The Lies We Believe

by Eden Rose

I can’t help it. My mouth drops at the way he’s speaking to the police but then I remember. He’s a cop and he’s known for being a hothead.

  “You can give up on my wife, but I won’t. I know that she’s alive and I will do everything in my power to find her again. I want you out of my house. If you aren’t going to help, then you can get out!”

  “Uncle Damien?”

  I turn to the left of me and see either Cammie or Cayla standing to the side of me with a sad look on their face. “Yes, sweetie?” I ask politely and drop down so I’m eye level with her.

  “Don’t be sad. Be happy. I love you,” the little girl says.

  When she holds out her little hands, I hold out my arms and embrace her in a hug. For some reason, I got hit with a sense of feeling a completion that I didn’t realize that I was missing. It felt good to hug her and have a child looking up at me and I couldn’t help but think about what it would feel like to have Audrey and my daughter looking at me like this.

  I pucker my lips and then kiss the top of her sweet smelling head. “I love you, too, sweetie.”

  As I stand back up, I notice that everyone is watching me and I can’t help but smile. I ruffle her hair and then look back at the police. “If you will excuse us, I need to find my wife.”

  The Next Day

  Liz started to get cocky and that was how we knew that it was only a matter of time before we got Audrey. With Audrey calling us and being on the phone for approximately thirty seconds, we were given enough ground to track her call.

  The problem? It’s a burner phone and it gives us a hundred miles worth of a span.

  I drive over to Liz and Garrett’s house in order to pick him up and we decided that we would drive together. As I pull up to his house, I fight the stab of jealousy as I see him kiss Liz bye.

  In the moments such as this, I realize how much I took for granted my access to Audrey. Did I kiss her enough? Did I hold her enough? I don’t know if it’s possible to have kissed her enough.

  Audrey: The Day Of

  My thighs are still tingling from the massive orgasms that I encountered with Damien. I have never done anything like that and I’m elated that I can embrace my inner freak with him.

  As I pulled out of the driveway of his dental office, I tighten my belt around my waist to cinch my coat tighter. Something about the flaps being pushed open while I drove and everyone seeing my breasts freaked me out.

  I quickly scan all of the radio stations until I find the one that is going to to entertain me enough to drive home. The problem with living in this city is the damn traffic. I can’t even begin to tell you all of the times that I almost got into an accident for changing the radio station.

  Too fucking many.

  I check both side mirrors and then the rear view mirror before I start to turn left onto the ramp. The traffic behind me is getting pretty packed and I hope I can get home in a timely manner. That’s another thing with living in this city, things that take five minutes actually take an hour.

  I signal to get into the left lane that is going eighty-five miles per hour and as I do so, I notice a black SUV following very closely behind me. Due to the fact that I’m already on high alert because of the stress of not knowing where Liz is, I begin to take precaution.

  Once I’m in the left lane, I immediately speed up to almost ninety. When the car behind me does the same, I slow down to seventy. Again, the SUV mirrors everything that I’m doing and it’s causing me to panic a little.

  I reach over to the passenger side of the car and dig in my over sized purse for my cell phone. My fingers barely touch it before the car gets close enough to bump my rear bumper and does.

  “Fuck!” I yell out loud and then cringe as my car jerks from the impact.

  Knowing that being on the highway isn’t going to help matters, I signal to get off and quickly pull off to the side of the road. My car isn’t even parked for a total of fifteen seconds before the force of a boulder hits me and I go flying against my steering wheel.

  My head hits the top of the wheel with a dissatisfying whack and I see stars in front of my eyes. I wince and then squeeze my eyes shut in hopes that it will stop the stars from dancing in front of me. It doesn’t work.

  I look over at the driver’s side window and try to see if I can see anyone that might be looking at me. Who just runs someone off the road? There must have been some reason why I was ran off the road. I squint and I can’t see anything through the distorted glass.

  That was until the baseball bat comes through the window and suddenly hits me in the face. The blunt force of the hit is buffered by the breaking of my nose. I know that it’s instantly broken.

  I cradle my face in my hands and press my two index fingers against my cheek bones in hopes that it would help with the burning pain that is taking over.

  “Who are you?” I scream and cry through the window. “What do you want from me? If it’s money, I don’t have any on me.”

  “Oh, sweet and naive Audrey.”

  The innocent but vindictive female voice is enough to make me cringe a little inside. Somehow the person that is doing this to me, knows my name and I feel fear. “How do you know my name?” I ask as tears leak over my swollen face from the accident and getting hit. I can already tell that my nose is broken and I’m thinking that my cheekbones are smashed to hell.

  A female body is standing next to the window of my car and I look over at the blonde female there. “Liz?” I croak out and then squint in order to see if it’s really her.

  All of this time that we have been searching for her and for all of this time she was probably right underneath our noses. This woman is different than the one that I remembered. The woman standing in front of me is confident and aimed to strike at me.

  “Well, geeze, Audrey. Is that the way you greet your almost sister-in-law?”

  “Liz, what are you doing here?” My breathing is coming in like pants and I can’t help but have to take deep breaths to ensure that I’m getting the right amount of oxygen through my body. I hate that I sound like a smoker who smokes three packs a day.

  She sticks her long red fingered hand in through my window and grabs the back of my head. “The right question is what are you doing here? This all could have been avoided if you would have just given me the money and I wouldn’t have had to be the crazy bitch.”

  I can’t help but snort. Seriously? Who the fuck does she think she is? “A crazy bitch?”

  “You know, the one that is always misunderstood but ends up being the hero at the end?”

  “Why do you need the money so badly?” I can’t help but ask questions. I’m so curious as to why she picked my family to go after. According to Garrett, she had money before.

  “That’s not important. Boys,” she leans her head to the side and two men come out from behind the wreckage of my car. I can already see the smoke and haze from the impact of hitting the telephone pole.

  The first one that I see is one of the biggest men that I have ever seen in my life. He’s also the first one that leans into my car to unbuckle my seatbelt. It would have been comical to see him squeezing through the window with his bigger than fuck body frame, but due to my current state, I suppress my laugh.

  My eyes close in hopes of not showing how in pain I am because of my injuries. It’s hard to keep the wincing down and the tears from streaming down my face as he pulls me out from the window.

  Yes, that’s right. My big ass self was just pulled out of my compact car through my driver’s side window.

  “I want her gagged and bagged. Then we are going for a ride.”

  “Where are we going?” I ask as I’m laid against the hot metal of my car.

  Liz charges at me and punches me in the stomach hard. The blunt force of it made the air in my lungs get caught and I felt as if I were choking. “Don’t fucking talk unless I ask you to. Do you got me, bitch?”

  So many questions are going through my head as she’s walking away from me. One of the ma
jor ones is why is she so adamant that I could help her?

  The other guy, not the huge one, this one is more Kevin Hart than The Rock, begins to come towards me with tape in his hands. “Should we take off her coat?”

  I could just hear the perverted way that he asked that question. Was he getting excited about seeing a defenseless woman getting the shit beat out of her? Did he enjoy it?

  Liz yells in the background that he should take my coat off and I instantly cringe even more. I know that I have nothing under my coat and the mere thought of being naked in front of them, is enough to make me want to vomit.

  “No!” I try to protest. My protest is met on unhearing ears and the belt to my coat is cut off. “No! Please, don’t!”

  “Gag the bitch. I’m tired of listening to her dumb ass mother fucking voice.”

  That was when everything went black.

  Some Time Later

  The constant hum of the motor that is resting under me is what wakes me up. I can hear the mundane noise and it lulls me awake.

  I can’t tell if my eyes are open or closed and it makes me panic. My heartrate goes up and I feel my blood pressure go up as well.

  “Keep her drugged. I don’t want her coming out of this and swinging at us.”

  “She’s restrained. What the fuck is she going to do to us if she wakes up?” A man says.

  The woman that spoke the first time speaks in a clipped tone that tells me that she’s tired of being questioned. “Did I ask for you to argue with me? Also, did you search her body to make sure that she doesn’t have anything on her that could kill me?”

  If I wanted to kill you, I would have done it already.

  I keep my eyes squeezed shut in the event that they are watching me and will react to me. I don’t want them to think that I’m listening to them. Liz used to be extremely stupid, it’s only a matter of time before she slips up and tells me what she’s wanting.

  Damien

  The Night We Found Audrey

  The incessant knocking and pounding on my door is what woke me up tonight. I don’t know if it’s night or day because I haven’t been sleeping like a normal person. I miss my Audrey and the longer that she’s away from me, the longer it takes for me to do the normal things in life.

  Like sleeping.

  “Hold the fuck on,” I yell through my house. I fell asleep on the couch because sleeping in the bed that no longer smells like Audrey, doesn’t sit well with me.

  “You need to get your ass up right now!”

  My head immediately jerks up and I get the spins from sleeping too hard and moving too fast. “What are you doing here, Garrett?”

  My brother in law doesn’t even give me the option of opening the door because he’s kicking through it and in my face. “We found her. We found Audrey. She’s at the hospital!”

  “What are you talking about? I can’t go through this again if it’s not her. Don’t do this to me.”

  I couldn’t deal with another case of knowing where she is and Liz having the upper hand on us. I know that she’s pissed off because we haven’t given her the money that she’s been wanting the past six months. However, she’s not going to give us Audrey back. We have to go and take her back from Liz.

  “I didn’t receive a call or anything that they had found her,” I start to say and lean over to dig up a shirt. As I’m slipping on the tee, Garrett is walking through my messy house.

  “Audrey is going to be pissed as fuck when she comes back here and isn’t able to find her damn cat under this mess.”

  “Miss Meow is here somewhere. I… It doesn’t fucking matter. Where is my wife?”

  “You need a shower, man.”

  We’re facing off in the living room and debating on how to push the other person. I know that he’s trying to decide if pissing me off is the way to begin this day.

  “I will shower later when I have my wife home.”

  Garrett is rubbing the back of his neck and then shakes his head. “Do you even like her?”

  “You pick today when we are so close to having her back in our hands to question my devotion to her? I love Audrey. I have always loved her and I will always love her. Where is she?”

  “She’s at Mercy Hospital in the ICU.”

  I shove my feet into my shoes and then grab my keys. “Do you know where that is?”

  He nods and then yanks my keys out of my hands. “I’ll drive. Liz dropped me off so she could go and get Jerry and the twins.”

  My heart is beating in my chest and I can feel my heart growing back to normal. “Wait, you said ICU?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know all of the details but luckily my friend is a beat cop and called me when he saw Audrey being wheeled in.”

  I climb into the passenger side of my truck and wait for Garrett to slide into the other side so he can drive us. “Did she look okay? Did he say anything about that?”

  “Look, I don’t know fucking anything about it and since you are her husband, they won’t talk to me. My parents are there right now and they are waiting.”

  We ride in silence as I think about everything. I think about how beautiful of a woman Audrey is and how much it kills me that we are so close but yet so far away. I think about how I’m going to kill my ex-fucking-girlfriend who kidnapped my wife.

  The lights of the hospital is what stirred me from my thoughts. You can see them over the hill and it’s enough to give me hope. If she’s here, then that means that she’s going to be okay, right? They wouldn’t rush family members in if something was wrong.

  Garrett parks the truck in the front of the hospital and slides out from the driver’s seat. I follow suit and we meet in the front of the car. “Let’s go get her and bring her home.”

  I’m very grateful that Garrett is doing all of the talking regarding where to find Audrey. I have no patience nor do I care if I seem like a dick. I just want to make sure that she’s okay and if she’s going to be okay.

  “It’s this way,” he says to me as he leads me towards the elevators. “They brought her up here after surgery.”

  “Surgery?”

  “Yeah, the doctors will be able to discuss with us everything.”

  Once we got to the right floor, I didn’t need to be advised where to go. I knew exactly where she was and I went straight to the seventh door on the left from the elevators.

  Sure enough, Audrey is lying on the drab hospital bed hooked up to machines. Her hair is snarled and in a mess to the side of her face. The coloring of her skin is different from what I have grown to love but she’s still the most beautiful woman in the world to me. I scan her body to see that she’s covered in a gauzy material that doesn’t look warm or comfortable.

  Audrey likes fluffy blankets and cuddly things.

  I rush over to where she’s lying down and I climb into the bed. My lips rain kisses all over her face and I can’t stop myself from touching her. She’s so beautiful.

  “Baby, oh my fucking god. Baby, are you okay?” I ask and run my fingers over her face and body.

  “Sir, you can’t be in her bed with her!”

  I look over to the side of me and see an elderly nurse staring at me with squinted eyes. “I’m her husband and she’s been missing for six months. You can’t expect me to leave her for even a moment.”

  The nurse sighs and then leans out towards the hallway. “Dr. Hall? Jane Doe’s husband is here.”

  “Jane Doe? Her name is Dr. Audrey Michaels Alexander. She graduated from USC dental program three years ago and she likes all things cuddly. She’s not a Jane Doe.”

  Hearing them call her Jane Doe was a stab in the stomach. I can’t believe that they were so callous and didn’t even check her dental records or anything. As a dentist or even a doctor, you should know that you can identify almost anyone by their teeth.

  I, myself, know that Audrey has a perfect set of teeth.

  “How do you know this is Audrey Michaels?” A male doctor asks as he walks into the room. He looks exhausted b
ut friendly enough. I feel as if he’s actually going to want to help me get Audrey back to normal.

  “Alexander,” I correct him. When he looks at me with a tilted head, I explain why I said that. “Her name. It’s Dr. Audrey Michaels Alexander. Not Audrey Michaels.”

  He rolls his eyes and then looks over the chart in his hand. “I see that your wife has suffered some trauma. First, I need to make sure that she is who you say she is. Do you know if she has any tattoos or anything on her body that could help identify her?”

  In my head, I scan my eyes over her body. “A Cupid tattoo on her back shoulder and her hips have little silvery cuts to them.”