Chapter Thirty
Gray
A timid knock hit my door and I calmed only a little.
It has to be her.
But it wasn’t my daughter. It was Alicia, the drips of a steady rain around her as the raindrops hit her red umbrella and fell to the near-flooding ground. In the distance, her rental car sat but it wasn’t running nor was there a familiar face in the front seat.
My phone fell from my ear, the woman I’d been calling nonstop standing before me. She hadn’t answered one of my calls, and my truck keys in hand, I’d been in the process of heading over to her house.
I dipped into the storm. “Alicia.”
The sight of her told of my need for her, her mere presence like a way to recapture air.
“She’s missing,” I told her, blinking around raindrops. “Laura’s missing. I can’t find her. I…”
The words accompanied a sickness, which chased itself up my throat and I wondered if not for Alicia grabbing my arm if I’d been heading for the ground. Sometime, someway, she’d guided me out of the rain, my mind blank and the simple construction of words I found a heavy challenge.
“Gray?”
She materialized before me, long, dark hair untouched by the rain and full lips I took every advantage to kiss when I could. They deserved to be kissed, made love to every day.
Closing them, she pushed her hair out of her face, dropping the open umbrella to my carpet before closing my open door. She stayed there, at the door when closed, and sometime in that moment, I got my thoughts back.
“We have to go find her,” I said. “Something’s wrong. I tried to call you. I don’t know why she left.”
I could have only slept for a couple hours, but even that sleep had been restless. I’d been concerned about Alicia and where we left things.
I said a lot to her, Alicia, but even still she remained by the door. Approaching her, I would have made it to her had she not raised her hand.
She actually raised to me, for me to stop, and her gaze averted as her raincoat dripped droplets to my carpet.
“Alicia, did you hear me,” I said, not understanding. “Laura’s out there—”
“She’s fine, Grayden.”
She’d finally looked up at me with my name, the Grayden on her lips more than tense. Her expression had actually changed when she said it, her eyes sad as if something had caused her pain.
My phone dropped to my side, both her words and demeanor not making sense.
“You know where she is?” I asked and with her nod that calm again only lessened a bit. She said she knew where she was.
But I noticed she didn’t tell me.
“What’s going on?” I asked and with another step, she stiffened this time, as if me getting closer would actually hurt her. Her gaze had also averted again and her hand gripped her coat-covered arm like a safety net.
I stood stationary, the warnings in my head going off like alarm bells, her reaction to me and lack of information about my kid.
I shook my head. “Where’s my daughter, Alicia?”
She said nothing and I chose to repeat my words again.
“Alicia. Where is Laura—?”
“She’s safe, Grayden.”
There it was again… Grayden.
She hadn’t called me Grayden since I met her, the sudden formality not lost on me.
We stood in a room pregnant with silence, our accompaniment that of the anger that brewed outside. Tree branches rasped at my windows like they were tearing their way inside me, and again, no words of elaboration were said by Alicia.
Testing her, I came forward and despite how closed off she was being I didn’t stop. It actually took her saying the command to make me.
My steps froze with the sudden words and my swallow was terribly hard.
“Why?” I asked her, my question of many. Why wouldn’t she tell me where Laura was other than the fact she was safe?
And why couldn’t I go near her?
My mind had travelled to that of the worst-case scenario in my life many times before. I’d had reasons, but over time, the anxiety of the thoughts lessened. It had partially to do with this town, most with a woman name Josephine, but even more with the woman before me. She allowed me to trust again, trust in people and the possibility of having goodness in my life.
My hand closed around my phone, the device I knew I ruined in the rain. Either way I hadn’t cared in the moment, so much more to care about in the present.
“I just need to know the truth,” she whispered, eyes lost and when she lifted her hand, she gathered a tear that clumped in her thick eyelashes. She rubbed it away with the shake of her head.
“I need to know the truth about you and why…” Her voice cracked on the end, her face cringing again with another tear she pushed away. “Why there’s a warrant out for your arrest.”
Her chosen words unleashed my greatest fear but not in the way I imagined. Real truth, if anyone found out my history and why I couldn’t stay in a city for longer than a few months, it’d be bad, but this woman in particular finding out cut me right at the core.
“You don’t know what you think you do,” I told her, a strong current coming from my lips. “This is so much more complicated than you could ever know.”
My words were putting it lightly, a history here she knew nothing about. This had been my fault I knew, but that fact didn’t make this moment any easier to deal with.
“That’s why I need to know the truth,” she said and I noticed she did come here alone. She could have come with other people, authorities, or not even have come at all. She came here.
She came here to talk to me.
My fingers pushed into my hair and the way the strands moved around, I knew I was shaking. My gaze lowering, I asked her to take a seat on the couch, noticing right away she made no moves to do so.
“Ask your questions,” I told her, remaining where I stood. “And after, you tell me where my kid is.”
Alicia
I wasn’t going to make any deals with him.
I couldn’t.
The best of what I had in me allowed me to come over here unattended. I didn’t have to do that. My love for him made me.
That was what made this all so hard, a constant stomach toss making it hard to contain the contents of my insides. Still tasting the bile in my throat, I watched him in my periphery across the room. He ended up taking a chair from his kitchen table, sitting in it on the other side of the room across from me.
I’d taken the couch.
“Alicia, I’ll tell you… I’ll tell you what you need to know, then you need to tell me where Laura is. It’s important. Her safety’s at risk.”
“Really?” I questioned, looking up at eyes that seemed to have aged even more before me. He’d been scared when I came over, knowing his daughter was missing I wasn’t surprised, but that had changed now.
Currently, only sadness remained.
It only displayed at me and I found it hard to look at.
“Because it seems you’re the one who might be the danger to her.”
He said no words after mine, choosing silence. He shifted before me and when I looked up, his gaze had moved to the window.
His hand slid over his beard.
“I spent a lot of time wondering if what I’d done was the right idea,” he said, moving his gaze over to me. “But each time I reflected, every time I looked back and mulled things over, I came to the same conclusion every time. What I did had to be done and never not once have I regretted it.”
I saw that in his eyes, so many things I saw I didn’t understand. It went beyond me, and like he said, things I didn’t understand.
“What happened?” was all I could say, as if he was the photograph, that handsome man who had everything, but had suddenly seemed to have thrown it all away.
His hands dropped between his legs, his chin lowering as well.
“Laura’s mom I never got to know,” he said. “I didn’t care to know. She was ass, ass that I wanted at the time and so many had come before her. I partied like the best of them and have the notches in my belt to prove it.”
The man he spoke of sounded so foreign to me, a tale out of a dark storybook.
“I was a playboy like you’d never seen, Alicia,” he admitted. “I was rich, powerful, and I used it. Laura’s mom just happened to be who I wanted that night and come to find out, she found herself pregnant not long after a thoughtless fuck.”
His choice of words had me cringing like it did at the lake, but I wouldn’t look away, not this time and he didn’t either, his gaze affixed on me.
“I really wouldn’t believe it at first,” he told me. “And I didn’t. It took several paternity tests. After that, it became what did she want. How much, you know?”
His story had him laughing with no humor, the tone incredibly dry in his deep voice.
He looked up. “I didn’t want a kid, so I was willing to pay her off to get rid of it. She didn’t want that. In fact, she only wanted something I couldn’t give her.”
“What?” my own voice cracked, him cringing now.
“She wanted a goddamn father for her child,” he said, something he’d left out in his explanation at the lake. He said he gave her money.
He didn’t say she wanted him.
The reality of that played on Gray’s face, his omission clear between us.
He moved his lips. “That’s all she wanted, my time and basic child support. I couldn’t agree to the former, but the latter, as you know, I gave in to.”
He really had been different, so much different before me.
“We came to the agreement that every month I would visit when I paid the support, but only if the child didn’t have to be acknowledged,” he went on. “Laura doesn’t even have my last name.”
I noticed that. I noticed it on the warrant.
She was Laura Wallace on there, not Laura Davenport.
Grayden blew into his hands, a breath on them that filled the room.
“Everything was pretty good after that for a while,” he went on, dropping his hands. “She got her money and her visits and I got to screw around with whatever piece of ass I could find. I could continue being a bachelor with no ties and no kids.”
“What changed?”
My own voice sounded foreign to me and he stared at me, his head tilted.
“The drugs,” he said, something he had let me in on before. Laura’s mom and her connection with drugs.
“It was the woman’s habit that changed things,” he said. “Coke her drug of choice. We’d done it at the party we met at, which led to the sex. I pretty much got fried at all the parties I went to but it was only socially. Her mom was on a different level and something I only knew as I’d noticed her stash every time I’d visit her and Laura on our agreed-upon times. Sometimes, I wouldn’t even see her for hours on visits. She’d just go to her room and leave me with the baby. Eventually, she started to ask for more money, claiming it was for child support, but I didn’t believe her.”
Because she needed more money for her habit, the evidence there. I closed my eyes.
“She didn’t even want visits anymore eventually,” he said, that sad laughter back in his voice. “Just more money, money I knew she was spending on drugs and not our kid, a kid… a kid I was finally starting to see.”
His voice changed on the end and he squeezed his eyes.
“I wished I could remember more of those times,” he said. “How special Laura had been and her voice… Her laughter was infectious. I was starting to get attached to her, but I was also seeing what was happening with her mom. Eventually, I believed she was taking advantage of the situation and I had to cut her off. I stopped paying her entirely and threatened her if she came for me. Not long after, I started to get the paperwork together to obtain full custody of Laura. I didn’t want her near her screwed-up mother and ignored her calls until I could hammer out the details with my attorneys. We were almost done when I got a text from her.”
“What did it say?”
The fact he’d said nothing when he had been so upfront with everything now scared me.
As well as the haunted look in his eyes.
His gaze became empty, tortured, and I watched as words formed on his lips.
“It said, ‘You made me do this.’”
And that’s when his eyes filled with the sheen, a thick glow that made him wipe his eyes with one hand. Dropping it, he shook his head and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what happened next. I wasn’t sure I should hear.
“She sold her, Alicia,” he said, his words retched into open air. A tremor hit his lips with movement. “She sold her for drugs and told me when I tracked her down after that text. She couldn’t even remember where she left her. Our baby girl…”
The abyss I fell into resembled a dark cave, the world stopping and my brain unable to form thoughts, only the nightmares. The retelling itself sent Gray into a tailspin, his hands frantically moving, his eyes searching, and his voice choked.
“I had no idea how long she’d been with those people, or many of the details that happened after they took—” His rasp escaped with a pinch upon the bridge of his nose. He shook out of it. “Eventually, I found her, made calls, had people. Thank fucking God I had people.”
He looked up when he saw me move, where I should have been the whole time. Sitting at the base of his legs, I held onto him, for dear life if I could have. I didn’t want to let go, scared of what would happened if I did.
On my knees I remained at his waist, my arms wrapped around him and my face pushed into his chest.
“What happened to her, Gray?” I asked, closing my eyes between tears. “Did they hurt her?”
I really didn’t want the knowledge. It was a need for it the only reason I asked.
So much made sense now, that little girl, her pain…
“I know at least they didn’t do that,” he said, nearly hyperventilating. He had to take a second, calm himself as if he was reliving it all.
Maybe he was.
Using me, he found his voice again, his arms around me now.
“I was told when my people found her, the dealers explained they hadn’t touched her. They had plans for her and she was worth more if she was…”
My stomach rolled this time but I stayed.
I’d stay forever.
It seemed Gray couldn’t go on with that train of thought either, his eyes closing.
“They ended up locking her in this room,” he said, his voice far away. “Alone and by herself with no one else. I was there when my people located her and I just remembered how she looked.”
His stare vacant into the room, so far away like his voice.
“She was completely dirtied,” he said. “Covered in her own urine, vomit.” His lids lowered, the swallow hard in his throat. “And hadn’t been interacted with for days. I spent so much time with her, so many hours getting to know her, love her and she…”
His sniff cut him off, his eyes flashing at me.
“She didn’t even recognize me, Alicia. In fact, she cowered. It took me singing to her, a song I used to sing to help her go to sleep when she was a toddler. With it, she knew it was me, and eventually, she did let me take her away, away from that place with windows shot out and people passed out on the floor in a heap. We went and that was the last we saw of the place. Her voice completely gone. For over three years it was gone.”
My eyes closing, I rubbed his leg. So much pain they’d both been through and it all hit me at his conclusion.
“You took her then, didn’t you?” I asked, staring up at him.
He nodded. “I did.”
“But why, Grayden? You didn’t have to just take her and run.”
“But I did,” he said, his lashes flashing away. “I couldn’t risk her mom coming to her senses and realizing what she’d done. The woman, as fucked up as she was, is Laura’s biological mother. She could have a case for a claim over her one day and even if I did get full custody she could have rights to see her. I didn’t want her to see her. I didn’t want her having anything to do with her and mess up her life even more than she had.”
And so they escaped, disappeared into the abyss of anonymity. I had no idea where the two had been, but if they’d been places like Mayfield they’d be easy to hide in, disappear in.
“We’ve been running for three years,” he said, his arms finally holding me tight. It’d taken that long, took him that long to notice I was really there…
And he wasn’t alone anymore.
He sat in silence like that for so long, me on my knees at his lap and his arms around me. Eventually, that storm stopped and it was just us, us together and holding on for dear life that this all would work out, that we could take back everything we had before he’d admitted the truth and I found out. But I think we both knew with his admission things would change.
How could they not?
“She’s at Jasmine’s house,” I said, pulling away. “She’s there, but, Gray, you have to fight. I’m assuming she’s the one who put the warrant out for your arrest. Laura’s mom?”
He said he’d been scared one day she’d come back to her senses.
His arms falling away, he pushed his hand into his hair.
“Yes.”
“Well, what if she’s better? It probably took a lot for her to put that warrant out, challenge you and everything you said you were. What if she’s gotten herself together?”
“And what if she hasn’t?” he challenged himself. “What if that warrant is a way for her to smoke us out? Get us in a place where she can fight for her?”
“So we do like I said, we fight.”
“I have nothing, Alicia. We have nothing. There was fraud in my company before I left and I worked out just enough to give Laura and me a chance before putting it all behind us. We literally have little more than the shirts on our backs now.”
Bastian mentioned that, how he’d been smart and got out.
I closed my eyes, looking up at him. “You have me.”
One resource he hadn’t had before and his hands caged my face after the words, his forehead touching mine. His throat jumped, and even this close, the sadness in his eyes pierced my soul.
“We do have you, Alicia,” he said, his voice tightening. “But it’s not enough. I don’t think it will be. I can’t take the risk. I can’t lose my baby.”
The tears flooded my eyes in a river, his voice so final, gut-wrenchingly so.
My hands gripping his shirt, I closed my eyes.
“You can’t keep running,” I said, my voice shaking. “Someone will find you eventually. You’re trying to outrun time.”
“It’s a risk I have to take,” he told me, his thumbs smoothing down my cheeks. “I have to take it for her.”
“Well, I won’t let you. I can’t. You deserve the right to be her dad, for her to have your name and no longer live in fear.”
“What will you do if I can’t let you do that?” he asked and my silence told him I think all he needed to know.
I wasn’t lying. I couldn’t let him keep running. I’d fight for him, her until I had no more fight in me. That was who I was and the world I came from. I had a means and colleagues that could fix this situation for him and I would do it whether he let me or not.
I believed he saw that in my eyes, that fight, and suddenly, I witnessed something I wasn’t sure I’d ever see again, his smile so handsome before his lips crashed down on mine.
It’d been a soft kiss, the softest of kisses and it felt so final it broke my heart. He was saying goodbye and I knew right away…
He was letting go.