“Her Majesty’s what?”
“Pleasure. It’s a British mocking term for prison because Her Majesty’s Prison Service manages most prisons in England and Wales, so they just change the last word to pleasure.”
That was weird, but I guess it was kind of cool unless it meant that they were luxury places for criminals to serve a sentence.
“It makes them sound like luxury condos.”
“A bit, but I think the prisons are like ones here,” she shrugged. “Anyway, after talking it out with Dad, we moved in with my gran, Phyllis, instead of moving here. I was about to do the first set of school exams to give me the school qualifications I needed to do my final ones when I was eighteen, my sister was a year away from the ones we take at eighteen, and my brother didn’t want to be separated from us. It was a hard decision to make, but our lives were in West Wickham, and with the hit of losing Mum like we did, we needed ‘normality’ to recover.”
“That can’t have been easy from start to finish, babe. I don’t know how you managed to do it.”
Staring down at where she was still holding my hand, she mumbled, “It got worse.”
Worse? How much fucking worse does it get than that?
“What do you mean?”
“Mum’s neighbor was the Deputy Mayor of Bromley—the city the village we’re from is part of—at the time, and he was a total wanker.”
“I hate to interrupt you, Sadie, but can you just quickly explain about the village and city thing? I just want to understand what you’re telling me a bit more.”
Instead of looking irritated by the request and interruption, she looked relieved. “Sure. Some places have villages that are part of a city, but they also come under a county or borough. So, I lived in the village of West Wickham, which was part of a city called Bromley. Bromley’s in a county called Kent, but it’s a London borough, too, because it’s on the outskirts of London. Confused yet?”
“Well, yeah?”
“Good,” she snickered. “It’s weird, but also kind of cool in my mind. But one thing I want to stress is that we don’t tend to pronounce the ‘shire’ in a lot of our counties like The Lord Of The Rings pronounced it—we say ‘shur’.”
“What does that mean for Worcestershire Sauce?” I blinked, asking a question that’d always bugged me. I mean, who the hell can say it without stumbling?
“It’s easy. Woos-tur-shur, that’s it.”
I blinked a couple of times, struggling to understand how the spelling equated to that. “How’s that possible?”
“Do you pronounce Connecticut—Connect-eye-cut?”
“Well, no, because that’d be dumb.”
“Exactly,” she winked. “People overcomplicate things. Borough is pronounced—buruh or bruh, too.”
“Fuck me, it’s like a whole new level of English.”
Chuckling, she squeezed my hand. “I’m thinking we all need to make a trip over there so you can see it and hear people saying it in a real setting. It’ll sound normal after you hear it twice.”
I seriously doubted that.
“Back to your story. The neighbor was the deputy mayor?”
“Yeah, and a total twat. When we moved, he made a huge production out of how he wanted to continue supporting us, blah, blah. My sister, Cynthia, got her A-Levels and went to uni the following year, and he also lost his position in the elections.”
Seeing as how I could only just keep up with politics in my own country, I was drawing a total blank on the UK's politics as she told the story.
“Was he pissed?”
“Pissed?” she snorted in disbelief. “He was fucking triggered into an evil bastard. He started stalking me and parking outside my school, offering me rides and just being really over the top. I came home from my friend’s house one day during the summer holidays, and Gran was at a hospital appointment, so it was just me. Somehow he found out, and while I was listening to music in my room, he got in downstairs and attacked me.”
Her tone was monotonous, almost like she’d removed herself from the situation and was reading it from a book she had no interest in.
“He attacked you? Like, hit you?”
Clearing her throat, she whispered, “He beat me until I was unconscious. Then he tried to rape me. I’ve told you about my brothers of the heart, but I don’t think I’ve ever told you how much they’ve done for me. One of them, Leroy, was coming over to see me, and when he found the front door open, he knew something was wrong. He found… him pulling down his trousers and my ripped leggings on the floor.”
The tears I’d felt building spilled over. “Jesus Christ, Sadie. But he stopped him, right?”
“Yeah, he beat the shit out of him. One of the neighbors heard the screaming and things breaking, so she called the police, but they took one look at who he’d beaten up and refused to believe he’d done what he had to me. I was taken to hospital to get looked over and have a rape examination done, and when I gave my side of the story, they called me a liar.”
I wanted to believe it wasn’t the truth, but I knew no matter what country you lived in, shit like that happened.
“How’d they find out it was?”
“Because forty-three other women came forward when the news broke, all saying he’d raped or tried to rape them.”
“Fuck me. I can’t even… What the fuck?”
“Unfortunately, they also looked like me, except my hair’s naturally this blonde and theirs were dyed. He was charged and went to court for it, and during the trial, they said he’d been obsessed with me since I was ten but was adamant he wasn’t a pedophile, so he’d looked for older ‘lookalikes’ to take it out on until I was old enough.”
“Sadie, is he in prison?”
“Yeah, for another three months.”
“What?” I screeched, making her jump. “What do you mean? How long did he get?”
“Seven years, because his lawyers claimed he was an upstanding member of the community who’d been ‘triggered’ by the loss of his position, so part of it was down to temporary insanity.”
“And that bullshit worked? I mean, he’d been watching you when you were a child, for fuck sake.”
“Ah, but being a pedophile would be wrong, so he resisted,” she said with absolutely zero humor in her voice. “At least in his mind that was a good defense, except for the fact I was fifteen when it happened and the legal age for having sex there is sixteen.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“Yeah, it’s really fucked up. Anyway, I have moments when I struggle to hold back anxiety and panic attacks, and a lot of the time, if a man moves suddenly around me, I flinch.”
Blowing out a breath at her story, I tried to put the lighthearted and funny Sadie I knew next to the young girl who’d almost been raped. I couldn’t do it. “The world’s a fucked up place—” I started and then groaned. “He’s getting out soon. That’s why you moved here.”
She nodded her head slowly, her lower lip trembling now. “He was getting his mates to send me messages about what he was going to do when he got out. I figured if he didn’t know where I was, then nothing would happen.”
“That’s why you didn’t move closer to your dad in Austin. He’s too high profile,” I guessed, hating that she was still going through hell.
“That’s why. Plus, I found this place here, and I kind of like all of you.” Her tone was lighter now, but there was a new strain I’d never seen around her eyes and mouth.
When I got stressed and had to talk about my problems, I always ended it by joking around, so that’s what I did right then, seeing from her face that she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Even Elijah?”
“Well,” she snorted drily, “let’s not push it.”
Laughing, I bumped her shoulder. “Just to say, girl, if anything happens, I want you to tell me so that we can break his legs. He’s not getting near you.”
Her face softened as she leaned into my side. “Thank you. I wasn’t sure I’d made the right choice when
I moved here and my toilet overflowed on the first night, but the next day when I met all of you, I knew I’d chosen perfectly.”
It’s weird how people meet and know they’re going to be friends for life. I’ve had friends who I thought were the shit, and then they stabbed me in the back. Friends who I was so close to, but we just drifted apart. Friends who I just knew I’d be friends with until I died. I was thankful for all of them now—even the asshole ones—because they brought me to where I was today. Her hell had brought Sadie to us, and I was grateful she made the choice she did. I wanted to say she was one hundred percent safe with us, but I knew we’d keep her as safe as we kept each other.
I also knew that if my cousin found out, he’d make sure the guy need surgeons to go really deep to remove whatever object he shoved up his ass. He’d probably also pay them off not to give him any pain relief. As much as I wanted to make that happen as soon as fucking possible, this was Sadie’s story to tell him. “I have one favor to ask, Sadie. Can I please tell my brothers? They’ll keep it quiet, but the more people we have watching your back, the safe you’ll be.”
She chewed her lip for a moment as she thought it over. “Can we wait until we have a release date for him, please? I just need a little more time to get the balls to tell people.”
That I could understand. “Absolutely.”
“Thanks for being a great friend, Ari. You and Beau have made me feel like I’ve lived here my whole life. I’ve been really homesick and missing my family—and my sister’s an arsehole who picks and chooses when she graces you with her appearance—but you two have made it so much easier for me.”
“You’re stuck with us now, and I have it on good authority from many, many people that my family are like herpes—you think you’ve gotten rid of us, but then we come back even bigger and badder.”
Throwing her head back, she burst out laughing, the sound carrying over the enclosed space for the goats. I was so relieved she was able to do it after talking about that level of trauma that I didn’t notice Gaynor had been affected by it until she righted her head and screeched, “Oh shit on it, I’ve killed your bloody goat!”
A day in the life of a Townsend, people wouldn’t believe it unless they saw it firsthand.
Quick enough, his legs started to move again, and then he was rolling over until he was on his belly, looking in our direction.
“Oh, thank God,” she moaned, holding her chest. “He looks like he’s glaring at me. I’m sorry, mate, I didn’t mean to,” she cooed as she walked over to him.
Bleating loudly, he got up and ran away from her, pooping for half of the journey. “That’s my boy.”
Wrinkling her nose at it, she walked back to where I was. “Didn’t you have to go and collect your nerdy gaming shit?”
With a wide grin, I got up and dusted my ass off. I was looking forward to this so badly.
“We’ll take my car,” she suggested, and that’s when the excitement dimmed slightly. They’d done a little bit of work on the car, but it was still a scary thought to be riding in it in the state it was.
As we walked around the side of the house, I pulled my phone out and set the alarm via the app on my phone. “Is there still a spring poking out of the passenger seat?”
“No, there’s two.”
Ah shit!
Fifteen
Parker
“Parker, there’s a call for you on line two,” Honey, one of the nurses, said as I walked out of the examination room.
Moving to the phone, I picked up the receiver and hit the flashing button. “Parker Knight speaking.”
“It’s Hurst. Listen, did Ari say she was going anywhere?”
“She was going to collect her gaming stuff from wherever she stashed it, but that was about it. Why?”
“We went by the office and saw Sadie’s car parked outside, but no one was inside, so we drove over to Ari’s house, and it’s all locked up.”
Frowning at the wall, I tried to remember if she’d mentioned anything, but when we’d finally gotten out of the shower this morning, she’d only spoken about the gaming stuff. “Is the alarm on?”
“Archer says the circular light thing is set to away from home, so I guess so.”
Patting my pockets, I came up blank for my cell. “Keep your phone in your hand. I’m going to find my cell, and I’ll call you back from it.”
Hearing an ‘okay’, I ran through to my office where I’d stashed my shit when I got here and hit the screen to see if she’d text or called. I had twenty missed calls and a shit ton of messages, and went through them to see if any were from her. No, but there were three texts and five calls from Dale.
Obviously, with the way texts read, the last one was visible first and had been sent an hour ago.
On my way to you now. Keep your eyes open, I don’t trust her.
Thirty minutes before that, he’d sent:
Rang the dick. He says she’s rented a house in Gonzales for a girl’s retreat. She left last night.
The first one had been sent three hours ago, and it kind of made it all fit together.
Spoke to DB. Chantal was pulled over for speeding a couple of weeks ago wearing an auburn wig, man. He says a couple of the guys have mentioned seeing her driving in and out of town in the middle of the night, too. When they pulled her for speeding, she told them she’d been out visiting you.
Typing back a quick reply to tell him to hurry, I rang Hurst.
“I think it’s Chantal,” I growled and then told him what Dale had sent me. “Pull as many camera feeds as you can to see if there was another vehicle or person at the offices. We need to track her down, especially if she’s rented somewhere.”
“Do you think she’ll hurt them?” he asked as he barked out orders to the others.
“I wouldn’t put anything past her. Fuck, Hurst, I should’ve seen this coming. I could’ve—”
“Parker, shut up,” he snapped, shocking me. “You know I worship my whole family, including you, so I don’t say this shit lightly when one of them is missing. You couldn’t have done jack shit. Yeah, she’s unhinged and does fucked up shit, but how in the hell were you to ever know she’d do this? You’ve been the target in the past, so it was right for all of us to assume you were still her target. Kicking and blaming yourself isn’t going to achieve anything apart from clouding your damned mind, which means you’re useless to the search.”
It was harsh, it was tough, but the words were what I needed. “You’re right.”
“You got that shit outta your system, son?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Good, don’t make me ever talk to you like this again, it makes my voice sound like Darth Vader. A calm mind is a clever mind, so you keep on repeating that to yourself. Now, call Dale and tell him to come straight here. I’m going to call Connor and get him in on it. We’ll find them, and this time that bitch is going to prison.” He was so resolute, so steely calm and strong, that it was hard to remember he was in his seventies and not a thirty-five-year-old Marine. “Now, I gotta call Sadie’s dad, too, to let him know his baby’s missing, so if he doesn’t kill me with words or voodoo, I’ll see you when you get here.”
“See you in ten.”
Yelling at Chris that I had a family emergency, I ran out of the hospital and over to my car. If I’d had the presence of mind to assess my mental and physical state at that moment, I’d have noted the calmness and determination I had were totally at odds with how pissed and scared I was. When I looked back on it three days later, though, I realized my hands hadn’t even been shaking as I unblocked a number I’d only kept so I could block it from calling me—hers.
That didn’t mean I didn’t lose my shit when it rang five minutes later, and two women screamed in the background, though.
Ariana
“Okay, now. Her tits I want to pop,” Sadie whispered as we watched the woman walking back and forth in front of us, her eyes glued to the screen of her phone. “Either she’s taking the
longest selfie sequence in history, or she’s waiting on a call.”
“She’s the one who kept coming into the bar with makeup and wigs on to change her appearance,” I replied under my breath.
I still didn’t know if it was me, my family, or Parker she was interested in because she hadn’t said a word to us since she took us. We’d been walking out to Sadie’s car to unlock the trunk—because it was that rusted it was a two person job, apparently—when she’d knocked us off our feet with her white Lexus SUV. Her and a man had gotten out and pushed us into it and driven off. They hadn’t even spoken to each other since either, it was fucking weird.
Then, the woman did the weirdest and most unexpected thing ever. She hit the screen of her phone and turned, so her back was to us, and held it up in front of her. “Selfie time!”
I wanted to say she was trying to antagonize or scare us, but the sound of a photo being taken followed it, making me and Sadie look at each other.
“Well, if you’d given us more warning, I’d have made sure my hair was straight,” Sadie snapped. “Oh, and that I didn’t have blood on my face.”
Unable to stop it coming out of my mouth, I added, “Don’t forget the dirt on your top, too.”
Spinning around, the woman sauntered toward us on six-inch white platform heels and squatted down in front of us. “Tweet, tweet, little birds. Wait ‘til you see what I’ve got for you.”
Glancing at her out of the corner of her eye, Sadie muttered, “Mate, I can see a lot of what you’ve got right now. When a lady’s wearing a skirt and squats or sits down, she’s meant to keep her knees together.”
Sneering at her, the woman hissed, “Shut up, you short bitch.”
“Well, that wasn’t nice. I was only giving you tips on how not to flash your hairy kebab, and there you are being mean and bringing my height into it. You seem kind of sad, did your parents never hug you?”
It was fair to say I’d heard all of the stories about my family when members of it had been in trouble, and every time I’d swear that I’d never say or do anything like they had. To be fair, I wasn’t the one doing it now, but still.
Forbidden Gold (Providence Gold Book 5) Page 24
