Let Me Go (Owned Book 2)

by Gebhard, Mary Catherine

  “Eli?”

  There was a slight pause, as if adjusting, and then the voice sounded much closer. “Grace?”

  “Eli…” I sighed his name into the phone. I shouldn’t have been calling him, but I didn’t know better. My heart called out to him. My pain sang for him.

  There was crime scene tape blocking the entrance to Vera’s room, but I’d ducked underneath and sat myself squarely in the center of her bed. Blood and mess surrounded me, but so did her scent. It was almost like she was right there with me.

  “Gracie, what’s wrong?”

  “Everything,” I answered truthfully.

  Eli sighed. “You need to be a bit more specific.”

  “You’re not here,” I whispered. I climbed underneath Vera’s sheets. They were colorful and bright, like Vera, with different patterns that looked like suns and flowers. Oranges, reds, yellows, and pinks blanketed me in warmth as I snuggled the phone.

  “I can be there in an instant.” Eli’s voice sounded strained, even through the smothered phone connection.

  “You can?” I said, my voice teasing. “You can teleport now?”

  “For you, anything, Grace. Always.” Eli’s voice had taken on a somber, almost reverent nature. It made my insides reach for him. My mouth opened, silent words calling out to him. Once again we were locked in tacit tension, our breaths keeping us tethered. Just as I was about to break it, I heard the front door unlock. My heart jumped out of my chest.

  “Who’s there?” I called out, putting my hand over the phone. I kept myself nestled under Vera’s blankets. They were my shield. My fluffy armor.

  “Gracie?” Eli asked through the phone. “Gracie, what’s going on?”

  “It’s Chad,” Chad called back.

  “I have to go,” I said into the phone.

  “Grace, wait, don’t go.”

  “Eli…” His voice threatened to pull me back. I felt my stomach flip for him and my thighs tighten just at his low, slow breathing.

  “Stay, Grace,” Eli demanded. “Talk to me. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  I was thinking of him. I was imagining Eli in bed with me, his strong arms wrapped around me. I was smelling his scent. I was hearing the sweet things he said close to my heart, his lips trailing down my ear. It had been so long, but my body would always be Eli’s.

  “I can’t.” I heard Chad getting something out of the fridge. If the police hadn’t contacted him yet, then I needed to tell him what was going on.

  “I’ll make it worth your while…” Eli murmured. I imagined his lips whispering that against my ear and shivered despite the sheets covering me. “Do you know what you do to me?”

  “Probably not half of what you do to me,” I said, hanging up.

  The police had looked into Chad, full name Charles Whitmore, and he was nothing more than a college student scamming the student housing system. He’d used Vera and I to get money off of his free housing. The school put him on probation and I got kicked out.

  I was homeless.

  The police assured me they were following every possible lead, but what leads were there? It was like a ghost had come in and taken her. Who would want to hurt Vera? She was like the sun itself. You don’t hurt the sun. You hurt the sun and everyone dies.

  Sitting in the coffee shop where I worked, I couldn’t help but remember where it had all begun. I was at a coffee shop just like this one when I met Vera. What would have happened if she hadn’t come into my life? I probably would have gone home with my tail between my legs, but Vera had come bursting into my life like a fireball and had lit up everything.

  I couldn’t believe she was gone. It was an impossible thought.

  I took a sip of my coffee, contemplating my next move. Thanks to my employee discount, this time I was able to afford a coffee while I thought about my homelessness. Months ago I’d sat on a similar chair wondering what was to become of me. Then Vera, like a guardian angel, had shown up.

  Now Vera was God only knows where with Satan only knows who. Eli had returned. My brother and I were still a couple Christmases short of family. And I was homeless.

  A lot had changed and yet nothing had changed.

  I took a sip of the coffee, the bitter taste finding camaraderie with my soul.

  There were only a few numbers programmed into my phone: Vera, Work, Emergency, Lennox, and Eli. Eli had made it abundantly clear where he stood. A part of me—no strike that, all of my being wanted to call Eli. It felt like I was tying up my soul with chains by not calling Eli.

  I knew he would take me in, but I also knew how it would end. Eli and I had so much history it would take a battalion of historians to navigate it. There was a graveyard miles long between us, bodies piled up that we hadn’t even begun to bury.

  Was it possible to bypass that stuff and move forward?

  “I’m so glad you called me! You’ll stay with us until you get back on your feet!” Lennox grabbed the bag off my shoulder. Even after being in Santa Barbara for a few months, I only had enough stuff for one backpack. I watched as she slung my entire life over her shoulder, ushering me into her and Vic’s apartment.

  “If it’s too much…” I trailed off, still feeling uncertain about the arrangement. I didn’t have much of a choice, though. After sipping the rest of my coffee, making sure to go slow so I didn’t have to make my decision, Marci had come out and made it for me.

  “You’re taking the month off,” she’d said to me.

  “The month?” I gulped, nearly choking on the bit of coffee still in my throat. “I don’t need a month. Really, I’m fine!” Not to mention I needed the money. A month off work was going to sink me.

  Marci sat down opposite me, her eyes barely visible beneath the heaps of charcoal she put on. “Look, take the month off and if you want to come back, we can talk about it.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I felt like crying.

  “You’ve clearly got some stuff you need to work out, Grace. Don’t look at this as punishment. I like you. I want you to come back, if you want to come back.” She patted my hand and stood up.

  I stared into the empty cup. Now I was homeless and without a job. It was at that moment I almost called Eli. I wanted his comfort so badly that I nearly gave in. I had the number dialed and was about to press the green call button, but I stopped. I switched and called Lennox instead.

  “So we just added this room. This used to be part of the living room, but now it’s a spare bedroom. We still only have the one bathroom, though, but it beats sleeping on the couch. Trust me.”

  I nodded, too overwhelmed to speak. I was very grateful for her hospitality, but the new room was the final straw on my hypothetical camel’s back. The bed was different than one I’d been sleeping on, firmer. The comforter was wine colored, whereas I’d been sleeping with a pale blue quilt. The differences were very small, but to me they seemed so huge. I put my head in my hands, feeling completely overwhelmed.

  “What’s wrong?” Lennox asked. “Well, okay, that’s a stupid question. I know what’s wrong, but is there anything I can do to help?” I shook my head, still cradling it in my hands.

  “No,” I said, voice muffled through my palms. “I just feel so helpless.” Slowly I removed my hands from my face and looked up at Lennox. Leaning against the doorframe, she eyed me with an emotion I couldn’t discern.

  “I think I know who can help.”

  It was my turn to eye her. “Who?”

  “Vic.”

  I made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a guffaw. “Vic?” What was he going to do, brood Vera out of her kidnapping? Lennox entered the room and took a seat next to me on the bed. I felt the bed sink in lightly with her weight and I listened to her breathing. We didn’t say anything for a few moments. Finally she spoke.

  “Hear me out. There’s a lot you don’t know about your brother.” I shot Lennox a look. What a massive understatement. Just because Vic and I weren’t braiding each other’s hair (his was long enough to d
o that) didn’t mean he could save Vera.

  “Look,” Lennox continued. “Vic was in the military and now he works for some scary dudes. There’s a lot of shit that goes with that…” Lennox stopped talking and I looked at her to see what happened. Her gaze was at the wall but it was obvious she was thinking of something else. She shook her head and continued. “There’s some good that comes out of it, though. Like when your best friend gets taken he can help find her.”

  “Maybe,” I muttered, not entirely convinced.

  “Let me talk to him.” Lennox placed her hand on mine. “What’s her name?”

  “Vera,” I said numbly. Even saying her name hurt.

  “What’s her last name?”

  “I…” It was my turn to stare off. I didn’t know Vera’s last name. What kind of friend was I that in the months I’d lived with her I never got her last name? It just hadn’t seemed important. Vera was Vera. “I don’t know.”

  Lennox hummed, apparently thinking. “Do you have a picture of her?” I was about to say no, feeling even more like the worst friend in the world, when I remembered.

  “Yes!” I scrambled for my phone. When I’d gotten my cell phone, Vera had made us take a “selfie”. She said it was a rite of passage. To date, it was the only picture on my phone that wasn’t of a sunset or the ocean. I pulled it out and showed Lennox. Vera and I were smiling, the aqua wall in my old bedroom our backdrop. Sorrow tugged on my chest as I looked at Vera’s smiling face, frozen in the phone.

  “This could work.” Lennox reached for my phone. “Do you mind? I’m going to send it to Vic.” I shook my head, handing her the phone. Lennox typed out Vic’s number and handed the phone back to me. In less than a second her own phone was buzzing.

  “It’s Vic,” she said, glancing at her screen. “He says he’s going to look into it.”

  The woman Vic had pulled up on the computer looked different than Vera. She had blonde hair, whereas Vera had black hair. The photo was poor quality, too, zoomed in so much that the woman was almost blurry. She wasn’t smiling and her eyes were sad. There was no denying it, though; it was Vera.

  “Is this your friend?” Vic asked, spinning around in his chair to look at me.

  “Yes,” I replied. “That’s Vera, only her hair is a different color.”

  “This is Vera Araya,” Vic said, closing the picture and turning off the computer. “It’s an older photo, probably about three years. It’s all I could find. However, now that I have your confirmation that it’s her, I should be able to get more information.”

  I folded my arms, regarding Vic. About an hour after Lennox had texted Vic the picture, he’d shown up. Lennox had kissed him on the cheek and gone upstairs to take a nap. I’d nearly begged her to stay, feeling uncomfortable with the prospect of being alone with my brother. Instead, I kept my mouth shut, watching Lennox slink away. Soon after, Vic asked me to follow him upstairs. Reluctantly I agreed.

  We went to a room that I hadn’t known existed. The door was hidden in the wall of the hallway, invisible to the naked eye. When I walked inside I was immediately taken aback by how high-tech everything looked. Wall-to-wall computers, monitors, and wires blanketed the room. My first question had been if Lennox knew the room existed.

  Vic shot me a look. “Of course she does.” My next question would have been what in the world the room was for, but Vic quickly cut me off. He pulled up the picture of Vera and then all I could do was focus on her.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked after he shut down the computer. I hugged myself, feeling cold in the dark room lit only by blue computer screens. Vic didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up and ushered me out of the small, secret room.

  “I’m going to find her,” Vic replied. I opened my mouth to ask how he could do that, but he was already shutting me out. I had been so keen to leave the room, but now that he was closing me out, I wanted nothing more than to stay. How was he going to find her? I wanted answers. As Vic closed the door, locking me out, it was almost as if I had never been there.

  I walked down the stairs and into my new room, recalling recent events. I wondered if I had imagined it all. I was a far cry from the girl who’d hitchhiked her way from Georgia. First Vera—Vera Araya—was taken, kidnapped in her own room. A room in an apartment that we’d shared. Then, Lennox told me my brother could help, a brother whose skills I’d previously thought were limited to brooding and glaring. Lastly, my brother showed me his secret lair, completely equipped with everything the modern day spy needs.

  That still wasn’t the craziest part. The craziest part was that I was starting to accept it all. Sighing, I fell back on my new bed and reached an arm out for my phone. I dialed before I could talk myself out of it. Eli picked up on the second ring.

  “I just wanted you to know that I’m not at the apartment any more,” I said before Eli could say anything more than “Hello.”

  “Bug—”

  “Vera’s kidnapped or gone or missing or something,” I continued, interrupting him yet again. “I got kicked out of my old apartment and now I’m staying with Lennox and my brother. It’s the historic building about three miles south of where I was before. That’s the end of this conversation.” I hung up. I didn’t know why I’d even called him and told him where I was staying—okay, that wasn’t true. I did know why.

  Back when Eli and I had been together, if I so much as got a paper cut, I needed to tell him. I felt like he needed to know every single minute detail of my life. Some of that still lingered.

  I tucked my phone under a pillow, hoping that it would suffocate the sound of Eli ringing me back. When that didn’t work, I took a long time to unpack what little I had, trying to distract myself from my thoughts. It was a useless task. My mind wandered to Vic up in his secret lair, acting like Batman.

  It was ridiculous, the opposite of sanity, yet I needed him to don his black cape for me. For Vera. I looked at my ceiling, imagining Vic upstairs in some weird amalgam of spandex and bulletproof fiber as he searched for her.

  Laughter escaped my mouth without warning. I’d imagined Vic in a lot of different scenarios. Back in Georgia, I had thought Vic was living happily ever after without me. After coming to California and meeting him, I’d imagined many things about Vic—some not so pretty, but none of them had ever included him playing superhero.

  I sat back down on my bed, allowing the laughter to flow. It gave me a brief respite from the terrible cloud of doom that was covering me. Vic wasn’t a superhero. He wasn’t going to step into some leather suit and save Vera. Truth was, despite what Lennox said and what I’d seen upstairs, I still didn’t believe he could find her.

  It was nice to laugh for a moment, though, and it was nice to imagine Vic in the role of superhero. Normal younger sisters thought of their big brothers as superheroes. For a few minutes, I was normal.

  My mind was once again about to be sucked into the vicious cycle of how abnormal I was when there was a knock on the front door. I couldn’t tell you what came over me as I padded my way across the living room to open the door. Maybe opening the door was a hard habit to break as I adjusted to being a guest, or maybe it was because deep inside my soul I could sense him. When I unlocked the door, Eli burst into the room before I had a chance to think.

  “You can’t just keep calling me when you feel like it, Bug. You’re either in this or you’re not.” Eli rounded on me, barely giving me enough time to shut the door he’d just flown through.

  “And what is this, Eli?” I raised my hands out in front of me, as if trying to grasp something. I loved Eli so much it hurt. It physically hurt me. I felt like my heart was being spooned out by an ice cream scooper every time we weren’t together.

  “This is love, Grace.”

  “You wouldn’t love me if you knew,” I whispered, mostly to myself.

  “I know everything about you,” Eli said, taking a step toward me. “You know everything about me. That’s how love works. I love you not despite your flaws, but b
ecause of them Grace, just like you love me. Just tell me the truth!”

  I opened and closed my mouth, feeling like a fish out of water as I tried to find the words Eli needed to hear. The truth? He wanted the truth? If he knew what he was asking for, he wouldn’t be so quick to demand it. The truth sounded nice. It sounded honorable and strong when talking about it as an idea, but in reality, truth was ugly. Truth tore people apart and created chasms too deep to ever cross or fill.

  He didn’t want my truth. My truth would destroy him as surely as it had destroyed us. When I didn’t respond, Eli shook his head away from me in frustration.

  “God dammit, Gracie! I replay the months before I left for college over and over again in my head and I just don’t understand why we broke apart. It was all so good and then it wasn’t.”

  I turned away, tears forming in my eyes.

  “So I started to think,” Eli said, his voice getting low. “I love you. I loved you the minute I saw you on the street all those years ago and I will always love you. I never stopped.” Eli moved toward me, his steps slow and deliberate. I kept my eyes glued to the wall. “I don’t think you stopped either.”

  I hugged myself, refusing to look at him.

  “But you pushed me away, Gracie. You pushed so hard that I didn’t think to look further. I thought you stopped loving me. I know now that wasn’t true.” Eli was so close to me now that his words echoed in my head.

  I ran to the opposite side of the room, trying to get distance between us. “Stop it! Stop pressin’!”

  “What is so bad that you had to pretend to stop lovin’ me?” Eli covered the distance I’d just put between us. I felt his chest against my back. His warmth felt like melted butter in my soul. Utterly Eli. He was my home. No matter where I ran, no matter where I went, Eli was my home.

  Tears burned like cold fire on my lids. I tried desperately to keep them away but they fell anyway, the traitorous things. Eli gently tugged on my arm, forcing me to turn around. I could smell him. I could practically taste him. His ebony skin was inches from mine. His chest was to my eyes and I refused to change my gaze.