Angel
The first weeks of married life weren’t exactly bliss. Being married to Dare was bliss, waking up in his arms, how he made love to me and was so caring and nurturing… definitely amazing.
But, my thoughts were all over the place where my sister was concerned. The day after our wedding, my first official day as Mrs. Dario Ferrano, wasn’t easy. My new husband told me, in our honeymoon suite, that my little sister Holly was missing.
I couldn’t stop thinking about news that my sister was gone. Had I broken for nothing if it never even saved her? No, not nothing. If I hadn’t broken, I wouldn’t have lived to become Dare’s.
Dare said, at first, that they had a lead on where she might be. But then he started backtracking with me and said he wasn’t 100% sure if Kruna had let Holly go and she’d run away or if they’d kept her or sold her. He tried to talk calmly, asking me to not jump to conclusions. He was still working on figuring out what happened.
I tried not to tell myself that his backpedaling was that he was sparing my feelings until we knew for sure, but then I decided that he knew best. I was trusting him to handle things. I had no choice; I didn’t have the strength to process this in the natural way.
He promised to find out what happened to her. When he said he thought his PI might know where she was, he asked me if I wanted to be kept abreast of things as discoveries were made.
“Would it be terrible if I just left that up to you?” I had asked him.
He looked thoughtful for a minute. When he kept watching me, mulling it over, I explained.
“All this time I wanted to believe that what I’d done, going along with them and not fighting, was keeping her safe. Now to find out that she’s missing? That she’s been missing all this time? I don’t know if I can process that. If I try…”
My whole body started to shake.
He took me into his arms, “I’ve got you,” he had said and cupped my face. And he said he didn’t know for sure whether his lead was solid. I had a feeling he was backpedaling to settle me down but maybe I needed to live in that state of denial, or maybe a state of hope. Before Dare, I’d had no hope. He gave it to me when he rescued me from Kruna.
Hope. Yeah, I’d hope. Just a little.
“Maybe they don’t have her, Dare. Maybe she ran away. Maybe she ran away to Uncle Charlie and Aunt Betsy’s and is living on my farm.”
“Maybe,” he said but he said it guardedly, “But baby, even if you hadn’t cooperated nothing would be different. Except maybe they wouldn’t have let you live. Whatever has happened, you did the only thing you could do.”
I nodded but deflated, “I don’t know if she’s been raped and murdered, is living as a sex slave, or if she’s living with my horses, trying to find out what happened to me and living thinking I’m dead. I don’t know if I can handle this. Dare. Master, I…” I started to feel the panic rise. “But if she did escape, she would’ve looked for me and your PI would’ve found that out by now, right?”
“Stop,” his hand gripped the back of my neck tighter, not painfully but with surety; it was reassuring.
I let out a breath and felt my body calm. It was becoming an unwritten rule for us that when I called him Master he knew that’s who I needed him to be. I’d been doing it less and less often and usually only in the middle of the night when I’d had a bad dream.
But now? With the knowledge that my sister, who would now be 17 years old if she was alive, had been missing for 2 years? That she might not have been seen after I’d seen footage of her bound and gagged in a cargo plane, naked penises surrounding her?
She was turning 18 soon, the day after Christmas, and I prayed to God that she would see that birthday somewhere on this planet and that she would see it free. Safe. Whole. Not raped. Not ruined. Not like me.
I hoped with all my heart and soul that she was with Charlie and Betsy. In her final year of high school. A cheerleader. Dating some sweet jock who looked at her like she made the sun rise every day. Because even in my darkest days back in Alaska and the even darker days in Kruna, Holly was such light, such purity, that I held onto the fact that the sun would want to rise, even if it was just for her.
“I’ve got this, okay? I’ll find out what’s happened and when I know, I’ll tell you.”
“Maybe that’s better,” I nodded.
“If you decide you want to know where things are at, at any time, you just ask me, my baby, and I’ll tell you. You are in control. If that means you give that control to me, I’ll hang onto it because you want me to. If that means you want it back, you tell me. Okay?”
I nodded.
“Maybe she went to Uncle Charlie’s. She knew of the place. I talked about it all the time. They’d take her in and treat her like family. I left her a bit of emergency money and had a copy made of one of my credit cards for her when I left. It was a MasterCard. Can you check that out? Can you get them to pull my bills? Maybe we can find out if she used the card. But don’t tell me anything Dare, until we know. I can’t. I can’t…”
“Shhh, I’ll take care of all of it. I’ll take care of you, too.” He pulled me closer.
I felt so torn. Part of me wanted to slip into my new life as his wife and pretend nothing else existed. The horror was trying to sink in and part of me was so afraid that all had been for nothing and that Holly had been suffering as long as I had.
I felt like I was on the verge of breaking and I didn’t want to break, I wanted to be strong, for him, for me, for Holly, so I decided to let my husband lead. I decided to trust him with this, knowing with every ounce of me that he would handle things well and handle me with care.
It wouldn’t help me to torment myself right now. I’d been so fragile since we’d met. I couldn’t take this on. I had to trust him to find out what happened to my sister and I’d try really really hard to not lose it in the meantime. When the truth was revealed, we’d go from there. I couldn’t blatantly hope, because my brain would run through the details over and over and let logic tell me that the chances were far too slim.
I also wouldn’t tell myself it was all lost because I knew; I was living proof, that sometimes hope came when you thought it was impossible.
I was just going to focus on what was in front of me and leave it to Dare. If I still was lucky enough to be his and didn’t have what I had in him, I’d never know about my sister anyway, because we’d never have delved into my other life, life before Thailand. I had to remember that and just put one foot in front of the other.
We had a honeymoon to go on. And I decided to leave it up to him if we would still do that. He told me he was going to find out about my sister for me and that in the meantime he wanted to make me happy. I was so lucky to have him. I’d never forget all he’d done for me. I wanted to make him happy, give him babies, make him laugh, be everything he needed.
“I know you won’t be able to put her totally out of your mind. I want you to just be what you need to be. Okay? Do you want to go on this trip? Or would you rather stay here while I figure this out?”
“I want to go on our honeymoon. I want to live while we figure this out. Is it selfish of me?”
I was weak and selfish and stupidly naïve. I had to be. I couldn’t do anything else right now; common sense would destroy me, completely obliterate me.
“What would she want for you? What did you want for her while you were there?”
I took a deep breath. He was right. She’d want me to live. She’d want me to enjoy my new life, my new husband, after all I’d been through. I couldn’t forget her but I’d try to live like she wanted me to live.
“I’ll have people work on this. I’ve already got them on it. We’ll find out what happened, okay? And if she’s somewhere where we need to rescue her, that’s what we’ll do. If she’s safe and sound, we’ll find a way to safely connect. Keep our cover until that fuckin’ place is nothin’ but a distant memory for us.”
I prayed that rescue wasn’t what would need to happen but I had to compartmentalize Holly right now until we knew more. If not, I’d wind up in the loony bin. And the loony bin, which might not be a bad idea for me, wasn’t an option because Kruna still existed and if they found out, the entire Ferrano family would be in danger. I was now lucky enough to be part of the Ferrano family. I would never ever want to put any of them in danger.
He wanted to take me to Italy and Iceland for our honeymoon. Dare wanted me to meet his mother and he wanted me to meet his Icelandic family, too.
I knew that despite my need to tuck her away somewhere safe in the back of my mind, Holly would creep into my thoughts until we found out what’d happened. It would take major effort to stop myself from obsessing.
I said a silent prayer that Mr. Frost and the others at Kruna had kept their promise to me and let her go and that she’d somehow made it to Charlie and Betsy.
I tried to ignore the nagging voice that told me that they were liars, that they were sick and sadistic human traffickers who would sell a gorgeous platinum blonde-haired blue-eyed teenaged beauty’s virginity to the highest bidder.
I talked to Lisa before we left for our honeymoon and she told me I was doing the right thing. I needed to live right here and right now. She told me to trust my husband when he said he’d find out about Holly.
“These guys, they have connections,” Lisa said, “Tom spent years building a network of people he could go to for any type of problem. Dare will find out what happened to her. It might not be good news, you have to be braced for that, but you’ll get answers somehow.”
She was doing well, on the road to healing. She impressed me. I decided to be motivated by how together she seemed. She told me that the retreat she’d gone on had helped. She’d had counseling. She’d talked about what’d happened to her. She knew it was dangerous but felt she had no choice but to do it. So that she could move forward.
“I owe it to the people behind. You know? The ones still there, still trying to make it through every day.”
“The ones working on their A to B plan.”
Lisa tilted her head, “A to B?”
I explained my initial plan and told her that she’d inspired it.
And then I told her my story, how I’d found myself at Kruna. It wasn’t easy to tell that story. I felt like any moment they could burst in and take us back. But she was incredibly supportive.
“I saw him,” she said after I was finished telling my tale.
“Saw who?”
“Jason Frost.”
“At Kruna?” I asked.
“Of course at Kruna, he’d practically lived there before I left for the U.S. I’ve had the pleasure, if you get my drift. I mean at the retreat. I saw him in passing in a hallway when I was first being deposed. I guess they had him at the same facility. He’s might still be in protective custody there.”
I shuddered at the memory of Jason, at how messed up things were at the horse barn when we’d talked before guys from Interpol swooped in and took him. When Dare found out about the task force and Zack’s ulterior motives.
Thank God Jason hadn’t been able to purchase me after Donavan Frost died. Thank God.