“Add them to the list,” Ebru snapped pointing at them as they started asking questions and checking her and the baby over.
“Louis Lyall Townsend,” Cole murmured drowsily as he stared down at his Satan and their spawn. “We spell it Louis, and pronounce it Lewis.”
We all understood the sentiment behind it. Ebru’s sister had died suddenly a couple of years ago from Sudden Adult Death Syndrome and her name had been Louise. Removing the e from the name gave it the same spelling as her name, but the pronunciation would be Lewis.
“You’re crying,” Sabine whispered through her own tears.
“Shut up,” I growled. “I’m not crying, you’re crying!” It was the weakest come back in the history of mankind, but I wasn’t crying. It was my contact lens in my eyes that had perfect twenty-twenty vision causing the watering.
"Wait, double check that it has balls and a dick," Cole shouted, saving me from the mocking that I was about to receive from Sabine. “One, two and there it is,” he crowed, fist pumping the air. “Mine got his junk you punk!” He yelled in Ren’s face. Dad just managed to grab onto the neck of Ren’s shirt to stop him beating our brother into the ground.
Helping dad, I got Ren outside and distracted him with a comparison of Maya’s screaming and insults versus Ebru’s. Ebru was definitely the winner.
“How do you think Sabine will do?” Coleman asked us.
Looking at each other and back at Coleman, I answered with pride. “They won’t even register. My wife is freaking awesome!”
I looked back over at where Ren had been standing, but couldn’t see him. Weird! There was suddenly a lot of movement and orders being shouted as Ebru and Louis were loaded into the back of the ambulance. Just as they were putting the ramp away, Cole came running past us with a bruise on his cheek followed by a limping Ren.
“I’ll follow in the car,” Cole panted out, before turning around and seeing our brother leaning against the driver’s door of it with an evil smirk on his face. Changing his mind, he got into the ambulance beside Ebru and threw his keys to Coleman. Never one to use his brain for anything, including his life, he leaned back out and yelled, “Don’t be a wacko just ‘cause yours got a taco!”
I took Ren down to the ground just as he reached the door of the ambulance as it pulled away.
“Did you hear that?” He yelled, trying to crawl after them with my body on his legs.
Wisely, I said not one word. Mine didn’t have a taco either!
The storm after the calm…
As with every moment in life when things were going great, a few short weeks later it all went to shit and my world exploded. This time, it wasn’t my family who was responsible. This time, if it hadn’t been for my family, I don’t know what I would have done.
Fifteen
SABINE
Brett had been called into the office to deal with some sort of crisis, again. There had been a couple of them recently and I was beginning to worry that he was exhausting himself.
Coleman had gone with him, so I was in the house on my own with three of Coleman’s guys outside. They were ones that I knew, but one of them, Ray, always made me feel uncomfortable. He always seemed to be around and would get very close to me. I knew that he was there for my protection, but I’m not sure he needed to be that close to me.
I was now thirty-five weeks pregnant and I really was totally over this whole pregnancy thing. I couldn’t see my feet, I couldn’t sit down without making a big production, I couldn’t balance, stairs were now my enemy because I couldn’t see where I was standing…it was a pain in the backside, literally because that was an issue too!
Ebru had called me asking if I wanted to come over and chill with her and I’d been so relieved that I could have cried, yet another pregnancy issue. She’d told me that Cole was with Brett and that she’d made some adjustments to his phone, so we were going to have some fun.
Putting on my flip flops because I couldn’t even wear proper shoes, I waddled out of the house. Not that many months ago, I’d been laughing at Tom for walking like this. Frigging karma!
The men followed behind me, with one of Coleman’s right-hand men, Cooper, walking at my side. He had some scars from a blast that I thought made him look rather distinguished. I could tell that he was embarrassed by them though, which was probably why I just opened my mouth and let my belly rumble.
“You know,” I ventured, “those scars make you look rather dapper.” The use of the British word would normally have been lost on him, but instead Cooper just glanced out of the corner of his eye at me and grunted. “I’m serious,” I insisted. “Personally, I think they make you look like one of the heroes on the front of a Harlequin novel.”
Stopping I turned to face him and put my hands on my hips, Jesus they’d grown, and stared at him waiting for him to acknowledge that he looked like a freaking romance model. He must have gotten tired of looking directly ahead of us, because he eventually turned back to look at me.
“If I say okay, will you continue walking and get out of the open,” he beckoned to the fields and trees around us, trying to distract me with the implication that I was in danger.
“Only if you mean it.”
Sighing, he ran his fingers through his hair and muttered, “Thank you.”
That was as good as I was going to get. Now to get to Ebru and see what she’d done to her husband. She was still looking for revenge for the pain she went through giving birth to Louis and normally I’d feel bad for the guy, but I’d witnessed it and she deserved it.
So, you changed his ringtones?” I asked Ebru slowly, making sure that I’d heard her right.
“Yup!” She nodded excitedly. “And, it’s his turn to go into meetings for Townsend Oil today.”
Since Brett had been working from home, the family had been taking it in turns to go to important meetings for the company so that Brett didn’t have to be there all of the time. Today was Cole’s day, that poor sod.
“How are you going to know his reaction?”
“Okay, you know Brett’s secretary?” Rolling my eyes at her, I nodded. Obviously, I knew the lovely woman who was in her fifties and who made it so that there were rarely any issues within the actual company itself. Sadly, she couldn’t control the outside of it too. “Well, she’s sitting in on the meetings to take notes and she’s going to FaceTime me. Look,” she turned her iPad screen toward me and I saw a table full of people in suits all nodding and listening to something that one of the men was saying. I recognized them all as employees of the company and figured that it was just the weekly meeting that was going ahead instead of one involving external businesses. Any messing around during one of those meetings might have cost the company a lot of money in lost business, but Ebru wasn’t stupid, she’d have known what this was.
“Sorry I’m late,” Colette burst through the door. “Did you start without me?”
“You’re just in time,” Ebru gave an evil grin and then picked up her phone and hit the screen. The sound of Spongebob singing the F.U.N. song filled the room and I watched as Cole looked around the room shaking his head.
“He thinks it’s someone else?” I asked incredulously. The noise was coming from him, how did he think it was someone else? “Wait, can he hear us?”
Shaking her head, Ebru pressed the red button to hang up her phone and nodded at Colette. “No, Susan muted us,” she explained as Colette fiddled with her screen.
The sound of Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street singing the Rubber Ducky song filled the room making the man who was still talking pause. Again, Cole looked around the room and shook his head. People were starting to stare at him and chuckle, but he was still none the wiser.
Then, Susan got up and walked out of the room quietly. The iPad was set up to point from next to the door toward the conference table, so we saw her silent laughter as she walked out.
“Wait for it…” Ebru giggled, then the Spice Girls’ Wannabe song filled the room. Ebru was laughing so
hard that she fell off her chair onto the floor while Colette and I watched the screen.
Cole did another judgmental look around the table, pausing when he saw that all eyes were on him. Sighing like it pained him to prove them wrong, he leaned down and pulled his phone out of the bag on the floor. Realizing that it was his phone playing the song, he started pressing the screen trying to make it stop. Susan must have hung up and called again though, because in the next second it started all over again.
“Why won’t you shut up?” He yelled at it, hitting the screen with his thumb.
“Why won’t it stop?” I asked Ebru. Surely by now he could have either answered the call or sent it to voicemail.
“I changed the thumb recognition and code on it,” she explained. “I also got one of Coleman’s guys to mess with the settings so that when those numbers call him, he can’t do anything.”
It was so evil that it was almost brilliant, until a thought hit me. “What if you have an emergency while he’s away?”
Looking over at Colette, she winced. “Uh oh!”
Little did we know, that it would be the one day when she needed to get in touch with him and that her genius payback would come back to bite her in the backside.
Three hours later…
I wasn’t sure if it was the bumping that had woken me up or the fact that I really needed to pee, but as I opened my eyes nothing looked familiar.
Trying to get up, I discovered that my hands were tied behind my back and that any tugging made my shoulders feel like they were being ripped out of the sockets.
“Ah, good,” a familiar voice said above me. “You’re awake.”
Rolling to my side so that I could see the owner of the voice a sudden fury hit me. How fucking dare he?
“You,” I hissed.
Fils de pute. Son of a bitch!
Brett
Cole’s phone started playing some fucking Spongebob song for the millionth time and it was really starting to piss me off.
“Will you answer your fucking phone!” I barked at him. I hated being away from Sabine and the drive to the landing strip was taking too long for my liking. I just wanted to get home. The closer we got to her being full term, the more anxious I became; and of course, she wouldn’t even consider moving into the hospital. I’d finally managed to get them to agree to me paying out of the ass for a private room for us, but nope she wasn’t having it.
“I can’t,” he cried, hitting the screen. “It’s not fucking working!”
After another ten minutes of the song, by which time I’d learned the words to it, we got to the strip. Boarding the plane, I pulled my phone out and growled when I saw the black screen. Of all of the days to forget to bring my charging case and for the damn battery to die on me.
Coleman’s phone started ringing at that moment, rubbing salt into the open wound that was my dead phone. Thankfully, we had sockets on the plane that I could plug it into and call her.
“Are you fucking serious?” Coleman yelled, and I turned around so fast I almost lost my balance. His eyes kept flicking to me as he spoke and with each word I pieced together what was wrong. Someone had taken my wife. “We’re on our way. Be ready to go!” He snapped before hanging up.
“What the fuck is going on?” The word fuck was being thrown around like confetti, but I didn’t give a shit.
“Someone took Sabine,” he grimly confirmed to me. “My team and your family are meeting us at the airport.”
Feeling a second of relief that there was a plan which meant that he must know where she was, I nodded until something occurred me.
“Why the airport?”
“Because the bastard who took her flew to London,” he explained. “The flight is logged to refuel at Gatwick and then travel onto a small airport in the south of France. At the moment, my men in London are creating a slight delay for the plane to allow us time to catch up with it.”
And this was why I had him as my head of security.
Buckling myself into the seat, I closed my eyes and thought of my happiest memories of Sabine to keep me calm. The three months that we’d been away from each other played out in my mind instead, and the overwhelming feeling of guilt at treating her that way hit me. There was also a feeling loss though, because I’d been cheated out of that time with her. I’d done my best to make that lost time up to her, but I was going to work even harder when we got her back. She might have been willing to move past it, but I hadn’t.
“Uh,” Cole interrupted my emotional battle. “Can anyone help me fix my phone?” He asked, just as the Spongebob song started playing again. Thankfully, the battery chose to die at that moment. “Oh, thank Christ,” he muttered, not plugging it in like I’d done with mine.
Almost as if I’d had the power to turn it on through thought - slightly melodramatic, but with what I was going through at that moment I felt I was entitled to it - my phone powered on and the binging of messages filled the plane.
Looking down at the screen, I saw one from Sabine sent four hours previously.
Wife of my life: Love you xxxxxxxx
It was so simple, but carried so much weight to it that I felt my throat closing up. Hitting the button to put the screen to sleep, I focused on what was ahead. Some might say I was too calm, but until you’re in that situation no one knows how they’d react if it happened to them. I knew one thing for sure though, I was getting my wife and son back.
Fifteen hours later (said in the Spongebob narrators voice) …
“Fuck,” Coleman growled as he walked back onto the plane. “He’s not here. His plane’s here, but there are no passengers in it.” He grabbed a handful of hair and stared out of the open door and across the tarmac of Gatwick Airport.
“How the hell did this happen?” I wanted to scream. We had made good time once we had boarded the bigger plane owned by the Company, but how had this happened? “She’s too far along in the pregnancy to fly. What about my son?”
“I don’t know, Brett, but we’re going to find them,” the look in Coleman’s eyes would have scared the shit out of a normal man, but I was no normal man. I was a Townsend whose wife and child were missing. “I spoke to one of the ground crew who said that the man who hired the plane had gotten off it about an hour ago, with a pregnant woman.” His face tightening as he added that.
“Someone tipped him off,” Maya muttered quietly. “Sorry,” she held a hand up and made a zipping motion over her mouth when we all looked in her direction.
“Hang on,” Coleman walked over to Maya and squatted. “What makes you say that?”
“Well, we know that he landed three hours before us because he didn’t have the same tail winds that we did, right?” We all nodded as she looked around us for confirmation. The tail winds had helped us catch up with him a bit faster. “And then, an hour before we landed he suddenly decides fuck this and gets off the plane when it was supposed to be continuing onto France? It makes sense that he was tipped off that we were coming and that we were landing faster than he expected.”
She was distracted from the issue by Crystal, who chose that moment to stretch and wake up. Picking her up and sitting her on her lap so that she was facing us, Crystal gave a slow yawn and then said what we were all thinking.
“Ffffffffff uck!”
At that moment, a member of Gatwick’s ground crew and a security agent walked through the open door of the plane. Their jaws dropped hearing the little cherubic looking baby girl saying the word ‘fuck’ in her cute little baby voice.
“Can we help you?” Coleman growled at them. As with most people who had never experienced him, they took a step back and looked at each other before proceeding.
“You now have clearance to disembark,” the security guy said, looking nervously at the door. What the hell? It’s not like there weren’t hundreds of back up for him if things went to shit. Giving us a quick glance, he got off the plane and stood at the bottom of the steps waiting for us to follow.
Clearly bei
ng the one with the balls, the ground crew member looked at Maya and said, “That’s bloody cool. How did you teach her to do that? I have a daughter who’s probably around the same age as yours and all she does is say normal words.”
Laughing, Maya stood up and turned to pick up the bag with Crystal’s diapers and shit in it. “Surround her with guys who don’t use any other words apart from that one and shit.”
“Shhhhhhhht,” Crystal repeated, suddenly finding the key to happiness in her tiny little feet and bringing them up around her ears. With what happened next, Ren will tell you she’s a genius, the rest of us figured it was a coincidence. Her face turned a dark red and she started straining while lifting her left foot into her mouth.
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