Antonio hugged me to his chest again, less forcefully and less painfully. He pressed his lips to my head and released a shaky breath. “I’m sorry. It’s been a bad couple of days. An old enemy of mine is fucking with me and I’m stressed. You didn’t deserve all of that.”
I shook in his arms, the realization hitting me hard that I was closer to my death than I’d ever considered a real possibility. I couldn’t help Helena if I was dead. I probably couldn’t help her if I wasn’t dead. I was useless. It’d been over a year since I found out she was still alive and all I’d managed to do was bring Cash to my doorstep.
“Are you okay?”
I looked up at the man in front of me and my breath caught in my ragged throat. I could so easily die at his hands without ever knowing anything about Helena again. I was go to my afterlife not knowing if she was really okay. A real fear of him bloomed and anything I’d ever felt for him crawled into a little ball at the bottom of my heart and shriveled away to nothing.
“Clara, don’t look at me like that.” Antonio cupped my face in his hands and shook his head. “You know I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
I winced and pulled away, needing space from the man who would surely send me to my grave.
He let me move away from him and just watched me. “You don’t have to come down for dinner. Just take the night to feel better. I’ll come back up and check on you after everyone leaves. Maybe we can spend some time talking and really sort stuff out.”
I kept my eyes on the floor and wrapped my arms around myself. I didn’t want to talk to him. The freedom I stupidly felt like I still had was rapidly shrinking in upon me and my heart was pounding a wicked beat in my chest.
“I love you.”
I turned my back to him and waited until I heard the door shut to look back to make sure he was gone. I sank to the floor and buried my face in my hands. My life was over. Facing my own mortality hurt and it felt like I could use a few days to adjust to the knowledge.
Instead, I was dragged up again and pushed to sitting on the side of the bed. Cash was there again, his face grim.
“Are you going to talk?”
I looked up at him, still reeling, and felt more sadness than I’d ever allowed myself to feel. My heart ached as I stared at the man who’d helped me make Helena.
“Clara, I don’t have time to sit here and play with you. Talk to me, goddammit. Where is my daughter?”
I wished I knew. I wanted to tell him everything but my mind was tripping over itself. I couldn’t form words. Panic and fear were powerful and I was suddenly helpless to them.
“Is she fucking here?”
I managed to shake my head. She was gone. He was gone. Before too long, I’d be gone, too.
Cash grunted. “Fuck this. You’re coming with me.”
Those words woke me up. I couldn’t go with him. Antonio would have Helena killed. I jerked away from him and smacked his hands away. “I have to stay here!”
Cash grabbed my hand and yanked me up. “No, you have to come with me and tell me where the hell our daughter is.”
I yanked against his hold and fell into my nightstand. It cut into my hip, but I barely felt anything. Panic so strong that it could choke an elephant was steering me. I ran for the door but Cash grabbed me around the waist and hauled me into his body.
Even as I lashed out, a memory of him holding me that close in another lifetime hit me. It hadn’t been for long. It had never been for long. I kicked my legs out, kicking my vanity and watching everything rain onto the floor.
Cash shook me and held me tighter. “Stop it. Don’t make me hurt you.”
I kicked out and hit the vanity again, knocking it into the wall hard enough to send the mirror careening forward. It hit the floor and shattered, sounding like a bomb going off in the room.
Cash didn’t hesitate. He dug his fingers into the side of my neck, sending a firebolt of pain through my body before everything went black.
*
Shit. That was my first thought as I slowly woke up. I felt like I’d been dragged through hell and I couldn’t remember what I’d done the night before. I wracked my brain, trying my best to come up with what would’ve made me feel so shitty, but I came up blank. All I knew was that I didn’t want to open my eyes. I wasn’t ready for the headache that was surely waiting on me with the sun.
I was cold, too. I wanted to roll over and curl up with my blanket and pillows but I was sitting up and whatever was under me was uncomfortably hard.
I frowned and tried to shift into a more comfortable spot, but I couldn’t move.
My brain struggled to keep up with what I was quickly realizing wasn’t a good situation. I couldn’t move.
I forced my eyes open and blinked as I was met with more darkness. I tried again to move, but nothing relented. Straining against the darkness, I screamed when part of the shadows moved towards me.
“Glad to see you’re finally with me.” Cash’s deep voice rang out in the room, startling me even more.
“Cash?” I groaned when pushing words past my throat felt like rubbing sandpaper on a cut. “What happened?”
“What happened? What happened is you stole my daughter from me and told me she was dead.”
The images from that night started slowly seeping back in, poisoning my brain as severely as anthrax. As reality started creeping in, I grew more and more agitated. He’d taken me from Antonio’s house and tied me up.
“You have to let me go. Let me go back, Cash. If Antonio finds out I’m gone”
He laughed bitterly. “It’s too late for that, sweetheart. Carver and his men have probably been looking for you for hours, now. Loverboy knows you’re gone.”
I jerked at the ties and tried to see anything in the dark room. “Please, Cash. Please! You’re going to ruin it all. You’re going to make him angry. He’s going to hurt her!”
Hands suddenly grabbed my arms and my feet left the floor as my chair was tipped backwards. “Her? Helena?! Your boyfriend is going to hurt our daughter? Where the fuck is she?”
I flailed as hard as I could in the chair and screamed. “Let me go! You’re going to get her killed!”
“Stop fighting and listen to me. Tell me where she is!”
Antonio was going to assume that I ran and was trying to get to Helena. He would kill her. He would rush to do it, too, before I had a chance to get to her. I didn’t even have a clue where she was, so I couldn’t save her. The only option was to get back to him and tell him that I’d been kidnapped.
Cash grabbed my face and squeezed my cheeks tightly. “You have two options here, Clara. Either you tell me where she is or I kill you and find her myself.”
If Cash started poking around after I went missing, there was no way that Antonio wouldn’t put it together. I had to get back to Antonio and then have Cash look for her. I didn’t know how to explain that to Cash, though. The man in front of me was on the edge of control and I didn’t trust him to wait if I told him to.
I went still, deciding to be calm and hoping it helped calm him down some, too. “Let me go, Cash. There are things happening that you don’t know about.”
With a wild growl, he dropped my chair backwards. My chair slammed into the ground, but he caught my head before it met the same fate. “You’re not listening to me. You tell me where my daughter is or you die.”
“I don’t know where she is, Cash!”
He jerked my chair upright before fading into the night. When he did speak, it was from across the large room. He sounded so far away that I had to wonder if we were in a warehouse.
“How do you not know where she is?”
I pulled at my restraints and noticed the chair creaked more than it had before. I put my weight more on that side of the chair and wiggled, trying to get it to break. “I just don’t.”
“You’re lying again.”
“I wish I was. I can’t talk to you anymore, Cash. I’m sorry.”
Silence was the only answer I thought I’d get until his voice rang out from right beside my ear. “What do you mean you can’t talk to me anymore?!”
I squeezed my eyes shut and reminded myself of the boy that Cash had been. What was normally too painful to remember fed my hope that he didn’t actually want to kill me.
“Fine. You don’t want to talk? I’ll just let you sit here in silence for a while. I have to run an errand, anyway. Sorry, I can’t turn any lights on for you and the AC is on the fritz. This will probably be uncomfortable, but I’m sure it’s nothing you can’t handle.”
I waited to hear his footsteps fade way, but he was completely silent. My head throbbed from straining to hear something, anything. After what felt like an hour of waiting, I assumed he was gone.
He’d been a SEAL. He was trained in stealth and I figured he’d put it to use. I didn’t think he’d actually left, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to try to get free.
I got my feet firmly planted on the ground and lifted myself as much as I could before letting my weight slam the chair to the ground on the weaker side. The arm of the chair bit into my thigh, but I didn’t let it stop me. I was determined. I lifted myself and did it again and again.
Breathing hard, I wiggled in the chair and heard more of the telling creaking. I felt like it was almost there. My body hurt and the throbbing in my head had increased to a roar that threatened to stop me from doing anything else. I couldn’t give up though.
Lifting myself again, my muscles shook as I stretched higher than before. Then, like a lunatic, I jumped and landed with all of my weight on one side of the chair. As the chair broke apart under me, I was thankful for my extra curves for the first time in my life.
A piece of the chair scratched my leg as I landed on the pile of broken wood, but it didn’t faze me. I was still tied to the broken pieces, so I had to take a few minutes to wiggle out of the looser cords. When I was finally free, though, I clamored to my feet and held my arms out as I spun around.
The room was pitch black and I couldn’t see my hands in front of my face, much less where to go. Unwilling to fall apart at that point, I bit my lip and started forward. I inched forward with my arms out, trying to find a wall.
All I could hear was my breathing and it felt like it was filling up the entire room. My heart was racing away, something it was doing more often those days, and for a moment I worried about the possibility of having a heart attack.
When my fingertips touched the hard surface of a wall, I cried out. Hurrying along, I bumped into things, some metal and some wood, but didn’t let it slow me down. I needed to find a door so I could get out. Dragging my fingers along, I felt my nails snagging and breaking, but that didn’t slow me down, either.
When the wall dipped and the surface turned metal, I sucked in a sharp breath and pressed myself against it while searching for a doorknob. Finding it, I grabbed it and turned, forcing the door open with my weight.
I stumbled into the night and found myself falling to my knees in a puddle of mud. The night was only marginally brighter than the room I’d been in, thanks to the moon, but it was enough to see that it’d been raining. I was surrounded by trees, as far as I could see, and the ground was practically quicksand as I climbed to my feet.
I couldn’t wait. I knew without a doubt that Cash was coming.