“Deal with it?” I asked. “Ashley. Come on. You’re a tough girl. And that guy will keep doing this to other girls just like you. He didn’t assault you. But he scared you. And he brought you somewhere against your will. I’m notifying the police and giving them his address, whether you like it or not. But I hope you will come to your senses and realize you have to stand up for yourself here. Otherwise, you’re doing that asshole a favor and letting him off the hook easy.”
“He has a broken nose and a dislocated shoulder,” she said. “I don’t think we’re letting him off easy.”
“I could have done worse.”
“I know.”
I leaned against the wall and sighed. “You know I have to call them.”
She nodded.
“Good. Then eat your toast.”
She started eating, and I went into the other room to make the call.
The whole thing blew over within a couple of days. The man who had taken her to his townhouse had a record of doing the same thing to other women. Turns out, it was because he was on house arrest. What he did to Ashley was a violation of his parole—and several other laws—so he ended up back in jail for four months. Not long enough in my opinion, but that was because it was Ashley who got caught up in the mess. In my mind, he deserved a life sentence, and I realized how warped that was.
Ashley had thanked me again later and told me how much she appreciated me pushing her to do the right thing.
The fear living inside me now was ten times worse than it was the night I drove out to pick her up from that pig’s house. I kept running through how that night unfolded, and I hoped this time would be the same. Maybe she was just curled up on the sofa, and Nick was there but not hurting her. I could live with that.
But if he’d laid a hand on her, I knew that everything would change.
Because I’d kill him.
Ethan got off the phone with Lulu, looking like he’d been punched in the gut. His face was pale, and he was rubbing his chest, something I knew he did when he was anxious. He slumped down at the dining room table and looked over at me. “You still on hold?”
I nodded.
Ethan ran his hands down his face and blew out an exasperated sigh. I thought he might start getting worked up and ranting, which he usually did when his nerves were getting the better of him. But both of us had heard Jesse’s warning. We were no good to Ashley unless we could keep a cool head and just get to her. The time to explode was coming, but it was not now.
“Dean?” Sanderson’s voice filled the phone. “You still there?”
“I’m still here.” I bit down on my tongue before I said “you asshole.”
“Good. Sorry to keep you waiting. My guy was hard to get through to. But he succeeded in putting a tracker in Nick’s phone. He’s sending me the coordinates now.”
“That’s the first bit of good news I’ve gotten all day,” I said.
“I have a general radius if you want to start heading that way now?”
“Yes,” I said without having to think about it.
“Looks like there are some forested areas due north of you, and that’s in the middle of the twenty-mile radius the tracker is giving us. In about ten minutes, I’ll have the exact location. So start heading that way, and I’ll call you when I have a precise location.”
“Thanks.” I hung up.
Ethan was already on his feet. “So?”
“We have a direction. Let’s get going.”
We both walked out of the house, and I closed the front door behind us. We hurried down the steps, and Jesse looked up from where he was walking a line along the outside of the driveway. He held his hand up, showing me a small diamond earring. “He brought her out this way,” Jesse said.
“How nobody saw, I have no fucking clue,” I said. “Come on. Sanderson gave us a direction, and I don’t want to waste anymore time.”
Jesse didn’t ask any questions. He dropped the earring in his pocket, and we got into my car. I was reversing out of the driveway before either of them had their seatbelts on. I was gripping the steering wheel so hard, my knuckles were turning white.
Jesse, always in the passenger seat, was watching me. I could feel it. He cleared his throat. “We’re going to have to be careful,” he said. His voice was tense. There was an anger in him that rivaled mine. Which was good and bad all at once. If all three of us were as angry as I was, we were going to do irreparable damage.
“Careful?” Ethan scoffed from the back seat.
Jesse nodded. “Dean, I’m talking to you. Not Ethan. This guy deserves to get his ass beat, but we can’t throw our lives away over it. You hear me?”
I heard him. I heard him clear as day. “Yes.”
“You going to be able to keep your shit together when we find her?”
“Maybe,” I said.
Jesse looked out his window and didn’t say anything while Ethan fidgeted with something in the back seat.
Then my phone buzzed. I passed it to Jesse. “Probably Sanderson with the coordinates.”
Jesse took the phone and answered it. “This is Jesse Thomas.”
I didn’t know what Sanderson said to Jesse, but he nodded along with the conversation and then asked Sanderson to text him the latitude and longitude so we had a precise location. He got off the phone. “He’ll send his location, but I think I already have an idea of where he took her.”
“Where?” Ethan and I asked at once.
Jesse looked out the windshield. “There are cabins back in the National Park. They’re a good two miles in, off the dirt road leading into the lake. Far enough away where no one would be around. And nobody goes there anymore.”
I stepped on the gas. “Sounds like the perfect place to go if you don’t want to be found.”
The phone buzzed again in Jesse’s hand. “I’m going to tell the police to meet us there.”
“Wait another five minutes,” I said.
“Why?” Ethan asked from the back.
“I want to get to him first.”
27
Ashley
I was so tired.
My entire body ached with a dull pulse that started at the base of my spine and worked outward through my limbs. It was the sort of hurt I was used to feeling when I used to play soccer as a kid and I would spend a weekend in tournaments playing game after game. My muscles would be so tight and stiff the morning after the three-day tournament, and all I would want to do was curl up with a good book and wait to recover.
This was like that, but the pain was from how tense I was. I tried to take deep breaths to calm myself down, like I had to do in a dentist’s chair, but it only worked for a couple of minutes before I tensed up again.
Nick was sitting on the hearth. His back was to the crackling fire, and his face was in shadow as he fidgeted with his car keys. Neither of us had said anything over the last fifteen minutes or so. It might have been longer or shorter. There was no way for me to be sure. There were no clocks or any way for me to measure time. All I knew was that it was still dark outside.
Nick got up and picked up the water bottle he’d let me drink from earlier. He brought it to me and took the cap off. I drank like I did before. He watched me swallow with a strange, unsettling fascination. Then he wiped my mouth again and went and got a granola bar. He brought it back to me and unwrapped it. He held it in front of my mouth, and I shook my head.
“Eat, Ashley. Let me take care of you.”
Take care of me? How could he possibly think he was taking care of me? “No thank you.”
“Eat!”
I flinched. He pressed the granola bar against my lips until I opened my mouth and took a bite. He nodded with satisfaction, and we continued this routine until the granola bar was gone. So much for my no food protest.
“Do you need anything else?” he asked after giving me more water.
“To go home.”
He returned to the hearth and sat in front of the fire. “I can’t let you go home. We have to work thr
ough this. That’s why I brought you here. You always said we could be better at talking.”
“This isn’t what I had in mind when I said that.”
“Me neither,” he said. And for a moment, a brief second, he was the old Nick. My Nick. The version of himself that was sincere and not insane.
“Then let me go.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. Please. I just want to go home. I just want everything to go back to normal.”
“So do I. Back to how it was. Will you come back to New York City with me? The apartment is the same as when you left it. Some of your stuff is still there. Your teapot. Your hair dryer. Your bobby pins are still everywhere. I can’t escape you, Ashley. I need you.”
“No.”
“But I love you, Ashley,” Nick said.
I looked up at him. He’d stopped playing with his keys. His hands were still between his thighs. I wished I could make out his features, but the lighting was so bad. His blonde hair was lit from the back by the fire, and he looked like some sort of angel. An evil angel.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” he asked.
What the hell was I supposed to say? That I loved him too? I wasn’t going to say those words out loud. No way. I hated him. I hated what he was doing to me and what he had done to me over the years we’d been together. He’d made me feel small, weak, and unworthy, and those negative feelings about myself only went away after returning to St. Simmons.
After returning to the Thomas brothers.
“Ashley.” His voice was hard now. Angry.
I swallowed. “There’s nothing I can say to that.”
“You love me too. I know you do. You always have. You just need to remember how it used to be and how good we were for each other. We still are.”
“No.”
“No? What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“We were never good together, Nick. If we were, you never would have cheated. I never would have looked the other way, even though I knew something was going on behind my back. I think we both just liked the idea of us being together and getting married and having kids. But it wouldn’t have worked. Clearly.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
I bit my bottom lip. Was there any sense in arguing with him? Was I just stoking the fire? Or was there a chance I could get him to see reason and realize that no matter what he did, I wasn’t going to submit to him and become the timid fiancée he wanted me to be?
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Ashley. You made everything better. I can’t live without you.”
“It’s not always about you, Nick.”
“This is about us.”
“No, it’s not. This is about you. Like everything else, this is about you. How can you not see that? I don’t want this. I don’t want you. And yet here you are, forcing me to—”
“I’m not forcing anything!” Nick got to his feet. The fire crackled behind him. I fought back the lump of terror in my throat. “I know what’s best for you. I’ve always known. You used to listen to me. Why don’t you listen to me anymore?”
That was a question better left unanswered.
“Answer me, Ashley.”
“No.”
“Answer me!” His voice shook the air around me.
I whimpered and shook my head. My bottom lip started to tremble, and I bit down on it to keep myself together. I couldn’t lose control. I would descend into a full-blown panic, and I’d be stuck to this damn chair, and that would only make things worse. I hated being confined.
Nick moved closer and put his hands on top of my wrists. Then he leaned over, his face inches from mine, and said, “Answer me. Why don’t you listen anymore?”
I met his eyes. If this was what he wanted, then so be it. If he wanted me to come clean and tell him everything, then he could have it his way. I knew he wouldn’t like what I had to say. It might make him even angrier. He might hurt me. But it seemed that he would hurt me anyway.
I took a deep breath. “Because you only wanted me to do what was best for you. Not what was best for me. Like teaching.”
“You’re good at teaching. You make decent money. It’s a better living than—”
“Painting? Art? The only thing I like to do that I stopped doing once we got together because you shit all over it? I let you control me our entire relationship, Nick. I became someone I never wanted to be with you. I hated myself when I was with you. I had no confidence. I had nothing to live for except you. And all you wanted to do was keep me under your boot.”
“That’s not true,” he growled.
“Yes it is! Look around, Nick! You’re still doing it! You’ve tied me to a fucking chair to keep me from getting away from you. That’s twisted. You’re twisted. You got off on controlling me and scaring me. You want me back because I let you walk all over me. All you’ve ever wanted was a lifelong power trip, and I handed it to you on a silver platter.”
“Enough!”
I clenched my jaw.
“You will not speak to me that way,” he said.
And then, like a total psychopath, I started laughing. I had no idea where it came from, but once I started, I couldn’t stop. It came out of me at first as a surprised snort, and then it blossomed into full-blown, chaotic laughter that had him leaning away from me in surprise.
I couldn’t stop. I bent over, wheezing for breath, trying to rein it back in as Nick took a step back. I sucked in ragged breaths and blew out through my mouth in an effort to calm down.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Nick asked.
“I cannot believe you just said that.” I straightened in my chair. The corners of my eyes itched with tears, and my ribs hurt from laughing. I knew how insane it was, and how dangerous it was. But all the adrenaline, the fear, and the fury were rising to the surface and chasing away all sense of self-preservation. My inner lioness was running the show now, and she was having none of his shit. “Did my disrespectful tone bother you?”
Nick was watching me like I was explosive material. “Yes. It bothered me.”
I laughed again but kept myself under control this time. “Do you not realize how completely fucking insane that is?”
His expression hardened.
For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t intimidated by him. “You kidnapped me and tied me to a chair. That’s some disrespectful shit right there, Nick. Why the hell would I treat you any differently? And why would you think this is the right move? You need help, Nick. Real medical help. Seriously.”
“If you don’t stop, I’m going to—”
“Going to what?” I yelled at him. I actually yelled. I leaned forward in the chair, straining at the zip ties that held me. The wood creaked in protest. “Are you going to hit me, Nick? Go for it. Do your worst. Because I don’t love you. I didn’t love you before you pulled this stunt, and I sure as hell won’t ever forgive you now. We are over. Done. I don’t belong to you.”
“You do right now.”
“It doesn’t count.”
“Sure, it does,” Nick snarled, dropping to a crouch in front of me and putting a hand on each of my knees. “I have you. Right here. Alone.”
I glared down at him. “Fuck you.”
“Where did all this courage come from, Ashley? I wish you would have had this kind of fire before. Then maybe things would have gone differently. Maybe I never would have had to fuck those other girls. You would have been enough.”
“Wow.” What an ass. “You’re delusional.”
“And you’re a spoiled bitch.”
“I wish I never met you.”
Several things happened all at once. First, Nick reached behind his back and pulled something black and metal from the waistband of his pants. I didn’t know what it was until he waved it in front of my face. A gun.
Now I started crying. Real fear gripped me.
Nick grabbed the front of my sweater. His lips peeled off his teeth as a growl left his throat
. His other hand curled into a fist, and I braced myself. He was going to strike me. I tried to pull away from him, but it was no use.
“I should have shown you who was in control way before now,” Nick hissed, tightening his grip on the front of my sweater. He put the gun back in his belt. “Do you understand who’s in charge now?”
And then the front door exploded open. I screamed. Nick jerked me closer to him out of reflex, and the zip ties tightened on my wrists.
I found myself looking upon the most wonderful sight I’d ever seen.
Dean Thomas filled the open doorway, and his dark eyes were fixed on Nick. The tendons in his forearms were strained, and when he spoke, each word sounded like it was painful for him to get out. “Let. Her. Go.”
Had Nick not just flashed a gun in front of me, I would have been relieved to see Dean. But he had shown me the gun. And now, I was burdened with an even more intense fear—fear that Dean was in more trouble than he might realize.
I had to warn him somehow.
28
Dean
Nick had the front of Ashley’s sweater in his fist.
Even though I only stood in the doorway for a split second, I took in everything. Ashley had been crying. Her eyes were puffy and pink, and her cheeks were flushed. Her hair was a bit of a mess. Her lips formed my name, and her voice came out of her weakly.
“Dean,” she whimpered.
My gaze slid slowly back to Nick. His mouth was open in surprise. His expression was slack. He hadn’t expected to be found here, especially not so quickly and especially not by me. “Take your hand off her.”
Nick released Ashley’s sweater. She leaned away from him as soon as she was free and tried to push herself back into the chair. She had nowhere to go, and he was still crouched in front of her and close enough to hurt her.
“Move away,” I said.
And then Jesse and Ethan were behind me. I moved into the cabin, and they came in behind me. We left the door open. This wasn’t going to take long.
Ashley let out a sob. I knew it for what it was: relief.
Jesse came to stand beside me. “You all right, Ash? You hurt?”
Her Independence Day Page 16