Never Let Go (The Storm Inside #4)

by Alexis Anne

  I shrugged. Hurricane Claudia had finally started moving north not long after I got off the phone with Jake and the computer tracking models were starting to come into a little bit of consensus, pointing to a northern landfall in Pensacola.

  “I know hurricanes can change their minds at the last minute and since we’re on this particular one’s warpath and we happen to live in a house it could rip to pieces, I’d rather get the hell out of here until it passes.”

  She nodded quickly and stuffed two of Sam’s favorite books in beside her bear and giraffe. “Didn’t you just renovate this house a couple of years ago?”

  “We did, and it is as prepared as a house can be, but that won’t hold back the flood waters.” The automatic hurricane shutters were already in place over everything and the lawn furniture and toys all stowed away. We could ride out the wind if we had to.

  “Do you think my apartment is safe?” She cleared the entire shelf of baby mementos.

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t know anything. Not even when Jake would be home. It left me feeling incredibly unsettled.

  “Well, then I guess it’s a good thing I left everything back home.”

  “That’s right, you said you moved in with three boxes and a couch.”

  She laughed hard, probably trying to shake the weird feeling we were shooting back and forth across the room as we shoved the girls’ favorite things into bags. “Yeah, I slept on the couch for two months before I finally got off my ass and ordered a real bed.”

  “Are you just that low maintenance or was there more to it?”

  She paused, staring at Max’s favorite t-shirt in her hands and it struck me that despite the number of hours we spent together Zoe had given me very little detail about her life.

  “I—” she stammered. “I picked up and ran one day. I don’t think I noticed I was sleeping on a couch until my back started hurting.”

  “What were you running from?” I tried to play it off as casually as possible. Talking about the hard stuff wasn’t easy when an overly curious employer was staring you down.

  She shoved Max’s shirt in the bag and zipped it up. “I guess hiding things like this from the two of you is pretty pointless, all things considered.”

  Well that grabbed my interest. I gave her my full attention. Zoe stood there so tall and brave, her shoulders back and chin high. It was as if she were pretending to feel stronger than she actually was. The Superwoman pose.

  “I was in a bad relationship and I woke up one day and realized that was my life. My whole life. For the rest of my life. Unless I did something. And I knew that if I hesitated for even a moment, I’d never follow through. So I packed three boxes, got in my car, and drove straight to Tampa. I crashed on my college roommate’s couch until she finished moving in with her boyfriend at the end of that week. She left me the couch and the lease.”

  “And you started over.”

  She nodded once. “Best day of my life.”

  “Is that when you started writing?”

  A huge smile split her face, lighting her up from the inside out. “Finally, yes. It’s amazing the things you’ll try when you think you have nothing left to lose.”

  I gave Zoe a big fat hug. “Don’t ever hide stuff like that in this house.”

  She squeezed me back and let go. “Yeah, I realize that. It’s nice to have people around who understand that life is complicated.”

  Just then my phone vibrated in my pocket. I silently hoped it was Jake, glancing at my watch as I slid my phone out of my pocket.

  It was my mom.

  I think Zoe saw the stress I was holding in because she gave my arm a pat on her way out the door. “I’ll just throw all this in your car and help the girls get their shoes on.”

  I gave her a smile and took a deep breath before answering the call. “Hey Mom. Still stuck on the highway?”

  “No, we’re moving again. They finally turned the southbound lanes around. Eve? I don’t think we’re going to make it to you before the storm hits. We’re headed straight to Jennie.”

  “Is it turning?” I hadn’t checked the news since I dashed upstairs but the storm suddenly taking a hard right turn into Tampa was my biggest fear.

  “It is. The wind is already picking up.”

  That was when I heard how much strain was in my mother’s voice. They’d accidentally gone through Charley and it had left its mark on my parents. Being stuck on a highway during a much bigger and slower moving storm was not the way my mother wanted to experience another hurricane.

  “I’m putting the girls in the car now and we’re headed straight to Jennie’s.”

  “As long as you get off that island and through downtown…”

  My heart sank. “It’s moving that fast?” I fumbled for the television remote, missing the button several times before I finally turned the damn thing on. The voice of the meteorologist filled the room. An angry red information ribbon scrolled evacuation information across the bottom.

  And there in the middle of the screen was Hurricane Claudia, moving straight toward my little house and everything I held dear at an impossibly fast speed.

  19

  JAKE

  The same annoying sound of doom honked at me through the phone speaker for the twentieth time in a row. The cell phone lines were officially overloaded and despite trying non-stop, I couldn’t get through to Eve.

  It made me insane.

  We’d run into one problem after another as we put the factory into lockdown, which prevented me from leaving any earlier. And now that I could actually leave the storm was turning. I probably wouldn’t have time to make it home and if Eve hadn’t left yet she would be better staying in the house. Unless she had already left. In which case I sure as hell hoped she could make it to Jennie’s house.

  So basically I was driving myself insane with worry over all the things I didn’t know. I needed to focus on what I could do. Which at the moment was direct my anger at Greg.

  “What?” he barked.

  “This is all your fault.” His wife was safely home in a neighborhood that wasn’t directly in the path of wind coming in off the bay and it was just barely out of the flood zone. Greg seemed like the perfect person to be angry at right then.

  He sighed. “It is not my fault. I’m pretty this is God. Get angry at him.”

  But it wasn’t God or anything else. It was nature and life. Hurricanes happened. Good people were always in the way of the storm. This time it happened to be us.

  “I’m going to try and get home before the storm hits.”

  Greg scowled at me. “And get yourself killed in the process? No. You’re staying right here where it’s safe.”

  I needed to hear it from someone else. “Fine. Since you are the knower of all things, tell me what Eve’s doing. Do you think she got out?”

  He frowned and gave my question some serious thought, which I appreciated.

  “I do. She knows how these things work and that your house, while it is lovely, would not stand up to a hurricane like this. She would have grabbed the girls and gotten the hell out of Dodge.”

  That was what I thought, too. “So the only question at this point is how far she’ll get before the storm hits.” Fuck it hurt to think of all the different scenarios. This could go wrong in so many ways.

  But it could also go right. She could have left in time. She could make it to Jennie and Andrew’s and already be snuggled up with the girls eating dinner with our friends.

  I decided that was what I needed to focus on even if it wasn’t true. Otherwise I was going to go half-insane with worry before the storm passed. And then what help would I be if they needed me? No, the only option was to hope for the best.

  “Can I ask a really uncomfortable question?” Greg asked.

  By the way he was keeping the desk between us I was absolutely positive I wasn’t going to like this uncomfortable question one little bit, but if it was important enough for him to bring it up then it was important enough
to listen to.

  “Shoot.”

  He swallowed and fisted his hands before speaking. “Have you thought about your mother?”

  I think I saw black for a minute. Partially because simply hearing her name was enough to shoot my blood pressure into the stratosphere, and partly because of the feeling that I wasn’t a good person since I didn’t think about her being in the path of a potentially deadly hurricane.

  Greg held up a hand. “I’m only asking because I know her house is in the flood zone and I’m pretty sure she is such an awful human being that no one would have helped her evacuate.”

  “Charlie would have. If he had time,” I bit out. Charlie wasn’t just a private investigator. I paid him to monitor and take care of all the things that had anything to do with my mother.

  “Good,” Greg said, and let it drop at that.

  But the thing was…I couldn’t quite drop it. Not that fast. I didn’t want anything to do with her, but she was my mother. I did the bare minimum. I made sure someone knew what she was up to. That person would never ever be me again and I needed to remind myself that it was okay. If finding out the Senator was my grandfather and that I actually had an extended family did anything for my life, it was to remind me that the measures I’d put in place to keep my mother out of my life were there for a very good reason.

  Maybe my bare minimum wasn’t enough, but it was what I could offer. Lydia made her choices and it wasn’t on me to make sure she survived.

  Eve, Sam, and Max, on the other hand were my responsibility.

  And it absolutely sucked that the only thing I could do was sit and wait.

  “Maybe I should to drive home anyway,” I blurted out.

  Greg shook his head. “Eve will kill me with her bare hands if she finds out I let you walk out of here. So here’s how it works. You will not leave this building until the storm passes. You may try to call her as many times as you wish. You will not be this big of a pain in the ass the entire time we’re trapped here, and you will see your family again when this is all over if you follow my instructions.”

  I hit the call button one more time and sat my ass down on Greg’s couch to wait out the storm.

  20

  EVE

  We were stuck in chaos. Despite the best efforts of the police, the streets leading through downtown Tampa to the interstate were gridlocked. It wasn’t quite dusk yet, but the sun had been obliterated from the sky by a thick blanket of clouds. It was windy and it was wet, but not raining. It was more like Mother Nature was throwing rain balls randomly through the air—just enough to keep things damp, but not enough to make it miserable.

  “Water?” Max asked from the backseat. Both girls were strapped into their car seats. We had a movie playing to keep them distracted, but it was dinnertime and they were hungry.

  “Just a sip, sweetie. We can’t stop for the bathroom, remember?” I’d explained a dozen times that we’d eat and drink later, that there were no bathroom breaks or playtime, but Max wasn’t quite understanding. Sam, on the other hand, was quietly freaking out behind me. Thank goodness for Zoe. She was doing her best to handle the girls while I tried like hell to get us to higher ground.

  My phone rang through the Bluetooth, but I took it by hand so that the girls couldn’t hear. “June!”

  “Hey, sorry I didn’t call back right away. I’m safe at Jennie’s. Any word from Jake?” June had left work hours earlier to help bring supplies over.

  “No.” I will not freak out. I will not freak out. I will not freak out. “But we both know the plan. I’m sure he’s just buried under preparations.”

  “I’ll let you know when Mom and Dad get here or, if by some bizarre chance, we hear from Jake before you do. Calls are about to get screwy. It took me about a dozen tries before I got through.”

  When the towers went down in the wind we’d be out of commission. As it was, the lines were so jammed with callers that it was almost impossible to get a call out.

  “And you remember your Morse code and smoke signaling right?”

  A joke from when we were kids.

  “I do, but I wouldn’t count on smoke signals for at least a couple of days.”

  “Won’t matter,” she sighed. “Because you’ll be here.”

  I didn’t say what we both already knew. There was no chance in hell we were making it to Jennie’s before the storm got too bad to drive through. “One thing at a time.”

  I wanted Jake with me. I was fine and the girls were perfectly safe in my hands, but with Jake I felt invincible. He could leap tall buildings and push concrete columns out of our way.

  “I need to go, baby sister. They just opened a lane of traffic.” Which was true, but not good news. This lane wasn’t headed up to the interstate evacuation route. It was headed down surface streets to a mall. Which meant we were out of time.

  Zoe spun around excited, but then saw exactly what I did and her eyes hardened. “At least we’re off the island,” she murmured too low for the kids to hear.

  “It’s going to be a long night.”

  Things were a blur from there. I tried calling Jake one more time and left him a message with our whereabouts when it went straight to voicemail after twenty tries. I did the same to June’s phone before giving up on phone calls all together. I followed the police escort into the mall where we would be forced to take shelter, along with hundreds of other evacuees.

  Everyone was polite and generous and I was grateful that Zoe had the foresight to pack us so comfortably. We brought everything we could with us inside in case there was no car to come back to. That meant the girls had pillows, blankets, stuffed animals, and books. We kept the iPads hidden for emergencies.

  “If you loved me before, you’re going to want to marry me in a minute,” Zoe hummed.

  “Oh yeah? You got hot dogs hidden in there?” For a split second I wished I could stick my middle finger up at Harvey Watts. See? Bad weather.

  “Not hot dogs, but pretty close.” She opened what I had thought was a purse and pulled out sandwiches for everyone.

  “Is that a lunch bag?” It was adorable. Burgundy with straps just like a purse.

  “It’s actually a wine cooler.”

  “Yeah!” Sam exclaimed as she shoved a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into her mouth. “And you brought milk boxes? Thank you Zoe!” She hugged her tight, then plopped down next to her sister and shared a bag of Doritos.

  “Turkey and cheese. Perfect,” I sighed as I sank my teeth into the bread.

  “We’re going to need our strength, and there’s no ice packs in this bad boy, so eat it all.”

  Maybe being stranded in a mall during a freak hurricane wasn’t going to be quite so bad after all.

  I DIDN’T KNOW things could get this bad in twenty-first century Florida. We’d learned so much from hurricanes past, like getting the interstates turned around so that all lanes moved in one direction, mobilizing aid so that food and water arrived immediately after a disaster, not days or weeks later. But things like that didn’t matter as much when a storm moved as fast as Hurricane Claudia had.

  I wish I’d gone to Jennie’s earlier. If I’d just grabbed the girls and left as soon as I got out of work we’d be safe. Instead I’d waited. I’d thought we had time. I’d thought Jake would be with us.

  It was a costly mistake.

  The power went down almost as soon as the hurricane force winds swirled ashore. National Guard arrived to help manage us, which should have been a welcome sight, but instead it made me feel like I’d walked into a war movie.

  I didn’t sleep. Instead I cradled Max in my lap while I listened to the end of the world. Zoe sat beside me, shoulder to shoulder with Sam in her lap. We couldn’t see much, but we could feel each other, and that was something.

  The building groaned and every so often there would be a bang so loud everyone jumped. I knew some of the sounds—transformers blowing, debris hitting the building—but others were a mystery.

  “How muc
h longer can this storm last?” Zoe whispered.

  I glanced at my watch. It had already been four hours since they sealed us inside. The storm must have stalled on top of us when it hit land. That was both good and bad. It most likely meant that the storm was being pulled to shreds by being over land instead of the water, but it was bad because it meant it was concentrated right on top of us. There was no way the house would still be there between the buckets of rain and the storm surge that was inevitably being pushed into the bay by a storm that wasn’t moving. At least we weren’t inside it.

  I just hoped Jake had left the factory before it hit. I didn’t have the time or the emotional capacity to imagine what the factory was facing right then.

  That’s when things took a terrible turn. First there was a bang—much louder than anything we’d heard yet—followed by a long groaning noise. The pops and bangs didn’t stop.

  “What in the hell is that?” Zoe didn’t whisper. A noise like that? Something that sounded like the hounds of hell had been released on Earth? Yeah, the time for whispering was over.

  Pure terror shot through me. “It’s the roof. It’s going.” Which was precisely why I had chosen to take a ground floor spot in the middle of the building near the stairs.

  The groaning turned into screeching as metal was torn apart. The entire building shook and then continued to vibrate. The roar of wind outside kept getting louder. The noise was deafening.

  “Is this the wall of the eye?” Zoe shrieked.

  For some reason that hadn’t occurred to me. We’d been in the thick of the wind for so long I’d assumed the eye of the hurricane must have missed us or passed over too quickly to notice, but now that she mentioned it, everything had suddenly gotten a thousand percent worse. The storm was strongest, with the fastest winds, in the layers that wrapped around the eye, forming a “wall”. There was a good possibility that Zoe was right.

  “Follow me.” The roof was already going and there was no telling what would happen next. I wanted us in the safest place I could find. A corridor surrounded by concrete block was as good as were going to get.