Freedom_A Captivating and consuming contemporary romance

by J Grayland

  Looking at the time on my phone it read 9.15pm. Breathing out a sigh, I placed the chicken that I had roasted earlier into the fridge next to the salad and resigned myself to the couch. I sent him a quick text to see if everything was all right, this was late for him, I mean it’s not as though he has to drive a long way to get home, right? He usually texts me, even if he’s going to be a few minutes late. Minutes pass and still no reply. This is not like him at all. Tapping on his name to call him on my phone, it rings once but goes straight to voicemail. I look for Paxton’s name on my phone but just as I am about to press it, the elevator pings and the doors open. Standing, I open my mouth to speak but stop as I look at Nate’s thunderous face. Its full of fury and rage and his steel eyes pierce into me like knives. Storming over he stands rigidly on the other side of the table and throws a large manila folder onto the table, followed by several small memory sticks. I look down at where the scattered papers fan over the table and gasp, placing my hand over my mouth to try and hold it back. “I think we need to talk Casey….or is it Catherine?” he growls. Looking from the papers on the table up to his face, his head tilted to one side, eyebrow raised, all I can do is collapse back into the soft leather of the couch and let the shock waves ripple through my body as I feel all the blood drain from my face.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Nate

  Earlier……

  Looking down at my watch I see that its almost five pm and I start to save the files that I have been working on for most of the day and close down the computer. Paxton had arrived back at work this morning looking like the cat that ate the cream. I was under the impression it was the new mother that glows, but it seems my little brother has caught the new father glow as well and it didn’t take him long to get back into the thick of things. In fact, I think it may have taken him a whole fifteen minutes in his office before I had a new contract in front of me to peruse, and one glance at it told me that this was going to be a long day. However, I also have no intention of spending any more time behind this desk when I have my beautiful woman waiting for me just a few floors above.

  Standing to leave, I’m stopped by a knock at the door. Looking up I see Paxton entering with a large file in his hands. “Paxton?” He stands in front of me and in his eyes I see a flash of apologetic regret. “What is it? Is it Lynda, Emily?” He lowers his eyes to the ground and slowly shakes his head and his behavior is worrying and his silence is angering. “What the fuck is going on?” I almost yell in frustration, and finally, he speaks.

  “I got those background files today.”

  “Okay...” I let out slowly with curiosity. I’m not entirely sure what the hell he’s talking about but I encourage him to keep going.

  “Casey’s background files.” He says.

  “Okay,” I repeat.

  “And…Nate I….” he trails off shaking his head again, then he hands me the file he’s holding and reaches into his pocket and pulls out what looks like several small memory sticks. “You need to watch these here in the office, in private, ok?”

  So many things are running through my mind right now, but the look on Paxton’s face is telling me that whatever I am about to see is not good. “I’ll be in my office when you need me.” He pats me on my shoulder and walks out. Looking down I look at the memory sticks in my hand and take a seat back in front of the computer, flicking it back on and slipping the stick marked with a number one on it into the dock at the side and pressing play.

  It looks like a news story. Looking in the bottom corner I see its dated the 9th of September 2004, with the headline story that reads “ Kidnap Victim Found After 3 years In Captivity.” Then on the screen flashes a picture of a young blonde headed girl, and I pause the video on her. Narrowing my eyes, I zero in on her face…those eyes, and it hits me like a baseball bat. This young girl is Casey, but the name under the photo reads Catherine Taylor. A male newsreaders accented voice comes over a flash of different photos and movie clips of an old house, a car, a middle-aged well- dressed couple, photo snaps of a small blonde haired, blue eyed girl on the beach, riding a bike. Smiling, she looks adorably happy. Then a clip of a guy, being led away from the house by a cop, his hands cuffed behind him, his head shaven and looking down at the ground until he reaches the police van then he briefly looks up at the camera with a sickening grin that makes me feel uneasy, before he is pushed inside and the door slams behind him. With my eyes so busy on the pictures that are now inundating my screen, the voice of the newsreader seems to have blurred away into my office and I have to restart the whole thing, this time concentrating on what is being said.

  “In breaking news today, teenage kidnap victim Catherine Taylor has been found alive early this morning. Catherine, the only daughter of successful power lawyers Corrine and David Taylor, went missing 3 years ago at the age of 14. Catherine’s parents received a ransom note 2 days after the teenager disappeared from her home. Corrine and David Taylor publicly rejected paying any money for the safe return of their daughter, as they feared she was already dead. Police continued their search and investigations, which finally led them to suspect 25-year-old Max Sullivan, a meat worker, who one night had bragged to a bunch of friends that he had his own slave at home. The barman, who had overheard the conversation, called police on a gut feeling about the young man, and it paid off, leading police to a small farmhouse where Sullivan lived alone. When police raided the home, Catherine Taylor was found chained to a mattress in the basement. Catherine Taylor was taken to the local hospital in what police called an appalling, emaciated condition.”

  Standing up, I headed for my bar and poured myself three fingers of Jack into a tumbler and threw it back, before I poured another one. My stomach was churning and rolling with bile, and I needed something to help me get a grip and enough courage to go back to the computer and continue…

  I spent hours looking through the file in front of me and watching countless news clips, photos, statements and files from the trial of Max Sullivan until I had pieced it all together. Catherine was the only child of older parents who were both lawyers. It seemed that Catherine came along later in life for Corrine and David Taylor and I got the idea she was an unplanned distraction for the power couple. Late one afternoon, 14-year-old Catherine went down to the corner store to get some milk, when she was grabbed off the street and bundled into a car by Max Sullivan. Sullivan, who had seen the Taylors one day in the local news being interviewed outside their large and expensive- looking house, noticed that it was close to where he worked at the local abattoir so he decided to start watching the house and he noticed that Catherine was mostly there by herself. The day she had gone to the corner store, he decided that Catherine was going to earn him some serious money.

  Grabbing Catherine and shoving her into the back seat of his car, he knocked her out quickly with a cloth saturated with chloroform, threw a blanket over her and drove her out to his farmhouse, where he had her gagged, hands tied behind her back and chained to the wall by her ankles. He stripped her of all her clothes and there she sat on an old mattress on the floor. He had intended to send the Taylors a ransom note which included the shirt she had been wearing that day, demanding payment for the return of their daughter. Apparently, his dumbass plan was to get them to drop off the money somewhere for him to pick it up, and he was just going to dump Catherine off on the side of the road somewhere. However, he didn’t expect the Taylors to refuse to pay any money for their daughter's return.

  In court the dirty looking, skinny youth told the judge that he had no idea what to do, so he thought he might as well get something out of the mess he had created, so he raped her repeatedly, beat her, and performed all other forms of depraved sexual fantasies out on this small 14-year-old girl, for three fucking years. When the judge asked Sullivan what he intended to do with Catherine, he said that after a while he was getting bored, so he decided to stop feeding her what little amount he was, apparently, he wanted to see how long a human could last without any foo
d or water. Like she was some kind of experiment, he wanted to study her as she slowly deteriorated. He wanted to watch her as she slowly died. Picking up a handful of the police evidence photos they showed an emaciated, small, filthy child. Other photos showed different snapshots of bruises, cuts and weeping sores, over almost every inch of her body.

  Throwing the pictures onto my desk, I poured myself another drink and knocked it back so fast it hardly had time to touch my tongue. I needed something right now to burn this nauseated feeling that was in my stomach. I needed the world to stop spinning right now and give me time to process this. I slammed my fist down onto the desk.

  In all the godforsaken places I had been during my years in the military, and all the shit I had seen, there is nothing that could have ever prepared me for what my eyes had just been subjected to. Sitting back down in front of the computer, I plugged in the last memory stick. This news coverage was dated a year later. Max Sullivan had been sentenced to 20 years imprisonment and once again Catherine Taylor suffered another blow to her life when both of her parents were killed in a head-on car accident while driving home one night. Typing Catherine’s name into my computer, I looked for anything recent on her, but there was nothing that I hadn’t already seen. She just disappeared off the face of the earth. Did I blame her? Shit no. So now I understand why the secrecy. I’m guessing her friend Flynn had everything sealed and hidden and provided her with a new identity…. a new life.

  I pushed the computer with fury and it slid off the desk and hit the floor with a loud crash. Standing and walking to the large floor to ceiling windows, I leaned my forehead against the cool glass and stared down into the city lights. I have no words, my mind is reeling with images that I cannot comprehend. I can feel my blood pumping through my veins like lava, filled with a violent anger and rage. I keep trying to swallow back the bile that I can taste in my mouth. All I can see is that fucker Max Sullivan’s pissy little face, and I want his blood. I want to wrap my hands around his throat and slowly squeeze every bit of life out of him and watch as he slowly dies. The thought of it makes my hands clench into fists so tight I feel like my skin is going to split.

  My door opens and Paxton slowly walks in where he finds me now pacing back and forth in front of the windows. Looking up I see the look on his face. He is silently judging where I am right now and, honestly, I have no fucking idea. Paxton shoves his hands into his pockets and hesitantly speaks. “Nate.” I hold up a hand to stop him from asking anything else. Continuing to pace, and running both hands through my hair, I hear him let out a large sigh, exasperated. “Nate, we need to talk about this, before you wear a hole in the floor.” Stopping and turning to face my brother.

  “Did you watch that?” I asked him pointing to everything that was splayed out on my desk. He took a moment before he answered me.

  “Yes, I did.” Returning to the bar, I grab the bottle of Jack and as I am just about to fill my glass tumbler up again, Paxton places a hand over the glass.“That’s not going to help Nate.”

  Looking at him through narrowed eyes, I say, “Oh believe me, Paxton, it fucking helps.”

  “How? This is something you need to talk about with Casey. All the alcohol is doing is masquerading everything.”

  “Good, I want it to, I want it to numb my brain so fucking bad that I can’t think anymore,” I spit out.

  “No Nate because when the blur lifts from the booze you’re still going to have to face it, that’s if you want to,” Hearing the low tone in his voice, I lift my head, looking at him sharply.

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I yell into his face, and he takes a step back.

  “Calm down, I just mean you do have options here.”

  “Options? You mean like just going to her and saying something like oh, sorry Casey you’re just too fucked up for me to have in my life, so I’ll just crap all over you like everyone else has done through your whole life, and send you packing?”.

  Paxton’s silence pisses me off even more and the next minute I have the front of his shirt in both fists, pulling him up so his face is inches from mine. “Is that what you would have done to Lynda if the tables were turned?” I growl, looking into his eyes, and I pinpoint the moment he gets how much I feel for this woman. His body now slack, eyes looking down at the floor, he slowly shakes his head.

  “No.” Releasing my grip on his shirt, and walking over to my chair, I sink into it. “I’m sorry Nate, I adore Casey, you know that. I guess I’m just trying to protect you.”

  “It’s not me that needs protecting Paxton, it’s her, and that’s what I need to get my head around and it feels like shit.”

  “Nate, you can’t blame yourself for something that happened years before you even knew her,”Paxton said.

  “Yeah I know that, but just the thought of someone hurting her, makes me want blood Paxton and the thing that hurts the most is she didn’t trust me enough to tell me.”

  “Look I know what you saw on those news stories is gut-wrenching, I get that, but does it really change what she means to you?”

  “Fuck no, it changes nothing in her, in fact, I respect and admire her even more if that’s possible, it’s just…. We’re so connected, not just in here,” I point to the left side of my chest then to my temple, “But in here and I’m finding it hard not to be able to take her pain, her anguish, her worries. She consumes me Paxton, all of me, and the way all this information is spinning around in my skull I’m worried that I won’t be able to compartmentalize it logically so that those images won’t be flashing across my mind every time I look at her or touch her. Do you understand what I’m trying to say here?” Paxton just nods his head at me. “You need to talk to her Nate.” Rubbing a hand down my face I relinquish and agree with a nod of my own.

  Gathering the file on my desk, I shoved the papers back into it and shoved the memory sticks into my pocket and headed for the elevator, trying to take some deep breaths on the ride up, trying to calm myself before I faced her. That ball of anger was sitting low in my stomach and the burn from it was rapidly rising again. Looking at the lights of the rising floor numbers, I briefly contemplated pressing the emergency stop button and just staying in this small space until I contained my feelings, but it would be fruitless, I needed to see her right now.

  When the doors slid open she was sitting with her legs curled under her on the couch, with her phone gripped against her chest. I saw in her face the look of relief as she saw me. She had been worried, and now, standing in front of her and being the irrational fucking mess I had been in my office, burst through as I threw the file onto the coffee table in front of her, followed by the memory sticks from my pocket. Papers and pictures spilled out in front of her and I was struck with a clenching pain deep in my chest as I see the look of shock and pain in her beautiful blue eyes, as she looks down at them.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Casey

  Waves of shock pulsated through every inch of my body as I looked down at all the papers and photos that now lay fanned out on the table in front of me. Pulling myself closer to the edge of the couch, I reached out my hand hesitantly and slowly moved them around. Seeing all the broken, revolting pieces of my life like this broke something inside of me. Hope, my hope had just fallen onto the table along with all these white pieces of paper. Looking from the table up into Nate’s eyes, I saw a fusion of emotions- anger, sadness, betrayal. He sat on the couch opposite me, elbows leaning on his knees as his hands scraped through his messy black hair. He inhaled a deep breath before he said, “Why?” Looking back down at the coffee table, I bit into my bottom lip and slowly shook my head. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Looking back up into his face, I opened my mouth to speak but there were no words and I needed to find some. Swallowing hard and looking straight into his eyes, I tell him the truth.

  “I was going to, I just needed the right time,” I said hesitantly.

  “The right time?” I saw the questioning look on his face.

 
; “Yes, I’ve wanted to tell you so many times I just…couldn’t find the words.” He let out a slow breath. “I wish it would have come from you Casey, rather than like this,” he said motioning to the mess of papers on the table.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper and he quickly stands and starts to pace in front of the couch.

  “That’s the last thing I want you to be Casey. You have nothing to be sorry for.”

  “But you’re angry.”

  “Yes I’m angry, I’m fucking pissed but not at you, I’m angry with me.” He emphasized the last word by smacking his hand hard against his chest.

  Looking at him now confused I ask “What? Why would you be angry at yourself? You haven’t done anything. This is all on me. I’m the one who carries all this shit around with me. I’m the one who should have been truthful from the beginning and let you see exactly what you were getting into. I tried so hard to keep you locked out, but you kept chipping away until it was too late to turn back for me.” Now I am standing up too and facing him head-on. “I’m sorry that I didn’t talk to you, it was just too hard to go back there.” Nate pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and looked down at the floor. With his shoulders relaxed he looked a little calmer now.