Rattle and Snake followed me through the mall, going from store to store. I’d already found a gown in a specialty shop that Antonio liked, but I was taking some of Rita’s advice and spending just to spend. It wouldn’t hurt Antonio, by any means, but it did make me feel like I was sticking it to him in some little way.
I made my way in and out of stores, not really seeing anything, but taking things just the same. It had the added benefit of keeping my guards occupied and away from me. They didn’t like to go into the stores, so I left my bags with them and got a few minutes’ space from them.
My mind was on Helena the whole time. I wanted desperately to know where she was. Antonio swore she was safe and happy, but just hearing it would never be enough. I needed to know. I needed to know that she wasn’t locked away somewhere. He swore she was living a normal life, but what did that mean?
Was she going to the mall with her friends? She’d be sixteen. Was she at school, passing notes back and forth to her friends at that exact moment? What did she like? What did she look like? Her five-year-old face was permanently burned into my brain, a picture that it felt like I looked at every single day, but had she changed? What new marks or scars had she wound up with?
I daydreamed about how life would be if Antonio had never happened to us. Would we be close? My mother died when I was fifteen and when she was alive, we hadn’t been close. She’d been clinically depressed and stuck living with a man who screamed more than he talked. She was more prone to hiding in her room than talking to her daughter.
What kind of mother would I have been with that kind of role model? When I was this kind of woman?
The same thought that occurred to me every time I thought about Helena came to me, and I staggered in between a rack of sweaters and a shelf of jeans. She was better off without me. Just because I’d said it to myself a thousand times didn’t make it any easier. It hurt. I wanted her more than anything, but deep down, I knew I could never have her. As if spending the better part of the past twelve years thinking she was dead wasn’t enough.
Standing in the middle of a store with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat the size of Montana, I looked around for the dressing rooms. I couldn’t make myself face the mall while feeling like that. I needed a few minutes to get my shit together.
I grabbed a few things closest to me and gestured to a sales woman. The dressing rooms were at the very back of the store, set off in a hallway behind the registers, and the woman smiled as she nodded towards them.
“How many things do you have?”
I looked down at my hands, completely unaware of what I’d grabbed. I counted a pair of jeans and a simple t-shirt. “Just two.”
“Perfect. I’ll be out here. Just let me know if you need me to get a different size for you.”
I slipped into the curtained off room and dropped onto the bench there. I dragged in a deep breath and slowly blew it out. “Dammit.”
“Did you say something?”
I closed my eyes. “No, sorry.”
“Okay, well, I’ll be at the register, ma’am. Just call me if you need me.”
I didn’t answer. I tried to clear my head of the thoughts of Helena, but that was painful, too. Forcing myself to forget my daughter, for even a few minutes, to make myself feel better, showed what kind of mother I would be.
I dropped my head back against the wall behind me and scrubbed my hands down my face. The only makeup I’d put on that morning was mascara and I could feel it smear. Sighing, I tried to rub it away as best as I could, but I didn’t actually care.
I looked at myself in the mirror and scowled. I hated the woman I saw there. She looked stressed, but none of my heartbreak showed. Sure, she could’ve taken a few more minutes that morning to look better, but she was pretty. She still looked innocent and nice, somehow. She wasn’t me.
In the twelve years since I met Antonio, I hadn’t changed that much. There was more money and someone willing to spend it on me, but besides my style, I looked almost the same as the girl helplessly searching for her daughter, afraid to tell the police or even her husband for fear of her daughter being killed. There was still long blonde hair that curled at the ends, wide, light brown eyes, and more curves than were fair, considering how little I ate. My mouth still curled down in a constant pout. I still had too many freckles.
I almost couldn’t handle my own reflection. It felt like a marker of how much I’d changed inside, because, surely, if my outside reflected as clearly in the mirror, I’d be looking at something uglier.
I squeezed my eyes shut again and counted to thirty, just needing to get my thoughts to slow down. I knew I didn’t have that much more time before the saleswoman started worrying about what I was doing.
I heard the slightest rustle of fabric and figured she was already back to check on me. “I’ll just be a minute longer. I can’t decide on the jeans.”
“You’re lying again.” A deep, familiar voice came from beside me, followed by a light growl and two large hands grasping my forearms and yanking me up.
The clothing fell to the floor between us and I gasped. “Cash.”
He’d changed. He was huge, bigger than I ever remembered him being, and he looked wild. His hair was long and his beard was thick, covering the lower half of his face. His eyes, the same dark blue as Helena’s, were bloodshot and narrowed on me in a fierce scowl.
Shock and fear kept my body loose as he pushed me into the wall and crowded me in. I stared up at him, mesmerized by his appearance. Shocked stupid, I’d say. Because, if the look on his face was anything to go by, Cash wanted, more than anything, to knock my head off.
His fingers dug into my arms painfully and he pulled me forward just to shove me back into the wall harder. My head hit and it rattled some sense into me.
“Cash!” I harshly whispered his name and tried to pull away from him. “Let go of me!”
He leaned into my space and the smell of whiskey came with him. “Where is she?”
My heart stopped. My one chance at getting Helena away from Antonio, my long shot, wasn’t working.
“That’s right, you lying bitch. I know our daughter isn’t dead. You lied. You told me she was dead. Where is she, Clara? Is she with Carver?” He snarled in my face, not unlike a vicious dog, and squeezed tighter.
Reason fled. He’d been reading my messages wrong and he wasn’t any closer to finding Helena than I was. If Antonio found out that Cash was hanging around, there was no telling what he’d do. If he found out what I’d been doing…he’d kill her.
Fear for Helena’s life blinded me from anything else in that moment. “Get out. Get out of here!”
“Not until you tell where you’re keeping my daughter.”
I had to get away. Staring up at the man I once had prayed to love me, I felt nothing but pure panic for our daughter. He was going to get her killed. I would figure out a way to redirect him later, but I had to get away from him before Rattle or Snake found me with him.
His rage was the only way I managed it. He was distracted and I wasn’t above cheating. I rammed my knee into his crotch as hard as I could and when he lurched forward in pain, I slammed my head into his face. The split second he let go of me and stumbled, I was out of there.
I didn’t know if he was chasing me, but I didn’t look back. I rushed outside to my bodyguards, who I was suddenly thankful for, if just for a minute, and pointed to the exit. “I need to go home. I just managed to hit my head on the dressing room door and I’ve already got a migraine. Come on.”
They didn’t care enough to ask questions and that’s the only reason I got them away from that store without them spotting Cash. How he’d even gotten past them in the first place, I’d never understand. Unless he’d been watching us. Maybe he was already in the store when I went in. Had I not seen him? Had I missed him? I didn’t know, but my heart was beating a dance number in my chest.
I could feel his eyes on me as we left the mall, Rattle and Snake flanking me. While they normally made me feel like no one would bother me when I was out, I didn’t trust that they could handle Cash. The thought had me walking faster to the car.
“What’s the fucking rush?” Rattle barked from behind me, his arms still full of bags. “We’re carrying all of your shit back here.”
I didn’t stop. I was practically running, but I had to get out of there. My thoughts hadn’t even caught up with me fully, but I knew when they did, I’d need to be sitting.
I reached the car just as the driver was getting out. Before he had a chance to come around and open the door for me, I was jerking open the door and diving inside. I scooted to the other side of the car and pressed my hands to the leather seat as hard as I could, trying to settle my pulse.
Cash Crimson. It’d been so long since I’d seen him. I’d never planned on seeing him again. Not after what I’d done to him.
My arms hurt from where he’d grabbed me, but I deserved it. I closed my eyes and breathed in time with the throbbing, using it to calm me until I wasn’t panting.
Rattle settled into the seat next to me and slammed the door shut. Looking over at me, he frowned. “Your head is bruised.”
I reached up with shaking hands and felt my forehead. There was a definite lump in the middle and my nose hurt to touch, too. I hadn’t even noticed the pain until that moment. “I hit it pretty hard.”
“You’re lying.”
Cash’s words came back to me and I shivered. “I’m not. And to say that I am means that something happened in the store that you missed. You want to go home and tell Antonio that?”
His mouth snapped shut and he glared at me. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”
“Yeah, tell Antonio that.” I leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes. I felt like I’d just been put through the ringer, physically and emotionally.
My plan, my little revenge against Antonio, hadn’t worked. I’d been sneaking around since I found out about Helena, first searching for Cash and then sending him as much as I could so he could find her. At first, it’d been just words, a desperate attempt to get him looking while I tried to get a copy of the picture I’d found of Helena. When I finally did manage to send him the picture, I was sure he’d be able to use it to find her.
I never expected him to find me. Antonio was supposed to have us buried. If Cash could find us, then Antonio wasn’t as safe as he thought he was. The idea didn’t disturb me too much. Antonio deserved whatever he got.
Cash had gotten it wrong. He’d come to me. He thought I had Helena, which meant he wasn’t looking for her in the right place and he wasn’t any closer to finding her than I was. And that meant that Antonio still had all the power.
I wanted to look behind us and make sure Cash wasn’t following. I was terrified that he was and he’d force Antonio’s hand with Helena. If he wasn’t careful, he’d cost us our daughter.
A sick feeling washed over me as I thought of his appearance. He wasn’t being careful. He’d been drinking and had clearly gone off his rocker. He was so different from the Cash that I remembered. His was another life that mine had destroyed.