by Brook Wilder
He was awake now. Maybe he was pacing around the kitchen, maybe he dropped the coffee mug in surprise. But his voice was nothing but venom and it almost scared her. But she didn’t care. Even if this was a false alarm, she needed to see it through. She needed Chance to know.
“He’s gone now. I’m not even sure—I don’t know. But I saw his eyes Chance, his eyes. They were so real and then they were gone. He just slipped into the crowd and disappeared.”
“Come home,” Chance ordered. “Now. We’ll figure it out but you need to come home. We need to sort this out together where you’re safe.”
She didn’t disagree, and that invitation had been the advice she’d been looking for. She put down her shopping bag, ignored the fact that she had planned to buy several maternity clothes in her hands, and moved towards the exit.
“Stay on the phone with me until I get to the car,” she begged.
“I will.”
He ended up staying on the phone with her the whole way home.
Chapter 26
Chance had never been a fan of scary movies. Link had tried to get him in the theatres for several years when he was a teenager around Halloween. He said that if Chance could take on rival gangs and the horrors of the streets, he could very easily see some remake of a remake of a 1980s movie with obviously fake blood and some blonde chick running around with obnoxiously large breasts.
But it was even worse when it seemed his life was turning into a horror movie.
Hannah stayed on the phone with him the entire time she drove back. They talked aimlessly about what they’d have for dinner that night and plans for the weekend and anything to pretend that something incredibly horrifying hadn’t just happened to her at the store. He didn’t tell her that, while they were on the phone, he was readying the pistol he kept in the drawer next to his side of the bed and making sure his reserve ammo was somewhere he could reach on short notice. He didn’t want to scare her, but he also didn’t want to take any chances.
She got home and they locked the doors and shut the blinds and lived as shut-ins the rest of the day.
“I wanted to get you a gift,” she said when he asked why she’d gone out so early.
“A gift?”
She turned red and shrugged. “I just wanted to have something nice for you. You’ve been so good lately and we’ve been so—I just wanted to give you something too.”
He gave her a soft smile and came to kneel down in front of her, placing his hands on her belly and splaying out his palms. He felt the heat of her body and imagined that, in several months, he’d be doing this again to the feeling of a baby foot kicking him back. He smiled and held her gaze. She was blushing hard and couldn’t see him to hold his eye contact.
“You don’t need to get me anything,” he said. “This is my gift. I got you that ring because I wanted you to have the best you possibly could. It was me paying you back.”
She smiled at that. They looked at each other in the dim and the quiet of the darkened living room. The TV was off, the blinds were drawn, the hum of the appliances filled the air. Everything was still and it was the last moment of peace they had for a very long time thereafter. They savored it by holding each other on the couch and listening to the sounds of their heartbeats and breathing as they waited patiently for whatever was going to happen to happen.
But nothing came. There was no crash outside, no sound of shattering glass. There was nothing to indicate anyone was hovering nearby or waiting to pounce. They were alone in their lakeside home and alone in their living room. They were safe, though they certainly didn’t feel it. Nothing about that day felt safe or calm and Chance wanted nothing more than to take Hannah and run far, far away. But he wasn’t going to let Ben win so easily. This was his home, and his life, and his fiancée, and his child. He was going to defend them to the last breath and take Ben down with him if he had to.
It was the end of their honeymoon phase, that afternoon. It wasn’t because they finally got into their first fight or disagreed over dinner, but because a madman might be stalking them. It was because something or someone dangerous was waiting a little too close for comfort and they let the tension get to them. What ensued was going to be one of the most trying times Chance had ever endured and one of the darkest times.
Maybe if he had watched those horror movies with Link as a kid, he’d be able to avoid this now.
***
It started with the footprints. It had been several days since the mall incident and they hadn’t mentioned it since. They hadn’t even told the rest of the gang or Chance’s family. It didn’t seem important. They had a momentary time of fear and now it was over and they could move forward with their plans. But the first sign of trouble had come the night they decided to actually sit down and plan out the wedding.
“I don’t care about the date,” Chance yawned. They’d been staring at the calendar and possible venues for over an hour. “I just want to marry you. Hell, I’ll do it right now in the living room with a minister and a couple of randoms off the street as witnesses.”
“I’m flattered and that’s romantic,” Hannah said, kissing his temple. “But I’ve dreamed of my wedding since I was twelve and you’re not going to take the fairy tale dream away from me.”
“If you dreamed about it since you were twelve, don’t you have your own plans for it already set up?”
“I want to make plans with you. This is the first thing we’re doing together. It’s important.”
He had to give her that. Planning a wedding was like the training wheels of a marriage. You had to get through it. You learned all about compromise and partnership while you fought over place settings and colors. Of course, Chance couldn’t really bring himself to care that much about those things enough to argue with her. He tried though. For her sake he would try to care enough to fight with her about their wedding options.
It made her giggle, the way he overly pretended to care. But the giggles stopped when she went to deposit the pizza box in the trash outside and desperately called for Chance. He took off running and came to her side to find her perfectly fine but staring, deathly pale off into the yard.
“What is it?” he asked, looking around for whatever it was she was seeing.
She pointed. Then he saw it. There were footprints in the mud from the rain that had fallen earlier that day. They were large, the kind that fit a man’s boot. Chance, at first, wanted to believe they were his. But they hadn’t gone out all day and these were a little fresh to be from any time longer than a few hours ago. He felt a chill travel from the very base of his spin to the top where it exploded into pure paranoia at the base of his skull.
Someone had been near their home. And that wasn’t the end of it.
***
Chance didn’t know if things were actually escalating from there or he was just becoming more and more attuned to finding the dangerous things that were hiding around every corner of his house. The next strange occurrence was a few days later. They’d gone out together to window shop for tuxes for the groomsmen to wear. In this Chance did have a bit of an opinion. But their banter was cut short when they got home and found that something just wasn’t quite right.
The kitchen chair had been moved. Hannah always made a point to push them in before they left because she didn’t want to get in the habit of leaving them out in case the baby decided to take an adventurous climb. So when they came home to find one sitting in the middle of the kitchen, it seemed more than a little weird. And then the implications made Chance’s blood run cold.
They didn’t speak of it out loud. Neither one of them mentioned what they were really thinking. If they voiced their fears then it would become too real. It would be too much. So they stayed quiet about it, if a little on edge.
It happened again a few days later. This time it was the TV remote which seemed to have been hidden on the top of the entertainment center. It felt like something out of a haunted house movie but Chance knew it was so much more dangerou
s than all of that. They were being watched. And it was beginning to feel like they were being toyed with. Chance had a feeling he knew exactly who was behind it all and his blood began boil and boil more and more.
The biggest strike came when he noticed something odd poking out from between a stack of books on the shelf. It was small, round, and seemed to have something reflective on the front. He walked over, bent down, and felt himself nearly lose it when he realized what he was looking at.
It was a camera. It was small and it was discrete and that made it all the worse. Someone had planted a camera in his home. Someone was spying on him and Hannah. He tore through the rest of the book shelf, looking for more. He detached light fixtures and found a small, round disk that he recognized immediately as a microphone. Their house had been bugged.
Someone had come into their home and planted things to spy on them with. Someone had been watching them. For how long? He suddenly felt sick to his stomach. He wanted to bleach the whole house at the thought of some foreign person being in there without them knowing. Then a horrible thought crossed his mind. He made his way up to the nursery. He pushed the door open gently and closed it behind him, not want to alert Hannah.
Then he set to work tearing the place apart until he found a camera there too. Someone was going to spy on his child. That meant whoever did this knew Hannah was pregnant. This was, possibly, the worst thing that could have happened.
Ben knew Hannah was pregnant, he knew where they lived, and he’d been in their house. And he’d known for a while now. Chance was beginning to feel himself slowly lose control over the situation as sweat broke out on the crown of his head. His family was in danger.
Chapter 27
In hindsight, he could have handled things a lot better than he did but he also didn’t really blame himself for the way he acted and he knew, deep down, Hannah probably didn’t either, though at the time it seemed like she wanted nothing more than to leave him never look back.
After he found the cameras, he called her and told her to come home. She said she was in the middle of class and couldn’t leave, she’d barely been able to take his call in the hallways without the professor glaring at her. He told her he didn’t care, she needed to come home now. Though, to be fair, he wasn’t sure that home was all that much safer for her, all things considered. After all, there were cameras and microphones planted around the house. It’s possible she was safer in an environment surrounded by other people, witnesses.
But no. She was safest with him. That much was entirely clear. She needed to be by his side where he could see her, keep an eye on her. He could keep her and their baby safe so long as he could see them both. It was the only way he could maintain control over all of this. He needed to see it, to touch it, to be able to know she was within earshot constantly.
As he paced around the house, waiting for her to get him, he knew he was going more than a little bit insane. Part of him wanted to call her and take it back, tell her that she could go about her day, that he regretted the paranoia and he was sorry. But no. They’d come this far. Besides, she was already mad at him. Taking it all back and telling her that he got over his momentary bout of fear was not going to make her any happier. So he just paced around and waited for her to get home.
“I’m here,” she said, dropping her bag in the living room when she arrived home. “Just like you wanted.”
“I know, I’m sorry,” he said. “Things are just a little crazy right now. I promise I’ll be normal tomorrow, I just didn’t get a lot of sleep, that’s all.”
She sighed. She was agitated. He couldn’t blame her. She was pregnant and stressed and he wasn’t making it easy on her. But she let her glare go, her brows softened and the creases there disappeared as her face turned into nothing more than a tired look. She nodded and bit her lip and said it was okay, that she understood, that they’d get through it. He didn’t think he deserved her at all. In fact he knew he didn’t. But that wasn’t going to stop him from trying to protect her and their child at all costs.
***
After he found another pair of footprints in the woods leading to their boathouse, he called Hannah again. This was days later. He’d calmed down a bit and had gotten himself down to only a few texts a day and one call in the morning. But he broke that standard when he saw the footprints. He called her home once again and this time she was not nearly as forgiving or as understanding as before. Nor was she going to back down for his puppy pleas about trying to protect her.
“You need to get off my back, Chance,” she said sharply. “That’s two classes you’ve made me miss.”
“Well maybe you should just take the rest of the semester off,” he said and watched her face contort, knowing he immediately said the wrong thing.
“I just got back into school after narrowly avoiding being fucking kidnapped and you want me to quit? I just caught up on all my work and got my professors to allow me to reenroll and you want me to just drop out again?” she said, carefully, dangerously. He was going to hold his ground. He wasn’t going to let her frighten him, no matter how much she truly did frighten him.
“Look,” he said, standing up and putting his hands over top of hers where she immediately pulled them away. “I just want you to realize the gravity of this—”
“I do,” she spat. “I’m the one who got tossed around between bikers trying to keep my brother from being beat to death for a couple of thousand dollars. I’m the one the Black Death was after. I understand completely what’s going on here but what I don’t understand is why I’m now the one who, once again, has to make sacrifices. What about you, Chance? Why don’t we put you under house arrest and see how you like it?”
He felt his blood begin to boil. She had a way of making him like that, making him agitated and angry and all sorts of frustrated. He was trying to protect her, trying to help her and she was throwing it all back in his face like he was the monster. He wasn’t the one who bugged their apartment or stalked her to the store. He wasn’t the one who had tried to take her on the back of his bike and sell her off to some prostitution slave ring against her will. He’d saved her before, but now that didn’t seem to matter at all as she started with venom back at him. Maybe it was the hormones from the pregnancy making her act crazy or maybe she was just that ungrateful for all he was trying to do. Either way, he wasn’t going to deal with it for any longer.
“Just don’t leave the house,” he ordered and turned to walk out the front door.
“Oh, but you can?” she asked, yelling after him. It was a good thing they didn’t really have any neighbors around here or someone might have called in some kind of domestic incident. Instead he got on his bike, lighting up the forest around them with the sounds of the motor. He kicked it into gear and peeled off down the street, not caring if Hannah was yelling at him on his way out or if it was just the sounds of the bike.
Chapter 28
“When it rains, it pours,” his mother told him once. “I didn’t come up with that but I’ll be damned if I don’t know that one better than anyone after all the shit I’ve been through.”
Chance thought about that a lot when things weren’t quite going the way he hoped in life, which was often. When he was younger it was issues with girls or with his mother scolding him for staying out too late or even problems with the gang. Even the most monumental of feuds in the groups seemed to pale in comparison to Chance going on a three day bender.
He ended up at some dive bar out of town. He didn’t want to run into anyone he knew. In hindsight he realized it wasn’t exactly smart to go so far away when he thought someone was stalking his family but all he could see was red. And all he could hear was the blood pumping in his own ears and making him go insane. He wanted to punch something or crash his bike into the lake or smash his head against a wall. He had all sorts of self-destructive fantasies when he got angry. But, more than anything, they manifested themselves with him drinking pint after pint of beer until he bartender took his keys
away from him and he was forced to rent a motel room. Hannah would kill him for dropping so much money on alcohol and accommodations to make up for being so drunk. But she didn’t have ties to his bank account yet and he was a grown man. He could do what he wanted when he wanted and right now he just wanted to drink until he forgot everything and then sleep until it was all over.
He repeated this process several days in a row before his card was finally declined for another motel room night and he was forced to return back to his home, hoping he had enough gas in the tank to get him there since he was, regrettably, out of money. He drove down the road and felt like he did back when he was a teenager and performing the famous walks of shame from some girl’s apartment back to his own the following morning. Except this time he was a grown man getting ready to grovel at the feet of his fiancée for overreacting and blowing up in her face over things she couldn’t control and then running off and leaving her to deal with the pieces.
He was agitated, at first, that she hadn’t called but he also realized these things were a two way street and she was likely going to be waiting for him to call and fix things since, whether he liked it or not, he was certainly the one who was in the wrong in this situation. So he journeyed home, far humbler than before, and pulled into the driveway with a roaring headache.