“You just made a big mistake, Moodie,” a different voice said through the speaker. “A fucking huge one.”
I think he’d reached a whole new level of nuts because he was so focused on who he was talking to that he didn’t even blink when I pulled my hands out of the rope and reached out for Sadie.
“I’m going to take my shirt off and wrap it around your leg, okay? Just stay with me, babe.”
Because the blouse I’d put on today was transparent, I’d put a tank top under it, so I was able to take it off and maintain some dignity by not flashing my boobs at the psychotic asshole who was now screaming down the phone again.
“Stay with you?” Sadie stuttered, her teeth making a chattering noise. “Where the hell am I going to run to, Ari? Actually, no, how am I going to run?”
“Well, if you’d come running with me every morning like I asked you to, you’d be a whizz on the one and a half legs you’ve got available right now,” I snickered, doing my best to take her mind off the pain she was going to be in when I tightened the shirt around the wound.
“I don’t do sports bras—the devil invented those things. Who the hell wears something that squishes your fun pillows against your chest? And it’s like wrestling an alligator getting it off.”
She had a point, I hated the things as well, but they were a necessary evil when you were running.
“Better than spraining your ta-ta’s! Okay, honey, I need you to take a deep breath in, then let it out in a big, slow stream.”
As she did it, I tightened the knot in the fabric, scared about causing her pain, but knowing I had to get as much pressure on it as possible. Just as I pulled the last tug on the ends, she bit down hard on my shoulder, making me scream.
“I was the one who was shot, you mean cow!” she snapped when she released the chunk of flesh she’d embedded her teeth into.
As neither of us was keeping up the pretense of being tied up, I scooted us deeper into the corner behind where we’d been dumped and watched the man spitting every time he spoke to whoever was on the phone with him.
Glancing at Sadie, I noticed the sweat on her forehead and how pale she looked. I’d never been shot—touch wood for luck—but I figured if I had been, I’d look the same way. Still, if I distracted her frequently, hopefully she wouldn’t go into shock, because that’s what happened, wasn’t it? “Do you recognize that voice?”
The look she shot back was incredulous like she was expecting me to be joking. When she realized I wasn’t, she snickered weakly. “That’s putting it mildly. If I were in that fuck face’s shoes right now, I’d be shitting my pants.” I wasn’t in his shoes, but I’d almost done it twice in the last hour, so… “That’s my dad.”
“Well, Moodie, I think you’ve got a bigger problem on your hands than we do. See, I know I’m getting my daughter and her friend back tonight. I also know they’ll both be breathing. Even more, I know you’re going to get what you deserve for everything you’ve done to both of them.”
“Really,” Moodie sneered back. “Seems like you might want to look at who has the power here, Dahl. You’re on one side of this phone call, and I’m on the other, except my side is in the same room as your daughter and her friend, where I have a gun in my hand that I’ve already proven I’m good to use.”
“I don’t think your dad should provoke him,” I whispered out of the corner of my mouth as he came closer to us, his hand shaking so hard it looked like he was going to drop the gun.
He was just raising it, his finger on the trigger, when the door burst open behind him, and a shot was fired. I’ll never know how I moved as quickly as I did, but I had Sadie on the ground under me before I even knew what I was doing, my arms wrapped around our heads.
All the times I’d rolled my eyes at my cousins was for shit because I reacted in the way I reacted as screams and shouts filled the room around us—I asked Sadie for her favorite song, and we both started singing it. I shit you not, her with a hole in her leg, me waiting for a bullet to hit me, we started singing a song she’d been listening to in the office three days ago—Soup Dragon’s Divine Thing. The problem was, neither of us knew all the words, and just humming the tune wasn’t cutting it, so I yelled out the next one for us to move on to.
Here’s a little something I will say about our coping mechanism—we both needed to learn more than a few words of the verses and only the chorus of songs because that happened each time we chose a new one. Whether it was nerves or fear clouding our minds, I don’t know, but we were shit at remembering them. There’s also the fact that I was tone-deaf, and she was struggling to sing with my weight on top of her, but by the time someone shook my arm gently, it was pretty obvious we’d never get a recording deal. Ever!
“Ari?” Parker shouted, sounding frantic as he shook me again.
Lowering my arm, I raised my head slowly in case the psycho guy was still holding his gun or Chantal had come back from the dead. With what’d happened here today, anything was possible.
“Is he gone?”
Collapsing on his ass on the floor beside us, Parker croaked, “Yeah, Connor has him outside. Are y’all okay?”
“Yeah, we’re okay, but Sadie—”
“Can’t breathe,” came her muffled response, reminding me I was still lying on top of her.
Rolling off her, I used both arms to wave oxygen toward her—we’ll put that stupidity down to shock. Two strong arms banded gently around my upper arms and pulled me away from her as Elijah bent down and carefully rolled her onto her back.
“Are you injured anywhere?” Parker asked gruffly, skimming his eyes over me. When I shook my head, he moved across to Sadie and looked at the bloody blouse on her shin. “Did the bullet go all the way through?”
When I just looked blankly at him, he raised his eyebrows and looked back over at my cousin. Rolling his eyes, Elijah leaned over her head. “Sadie, do you know if it went all the way through?”
“How the bloody hell am I going to have the answer to that? All I can tell you is I’ve got a flipping hole in my leg that wasn’t there when I ate lunch, and it’s also ruined the blouse Ari was wearing, which was a really pretty one, too. Oh, and the bastards knocked me out, so my head feels like it’s a dinosaur egg from Jurassic Park, and any second a bleeding massive dinosaur’s going to come popping out of it.” As she ran out of steam, she made a farting noise with her mouth and sat up, bringing a gun with her and waving it around. “Also, when the big bastard was shot, his gun skidded across the floor, stopping right under my tits just as Ari landed on top of me. I thought my nipple was a goner!”
With each word, she moved the gun around in the air, likely not realizing that the safety was off on it. Yup, this close up, you could definitely see that.
“Uh, Sadie, can you give me the gun, baby?” Elijah asked softly, reaching out for it, ducking when she swung it past him again.
“No, it shot me!”
“Technically Moodie shot you, and the safety’s off on it, so you could do the same to one of us if you don’t either put it down or give it to one of us,” he explained warily, cringing when she turned it with the business end facing herself.
“Tell me what button I push, then, ‘cos I’m not passing it to anyone apart from the police or shoving it up that bastard’s arse. See how he likes it!”
Thankfully, she’d turned it to face up at the roof as she looked for the ‘button’ that Elijah was describing to her when a man yelled her name, making her jump, and all of us move away quickly.
“Sadie Odessa, put that damn gun down. I told you when you were little, you were never playing with one again,” the man yelled.
Elijah and I looked at each other wide-eyed, and he muttered, “Play? With a gun?”
Whatever transpired after that was lost on me because when I looked back over at Parker, he was sitting on the floor with his head in his hands. What little I could see of it was pale and his forehead was wrinkled.
Crawling across to him, I gently
moved his hands away and scooted into his lap, burying my face in his neck. Wrapping his arms around me tightly, he shuddered and swallowed loudly.
“I’m so fucking sorry, baby. So, so fucking sorry.”
I tried pulling back to look at him, but he kept me anchored against him. “What are you sorry for?”
“This shit never should’ve touched you. She never should’ve gotten to you.”
Sometimes when bad things happen, the people who were there with a front row seat for it aren’t the ones who necessarily suffer the hardest. I was going to find that fact out with Parker. Sadie and I would definitely have emotional, mental, and physical scars because of what Chantal and Moodie had done to us, but Parker would be the one who’d take the longest to recover from it. His past, the part that’d scarred him deeply and made him believe he was dirty, had come back and hurt me. It’d been thrown in his face by the people responsible. And it all came back to torture him in a new way.
Sixteen
**Disclaimer: I, Mary B. Moore, do solemnly swear that the discussion about ‘thatch’ (you’ll understand when you read it) isn’t based on a real book. No books were harmed in the writing of that part, but I think my brain is scarred for life with the mental images I got from it.**
Parker
Three weeks later…
I needed to find a way to relax before I ended up in a grave at the age of thirty-one. I was driving myself nuts worrying about shit happening to Ariana.
The nightmares were back, too, so I’d returned to my old coping mechanism to get me through it. I woke up two hours before I needed to and worked out, and at night I’d go for a run or do another workout. It was a repetitive cycle, but it helped me work out my frustration. I’d also had the tattoo that stopped halfway down my right forearm extended down to my wrist, hoping the pain would give me an outlet for the anger and frustration. It’d been so bad on my last day off that I’d been the one to take Jerry to be neutered for Ari, just to stop myself working out.
I’d just finished doing some weights and was now just starting on the treadmill when I heard a door slam.
“Yo, fart face, where you at?”
Yeah, my brother was staying with me for a while. He’d been involved in the hunt for Ariana and Sadie—something I still couldn’t talk about—and for some reason had requested to finish his orthopedic residency off at the same hospital that I worked at. Until then, he’d taken some time off to stay here for a while.
“In here,” I yelled over my shoulder, watching the lights on the screen of the treadmill change as I went up a hill on the program I’d chosen.
“You ever going to live life like a normal human instead of a machine?” he asked, leaning against the front of the machine I was running on.
Focusing on my breathing, I shrugged and scowled when the gradient of the incline got even worse. I was used to running, but I also didn’t like the burn I had going on in my thighs at that moment because I couldn’t be bothered to stretch before I’d jumped on.
The problem was solved when Dale slammed his hand down on the red button of workout death—the emergency stop. I only just remembered to grab the bars on either side of me to stop my body from lurching forward and hitting the control panel.
“What did you do that for?” I shouted, jumping off and nabbed a towel to wipe my face.
Looking at me carefully, he weighed up what he was going to say. Instead of answering my question, he walked up to me with one arm out like he was going to pat me on the shoulder with some words of wisdom. But, when he got to me, he swung the other arm back and brought it forward into my crotch as hard as he could.
As the pain ricocheted through every part of my body and my reflexes bent me forward, he yelled, “Bow to your master!”
The next thing, I was on my knees, still feeling like someone had shoved a samurai sword from my nuts up to my throat. Unable to hold my body up with the amount of pain I was in, I tipped forward until my head was resting on the ground, right next to his feet.
“When it’s settled, I’ll be in the kitchen waiting to talk some sense into you, Parky Park.”
When I could think and had full control of my limbs again, I was going to kill him.
Painfully.
Starting with his nuts.
The walk I made to where the asshole was waiting for me was painful and felt like miles instead of yards. Each step made a residual spike of pain stab my gut, and for the first time in my life, I wished I could hold my nuts apart, so they didn’t touch each other.
And the fact Dale was sitting on my couch eating the muffin I was saving just made the anger grow even more.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Turning his head slowly to look at me with a mouthful of the apple and cinnamon awesomeness, he mumbled around it, “Wid you bawz or dis?”
If it wouldn’t have caused me more pain to do, I’d have jumped on him. Instead, I gingerly sat down beside him on the couch and snatched the half he had left out of his hand. “Both, fucker!”
Then, because I was a mature guy, I shoved the remainder of it in my mouth and chewed it quickly so he couldn’t ruin that for me, too.
With a smirk, he bounced up and down a couple of times on the cushion his ass was on, deliberately knocking me on the last one and almost making me bring the muffin back up.
“Well, you’ve been moping and working yourself into Terminator shape for three weeks now. When you’re not doing that, you’re stressing about Ariana or working so hard that you’re going to put the other Doc McHotStuffins—as the girls call him—out of a job. Now, as you’re a doctor, I don’t need to explain the detrimental side effects that can have on you, nor do I need to mention that you need to make an appointment with your therapist. But I’m going to.”
He leaned back in the corner of the couch, lifting his feet up and dropping them on my lap, only narrowly missing my nuts. “Too much stress and anxiety can have bad effects on multiple parts of your body, including your stomach and heart. Not getting enough sleep because of it, while at the same time working and exercising like you are, will just add to that. If we’re lucky, you collapse with exhaustion. If we’re unlucky, you collapse because your heart says fuck this.”
I sighed, hating that he was right.
“I’m not trying to minimize what you went through and what happened, but here are some facts for you: Chantal, the bitch, is dead. She’s been cremated, two people turned up to the funeral, and she’s gone. Moodie’s in prison and won’t be allowed out on bail. I’ve seen the charges against him, and he fucked up so badly, he’s unlikely ever to be released. He’s also going to have issues after the damage Connor’s bullet did to his shoulder. Dad, well, he’s got a long and lonely life ahead of him because we’ll never see him again, either. Sadly they couldn’t change him for being an incompetent and oblivious asshole, but the rest of his life’s going to be suffering enough. It doesn’t eradicate the memories and trauma from your mind, but it sure as shit means you won’t get any more from them and that you’re fully in control of the situation now. Are you following?”
“Yes, I’m following,” I ground out through gritted teeth. He was right. I knew he was fucking right.
“Good,” he clapped his hands together like I was fucking two. “You need to make an appointment to speak to your therapist, and you need to reassess what you’re doing. Still exercise, but a healthy amount is a third of what you’re currently doing.”
Leaning back against the cushion and staring up at the ceiling, I had to accept it was time for me to get my shit together. I’d spent three weeks living like this, and I felt like I had lead in my limbs. If I continued, there’d be consequences with my health, but more worryingly, there could be consequences with one of my patients' care. I owed it to myself to be better than this.
Which was a strange thought considering that when I’d first started down the road to ‘getting better,’ I’d done it for Ariana, not myself. I acknowledged that i
t would be a better life for me to live, sure, but she’d been the reason for it. But I’d just said that I owed it to myself to get better this time, knowing Ariana would benefit from it as well but using myself as the focus.
It was the growth we’d discussed only weeks ago.
“I’m not sure I like that smile on your face,” Dale muttered, moving his legs off the side of the couch so he could run if he needed to.
Turning it onto him, I warned him, “And with good reason, fucker. There can be only one master between the two of us.”
He knew when he least expected it, the master of ‘bow to your master’ was going to get his crown back, and it was going to hurt way more
Even though I’d been living in my head for the last three weeks, I felt closer to Ari now than I had before. When we’d gotten both ladies to the hospital, I’d been the one to check her over first, and I’d gotten to see all of the bruises all over her body. Hearing she’d been hit by a car, we’d sent her for x-rays, and Chris had double checked the results—confirming she had no broken bones, just bruising, the cut on her cheek, and some soft tissue injuries that would take six weeks to heal.
Remarkably, the bullet Moodie fired at Sadie had missed the bone completely, but it hadn’t gone through the other side and had caused damage to her anterior tibialis muscle, so she’d been taken into surgery to repair it.
Both women seemed to be doing fine, but I knew firsthand that delayed reactions happened, so we were watching them closely. Sadie would be on crutches for another three weeks or so, and because of that, all the women were sticking to her like glue, helping her out.
Her dad was driving to see her almost every day. It’d been cool getting to see a relaxed version of the very determined and efficient man who’d distracted Moodie long enough for us to trace his location and get to him before he could do any more harm to the girls.
Forbidden Gold (Providence Gold Book 5) Page 26
