seriously, I was about to die, and I knew it.

  The baby inside of me would never get a chance.

  Malachi would find me and…

  I heard frantic voices, but my oxygen flow was so low at this point that I was on the verge of passing out again.

  Then, just as suddenly as I knew I was about to pass out, whatever was at my neck was once again no longer choking me.

  “Sierra,” Malachi said, his breath whispering across my bruised and bloody face.

  Then, knowing that I was safe, I said, “Don’t let me go, Malachi. Don’t let me go.”

  I wasn’t sure if he heard me or not, but I somehow knew that he wouldn’t.

  Not until he was forced to.

  CHAPTER 19

  Lucky for me, I don’t have enough friends for an intervention.

  -Malachi’s secret thoughts

  MALACHI

  Unsent letter to Sierra:

  Sierra,

  Today they allowed me a pen and paper in hell.

  The guard obviously didn’t know that by handing me that, he’d just signed his own death warrant.

  I told them that I wanted to write you because I knew I was about to die, and I
didn’t want you to think that I was out there somewhere, and you not know what happened to me.

  I’m writing this letter right now with the pen that I used to kill him.

  It still has bloodstains on it, and that is what I’m smearing all over the paper.

  It was worth it, though.

  As long as it brings me back to you, I’m okay with just about anything.

  I love you,

  Malachi Gabriel Gnocchi

  • • •

  I frowned when I saw Axe come barreling up the driveway of my place and practically slam himself into the door.

  I frowned hard and pushed the door open only to see Axe back away.

  “What is it, boy?” I asked. “Did you follow Grans over here?”

  “He came from the street,” I heard said.

  Looking up, I saw Saint on his side of the road standing next to his dog, Smoke, on his front lawn.

  Smoke was staring at us, regarding us in doggy concentration, as he waited to see what would happen next.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He came from the road, not from where your grans normally comes from,” Saint repeated himself.

  I took the porch steps two at a time and tried to get to Axe, but he wasn’t having it.

  The moment I got close enough to touch, he jumped away again.

  “Fuck!” I cried. “What is it, boy?”

  Axe whoofed and started to run, obviously wanting me to follow him.

  I cursed and started to reach for my keys just inside the door, but Axe was gone in between one blink and the next.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said as I started down the length of my driveway toward him.

  That’s when Smoke took off, too.

  “Son of a bitch!” Saint grumbled as he hurried after the two dogs, echoing my own statement.

  I wasn’t far behind, a sick sort of sense starting to penetrate my brain.

  I pulled out my phone and called 911, wondering why in the hell I was running down the road when I should’ve been walking through the woods to get where I knew I was being led to.

  But Axe hadn’t been taken that way ever. Only Bobo. So he wouldn’t know the way.

  He’d only smell the way that the ladies always took to get to the duplexes.

  “Fuck,” I hissed as my call didn’t connect. “Your cell phone connecting?”

  The dogs were so far ahead of us now that I could only see a goddamn dust trail where they’d once been.

  “No,” Saint grumbled. “We’ve been having shit service lately because they’re changing the cell tower over.”

  I remembered hearing something about that but hadn’t given it much thought seeing as I didn’t get on my phone much.

  I was noticing it now, though.

  And at the worst time possible.

  The roar of a car passing by had me flipping them off, only to realize when we were halfway to the car that’d pulled over to stop that it was my grandmother roaring past us.

  She stopped, and Saint and I both jumped into the back of the truck.

  I pounded on the roof and she took it as her cue to go, roaring all over again toward her place.

  The dogs took the turn into my driveway a bit later, and just as we breached the entrance to the drive, Grans came to a sudden halt.

  It was only when we saw Sierra’s rental car that I realized why.

  It was slowly creeping our way.

  “Follow Smoke,” I suggested as we jumped out of the car.

  Axe had stopped just behind Sierra’s rental car, barking at me frantically.

  Smoke, on the other hand, had run into the woods.

  Saint jumped one way, and I jumped the other, both of us meeting at the front of the still slowly rolling car that was making its way down the driveway.

  I reached in and put the car in park just as Saint shouted at me.

  Frowning, I got out and walked backward toward the car only to fall to my knees in horror at what I saw.

  Sierra was tied to the back bumper of her car by a yellow rope.

  My yellow rope.

  The one that I’d bought as a stringer for when I wanted to go fishing at the creek and keep my catch.

  Saint already had his pocketknife out of his pocket before I could even process what I was seeing.

  “Fuck!” Grans cried.

  “Go back to my truck and use the radio to call this in,” I ordered. “Say officer down. They’ll get here faster.”

  Sierra might not be an officer. But she was the daughter of one. She was the sister of one. She was the soon-to-be-wife of one.

  They would come.

  And none of them would care that she wasn’t an officer.

  “Baby,” I said as I frantically searched for a place to touch her that wasn’t hurt. There were no places. I chose to cup her cheeks, not pressing too hard. “Baby. Sierra. Can you hear me?”

  “Don’t let me go,” she whispered through her cracked and bleeding lips. “Don’t let me go.”

  I would never. Not ever. Let her go.

  “I won’t, honey. I won’t,” I promised.

  I could hear police sirens in the distance.

  “Do you need me to do anything?” Grans asked.

  I looked up to find Saint gone, likely following his dog. His dog who, hopefully, found whoever was responsible for this.

  “If you see Sammy or Miller, keep them away,” I ordered. “Don’t let them see her like this. Or, if they don’t listen to you, tell them what happened. Explain. Don’t let them walk in blind.”

  Not like I did.

  Goddamn, seeing her being dragged behind her car would forever be ingrained in my head.

  I was going to be sick.

  Not now. But later. When I knew that she was okay.

  “Should I try to get the rope off?” Grans asked as the sirens got closer.

  I looked at the rope and immediately shook my head. “No. Not yet.”

  The rope was embedded in her skin. I wasn’t sure what the protocol would be in getting it off, but it wouldn’t be something that could easily just be taken off just yet. At least, I didn’t think it would be.

  Hell, I had no fucking clue.

  My brain wasn’t working correctly.

  “Don’t leave me,” Sierra whispered again.

  I leaned down so that my breath fanned over her face. “I won’t. I’ll never leave you. Not even when you want me to.”

  Things happened fast after that.

  Officers arrived. Chaos ensued. And I forced my way into the ambulance despite the paramedics not thinking I should come.

  “I don’t fucking care,” I growled. “Now drive.”

  The young woman looked pissed that I was forcing her hand, but I didn’t fucking care.

  The ambulance doors shut just as I saw Sammy’s truck rocket up to the curb.

  But before he could get out, the ambulance was hurrying away.

  The truck followed behind us.

  I looked back at my girl.

  She somehow looked even worse with the white sheets as a backdrop instead of the dark black of the asphalt.

  “You’re going to be back here, you need to stay out of my way,” the pissy medic growled.

  I didn’t bother answering her.

  I was in the far back corner of the ambulance and leaning over Sierra’s poor, battered face.

  Her eyes were swollen shut so badly that I knew she wouldn’t be opening them for a while.

  Her nose was broken. There was blood coming out of her ears, and her front tooth was chipped. She had multiple contusions, bruises, and cuts spotted all over her face as well.

  That was only the injuries I could categorize.

  Hell, she likely could have way more underneath all the things I could see. Like a broken cheekbone or a cracked skull.

  “Don’t let me go,” Sierra whispered.

  Her voice sounded ragged and raw. As if she’d been screaming for help for a very long time.

  “I won�
�t, baby,” I said, placing my lips to her cheek, just under a cut that was bleeding.

  I wiped away the blood from my lips and pressed the side of my face to her head, hoping that I wasn’t hurting her in any way.

  But I knew that she needed me close. She needed to feel me since she couldn’t see me.

  “I hurt,” she whispered.

  I looked at the medic. “Can you give her anything for pain?”

  “I’ve given her what’s safe for the baby.” The medic looked apologetic now instead of pissy. “I can give her more but…”

  “No, don’t,” Sierra said. “Don’t.”

  I closed my eyes and counted to ten in order not to keep the mournful cry from leaving my throat.

  “Talk to me,” I whispered. “Stay awake.”

  “About.” She breathed hard. “What?”

  “Tell me about the letter, baby,” I ordered. “One of the last letters that I got from you said that you had a dream,” I murmured, smoothing her blood-wet hair back from her face and trying to get her to stay awake.

  She smiled then, cracked lips and all.

  “About you.” She sighed. “It was about you. You and me. Married. With babies. Lots and lots of babies.”

  That sounded like heaven.

  “What’s lots and lots?” I asked. “Tell me how many.”

  “Ten. Lots and lots,” she whispered.

  “I can’t wait to see our baby,” I whispered. “She’s going to be so beautiful.”

  Sierra turned her head toward me, as far as the collar around her throat would allow. “When I chose, I made sure that the baby looked like you. You were the one I was thinking of when I was looking. Though, I have to admit, Mr. November also played a huge part in me choosing what features, too.”

  I dropped my forehead to the cot beside her head and forced back the tears.

  • • •

  “She’s losing the baby,” the doctor, Zach, said, looking from me to Sierra’s parents and back. “The trauma to her abdomen, back, and lower extremities were too extreme. The fetus couldn’t survive that kind of trauma. I’m so sorry.”

  I felt my stomach drop out of my body and land somewhere between my feet.

  “Is she okay?” Mercy asked, her voice a rasp of emotion. “Is she going to be okay? Will she be able to have more babies?”

  Zach looked hopeful then.

  “I do believe that’ll be the case,” Zach confirmed. “She’s a strong, healthy woman in her prime. She’ll recover from this.”